Children in This Church Were Sexually Abused. Then They Began Abusing Other Kids. Some Continued as Adults.

For two sisters raised in a family of 11 children that moved back and forth between Washington state and South Dakota, danger didn’t come from outsiders like they’d been warned by their church.

It came from their brothers in the next bedroom.

Lynn said she was still in diapers when her abuse began. Two older sisters told her how they caught one of their brothers touching her. The sisters told their mother, but Lynn said her parents did nothing; the abuse continued until he was 16 and she was 10. Years later, Lynn’s sisters offered a devastating explanation for their brother’s behavior: They believed he had been sexually abused, though by a neighbor.

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Young Girls Were Sexually Abused by a Church Member. They Were Told to Forgive and Forget.

Katherine, the family’s second-youngest child, said she was about 2 when it started for her. She was abused by a different brother. He, too, had been abused by an older cousin, she said in an interview.

Before long, the two sisters started to repeat the pattern. When she was 10, Lynn said, she took her younger brother out behind a shed and pulled his pants down. She’s blocked the memory of what she did next, but she remembers him running away. Katherine has a similar memory: She was 5 when she said she abused a nephew, who was 3 or 4.

Now 55 and 43 years old, Lynn and Katherine — whom ProPublica is identifying by their middle names because they are abuse victims — are still grappling with what happened. Each incident was met with a familiar, suffocating silence — minimized, forgiven and swept away. (Their mother and the brother who Lynn said abused her did not respond to a request for comment. Their father has died. One of the sisters who Lynn said witnessed the alleged abuse declined to comment, and the other is dead. The brother who allegedly abused Katherine has also died.)

The sisters left the church 20 years ago and have tried to address their trauma through therapy. They have chosen to raise their children outside the faith, hoping to break with a community that has shaped their family for generations and to protect them from repeating the same cycle.

“I can’t have my girls thinking that this kind of behavior is OK,” Lynn said.

Over the past year, ProPublica and the Minnesota Star Tribune have investigated child sexual abuse in the Old Apostolic Lutheran Church. Reporters interviewed 20 former members who said they were sexually abused, along with parents of child victims, and examined police and court records. Collectively, they described a culture of normalized sexual abuse that spans across North America and multiple generations of church members.

Some child victims were encouraged to forgive their abusers, while church leaders who were told of the alleged abuse failed to report it to authorities — part of a religious doctrine some current and former members say has allowed that behavior to continue unchecked.

In many interviews, reporters found a common theme: Children who were victims of sexual misconduct went on to repeat the behavior. In remarkably similar terms, women from opposite sides of the country described being touched inappropriately by an older relative or acquaintance and then repeating the sexual conduct with their peers.

“This went way beyond just normal children’s curiosity,” said a woman who grew up in a church in Minnesota, and who said that she was first sexually abused by an older cousin as a young child.

In other cases, children who were preyed upon grew into adults who committed abuse. Both kinds of misconduct blur the line between a victim and perpetrator, experts in child protection said.

“If you’ve got a culture of child sexual abuse and looking the other way and brushing it off and forgiving quickly and not truly engaging in repentence, it certainly can contribute to sexual behavior problems of children, including kids sexually assaulting others,” said Victor Vieth, a former prosecutor who now trains child-abuse investigators nationwide.

Katherine said that since leaving the church she’s struggled with what to do with unresolved anger over what happened to her.

“This is in me; it has to come out,” she said. “But you’re just taught that that’s a sin, and so then as soon as you start to feel that anger coming up, you feel like shit, because you’re like, ‘I’m sinning, and this is the devil.’”

Even though they’ve tried to end the cycle of abuse, they worry they bear some responsibility for helping extend it.

Lynn said that, until recently, she’d never talked to her brother about what she did to him, worried that doing so years later could traumatize him.

“If he does remember, I really do want to take responsibility,” she said. “If I have to go to jail, I’ll go to jail, because what we’re all doing here is not working.”

Not everyone has broken the cycle.

Some people who were sexually abused as children went on to abuse others as adults. One was Clint Massie, who pleaded guilty to four counts of sexual conduct with victims under 13 in Duluth, Minnesota, in 2024, and is currently serving nearly eight years in prison. The police investigation into Massie offered a glimpse into his upbringing. Raised in an OALC family in western South Dakota, Massie told investigators in a videotaped interview that, by the time he was a teenager, he had already been touched in a sexual manner by relatives. He described it as a routine part of childhood.

