For the two sisters, who grew up in a family of 11 who moved back and forth between Washington state and South Dakota, the dangers their church had warned them about didn’t come from outside.
It was from the brothers in the adjoining bedroom.
Lin said she was still wearing diapers when the abuse began. The two older sisters told her how they had caught one of the brothers touching her. The sisters told their mother, but Lin said her parents did nothing. The abuse continued until he was 16 and she was 10. Years later, Lin’s sisters gave shocking explanations for their brother’s actions. She believed her brother had been sexually abused, albeit by a neighbor.
Catherine, the second youngest child in the family, said it started when she was about two years old. She was being abused by another brother. He also suffered abuse from an older cousin, she said in an interview.
Over time, the two sisters began to repeat the same pattern. When Lin was 10 years old, he took his younger brother out behind the shed and pulled down his pants. She has blocked her memory of what happened next, but remembers him running away. Catherine has similar memories. She was 5 years old when she said she abused her nephew, who was 3 or 4 years old.
Now 55 and 43 years old, Lynn and Katherine (who ProPublica is identifying by their middle names because they are victims of abuse) are still grappling with what happened. Each incident was met with a familiar, suffocating silence, minimized, forgiven, and brushed aside. (The mother and brother that Lynn claimed to have abused did not respond to requests for comment. The father has died. One of the sisters, who Lynn claimed witnessed the alleged abuse, declined to comment, and the other has died. The brother who allegedly abused Katherine has also died.)
The sisters left the church 20 years ago and have tried to deal with their trauma through therapy. They broke with the communities that had formed their families for generations and chose to raise their children outside of their faith, hoping to avoid repeating the same cycle.
“We can’t let our daughters think this kind of behavior is OK,” Lin said.
Over the past year, ProPublica and the Minnesota Star Tribune have investigated child sexual abuse at the Old Apostolic Lutheran Church. Reporters interviewed 20 former members and parents of child victims who claim to have been sexually abused, and examined police and court records. Collectively, they described a culture of pervasive sexual abuse across North America and across multiple generations of church members.
Some child victims were encouraged to forgive their abusers, while church leaders who were informed of the alleged abuse did not report it to authorities. Some current and former believers say the practice continues to be allowed as part of their religious doctrine.
In many interviews, reporters found a common theme. The idea was that children who were victims of sexual misconduct would repeat the act. In strikingly similar terms, women on the other side of the country said they had been subjected to inappropriate touching by older relatives or acquaintances, who then repeated sexual acts with colleagues.
“This was way beyond the curiosity of a normal child,” said a Minnesota woman who grew up in a church and was first sexually abused as a child by an older cousin.
In some cases, children who were preyed upon became adults and became abusive. Child protection experts say both types of misconduct blur the line between victim and perpetrator.
“If you have a culture of child sexual abuse, and you turn a blind eye and are quick to forgive and never truly repent, that can certainly contribute to child sexual behavior problems, including sexual assault of others,” said Victor Wies, a former prosecutor who now trains child abuse investigators across the country.
Katherine said that since leaving the church, she has struggled with what to do with her unresolved anger over what happened to her.
“This is inside me, and it has to come out,” she said. “But you’ve just been taught that it’s a sin, and as soon as you start to feel the anger building up, you feel the worst because you think, ‘I’m sinning, this is the devil.'”
Despite their efforts to end the cycle of abuse, they worry that they may be responsible for facilitating the abuse.
Lin said she had never told her brother about what she had done until recently, fearing it would traumatize him if she told him years later.
“If he remembers, I really want to take responsibility,” she said. “If I have to go to jail, I’ll go to jail too, because what we’re doing here isn’t working.”
Not everyone has broken the cycle.
Some people who were sexually abused as children continue to abuse others as adults. One of them is Clint Massey, who is currently serving a nearly eight-year sentence after pleading guilty in 2024 to four counts of sexual battery on a victim under 13 in Duluth, Minnesota. The police investigation into Massey provided a glimpse into his early life. Massey, who grew up in an OALC family in western South Dakota, told investigators in a videotaped interview that he had already experienced sexual contact from relatives as a teenager. He described it as an everyday part of his childhood.