“Kids our age, playing around, you know, being stupid,” he said in the videotape.

When investigators asked for more details, Massie described the conduct with other children as “stroking, getting stroked, sucking, getting sucked.” As officers pressed him about those experiences, he became visibly shaken, raising his voice.

“It does bother me,” Massie said. “It’s disgusting. It’s not fun to talk about.”

“Do you think that had an imprint on your brain?” asked one of the investigators.

“I imagine it probably did, yeah,” he said softly.

In another case in Minnesota, a church member went to police in January 2023 and confessed that he had inappropriately touched his daughter and fondled his young son in his bed, and forced them to perform sexual acts on him. The man told police he sought out the investigators because “he does not want it to happen anymore,” according to documents in his criminal case.

ProPublica is not naming the perpetrator to protect the identities of his victims.

The man pleaded guilty to sexual assault charges. At his sentencing, the judge noted that the man and his siblings, who grew up in the church, had also been victims of sexual abuse when they were children. The judge said it was “almost incomprehensible” that no adult knew what they were going through, adding that “faith didn’t help stop that.”

If he hadn’t turned himself in, the judge said, the pattern could have continued. “The kids would have just kept a secret, until it caused problems for them in their lives as adults.”

The accounts of Massie and the father in Duluth help explain the world Lynn and Katherine have spent years trying to make sense of. But the sisters’ lives took a different course. After leaving the church, they spent years confronting what had happened to them.

“Rather than teaching life skills and tools and coping mechanisms, it was always forgive and forget,” Lynn said. “So that forgive and forget thing was just like an umbrella forgiveness. Like it doesn’t matter what happens, if you forgive it.”

The use of Scripture is a common method to assert authority and prolong abusive relationships in religious communities, and it can also be a form of spiritual abuse, said Sandy Stevens, executive director of North East Wyoming Advocacy Resource Center, a nonprofit located near an OALC community. Far from being a resolution to moving past trauma, Stevens said, the forgive-and-forget doctrine likely harms victims more.

“Forgiveness without accountability is not healing,” she said. “And you can’t pray away a crime.”

Lynn has tried to warn people about the older brother who abused her. She said he teaches Sunday school at an OALC congregation. Eight years ago, another family member accused him of abusing her when he was an adult and she was a child. Lynn learned about the accusation from both her brother’s ex-wife and from the victim herself.

Lynn decided to help support that family member. She wrote a letter to the sheriff’s department in the county in Washington state where her brother lives. Copies went to two OALC churches where his family had been members and to the authorities in another jurisdiction where the abuse of both Lynn and the other family member occurred.

She said the letter was an attempt to force an intervention where the church had failed them as kids. The abuse she suffered at his hands, she wrote, had “greatly affected my life, my relationships, my physical and mental health.”

She wrote that she wanted to “make sure that you are aware of what has happened and try to do what I can to protect others from having to live this hell.”

She said she immediately got a call back from an investigator to acknowledge her letter. But the other family member withdrew her claim, the investigation stalled and she has not heard anything since. Lynn said it has been several years since she has spoken to the older brother.

Officials with the OALC church in the U.S. and Canada have said they do not believe sexual abuse is more prevalent within the church than in society at large, describing it as a serious and persistent problem that exists everywhere. They said they were not familiar with Lynn’s claims but said they were confident that local authorities would have “looked into this matter and that the local congregation will comply with their recommendations.”

Days before this story was published, Lynn called the younger brother whose flight years earlier to escape her abuse had haunted her ever since. He’s still a member of an OALC church; she asked if she could visit him at his home in another state.

“I told him that I had done something inappropriate to him when I was young,” she said. She told him, “‘I don’t know if you remember or not. I feel really bad, and I’m so sorry. It’s been been a heavy burden for me to carry.’”

When she arrived, she said, he hugged her and told her that her sins were forgiven.

“Par for the course,” she said. (Through Lynn, the brother declined to comment.)

Forgiveness wasn’t what she had come for. She wanted to acknowledge what had happened and say that if he ever wanted to talk about it — with her or with anyone else — she would support him.

“I don’t think we should forget,” she said. “That’s part of the problem. Forgetting is perpetuating the cycle.”

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