“Kids our age are playing around and being stupid,” he said in the videotape.
When investigators asked for details, Massey described the behavior with the other children as “stroking, stroking, sucking and being sucked.” When officers confronted him about his experience, he became visibly shaken and raised his voice.
“That concerns me,” Massey said. “It’s disgusting. It’s not fun to talk about.”
“Do you think it affected your brain?” one of the investigators asked.
“I suppose it was, yes,” he said quietly.
In another case in Minnesota, a church member went to police in January 2023 and confessed to inappropriately touching his daughter in bed, fondling his young son and forcing him to perform sexual acts. According to criminal case documents, the man told police he sought out investigators because he “didn’t want this to happen again.”
ProPublica is not publishing the perpetrator’s name to protect the identity of the victim.
The man pleaded guilty to sexual assault charges. At sentencing, the judge noted that the man and his siblings, who were raised in the church, were also victims of sexual abuse as children. The judge said it was “almost incomprehensible” that no adult knew what they were going through, adding: “Faith did nothing to help stop it.”
The judge said the pattern could have continued if he had not turned himself in. “Kids would just keep the secret until they had problems in their adult lives.”
Massey and Duluth’s father’s testimony helps explain the world that Lynn and Katherine have spent years trying to understand. However, the sisters’ lives took different paths. After leaving the church, they spent years confronting what had happened to them.
“Instead of teaching them life skills, tools and coping mechanisms, it was always about forgiving and forgetting,” Lin said. “So, forgive and forget, it was like umbrella forgiveness. It was like, as long as you forgive, it doesn’t matter what happens.”
Sandy Stevens, executive director of the Northeast Wyoming Advocacy Resource Center, a nonprofit located near the OALC community, said using the Bible is a common way to assert authority in religious communities and perpetuate abusive relationships, and can be a form of emotional abuse. Mr Stevens said that far from being a solution to overcome trauma, the principle of forgiveness and forgetting was likely to further harm victims.
“Forgiveness without accountability is not healing,” she said. “And don’t pray that crime will go away.”
Lin has been trying to warn people about her brother who abused her. She said he teaches Sunday school at the OALC congregation. Eight years ago, another family member accused him of abusing her when he was an adult and she was a child. Lin learned about the accusations from both her brother’s ex-wife and the victim himself.
Lin decided to support the family. She wrote a letter to the sheriff’s office in the Washington county where her brother lives. Copies were sent to authorities in the two OALC churches where Lin’s family was members and in another jurisdiction where the abuse against both Lin and another family member occurred.
She said the letter was an attempt to force her to intervene where the church had failed her when she was a child. She wrote that the abuse she suffered at his hands had a “significant impact on my life, relationships, physical and mental health.”
“I want to make sure people know what happened and do what I can to prevent others from having to live through this hell,” she wrote.
She said she soon received a call from an investigator acknowledging the letter. But another family member withdrew her claim, and the investigation stalled, and nothing has been heard since. Lin said it was the first time in several years that he spoke to his brother.
Officials from the OALC church in the United States and Canada said they do not believe sexual abuse is more prevalent within the church than in society as a whole, but that sexual abuse is a serious and persistent problem that exists everywhere. They said they were not familiar with Lin’s claims, but said they were confident local authorities were “investigating the matter and local congregations will follow its recommendations.”
A few days before this article was published, Lin called her brother. Her brother had run away to escape abuse years earlier, something that had haunted her ever since. He is still a member of the OALC Church. She asked if she could visit him at his home in another state.
“I told him that I had done inappropriate things to him when I was young,” she said. She told him, “‘I don’t know if you remember. I feel really bad and I’m really sorry. It was a burden on me.'”
When she arrived, he hugged her and told her her sins were forgiven, she said.
“Par for the course,” she said. (Through Lin, the brothers declined to comment.)
What she wanted was not forgiveness. She acknowledged what happened and wanted to say that if he wanted to talk about it, to her or anyone else, she would support him.
“I don’t think it should be forgotten,” she said. “That’s part of the problem: forgetting is perpetuating that cycle.”
