For two sisters raised in a family of 11 children who moved back and forth between Washington state and South Dakota, the danger did not come from outside as their church had warned.
It came from their brothers in the next room.
Lynn said she was still in diapers when her abuse began. Two older sisters told her how they had caught one of their brothers touching her. The sisters told their mother, but Lynn said her parents didn’t do anything; the abuse continued until she 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 assaulted, albeit by a neighbor.
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Katherine, the second youngest child in the family, said she was around 2 years old when it started for her. She was abused by another brother. He, too, had been abused by an older cousin, she said in an interview.
Soon after, the two sisters began repeating the same pattern. When she was 10, Lynn said, she took her younger brother behind a shed and pulled down his pants. She has blocked out the memory of what she did next, but she remembers her escape. Katherine has a similar memory: She was 5 years old when she said she abused a nephew, who was 3 or 4 years old.
Now ages 55 and 43, Lynn and Katherine — who ProPublica identifies by their middle names because they are victims of abuse — are still dealing with what happened. Each incident was met with a familiar, suffocating silence – downplayed, forgiven and brushed aside. (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 tried to overcome their trauma through therapy. They chose to raise their children outside of the faith, hoping to break away from a community that has shaped their family for generations and protect them from repeating the same cycle.
“I can’t let my daughters think this kind of behavior is acceptable,” Lynn said.
Over the past year, ProPublica and the Minnesota Star Tribune have investigated child sex abuse in Old Apostolic Lutheran Church. Journalists interviewed 20 former members who said they were victims of sexual abuse, as well as the parents of child victims, and reviewed police and court records. Collectively, they described a a culture of normalized sexual abuse that spans across North America and across generations church members.
Some child victims were encouraged to forgive their attackerswhile Church leaders who were informed of the alleged abuse failed to report it to the authorities – is part of a religious doctrine, according to some current and former members, that has allowed this behavior to continue unchecked.
In many interviews, reporters found a common theme: Children who were victims of sexual misconduct continued to repeat the behavior. In remarkably similar terms, women from different parts of the country described being touched inappropriately by a relative or older acquaintance and then repeating this sexual behavior with their peers.
“It went way beyond the normal curiosity of children,” said a woman who grew up in a Minnesota church and who said she was first sexually assaulted by an older cousin when she was a young child.
In other cases, children who were preyed upon became adults who committed abuse. Both types of misconduct blur the line between victim and perpetrator, child welfare experts said.
“If you have a culture of child sexual abuse and you look the other way and ignore it and quickly forgive without really repenting, that can certainly contribute to problems with child sexual behavior, including children who sexually assault others,” said Victor Vieth, a former prosecutor who now trains child sexual abuse investigators nationwide.
Katherine said that since leaving the church, she has struggled to know what to do with her unresolved anger over what happened to her.
“It’s in me, it has to come out,” she said. “But you’re just taught that it’s a sin, and so as soon as you start to feel that anger building up, you feel like shit, because you’re like, ‘I’m sinning, and he’s the devil.'”
Even though they have tried to end the cycle of abuse, they fear that they bear some responsibility for contributing to its continuation.
Lynn said that until recently she never spoke to her brother about what she did to him, fearing that it years later could traumatize him.
“If he remembers this, I really want to take responsibility for it,” she said. “If I have to go to jail, I’ll go to jail, because what we’re all doing here isn’t working.”
Not everyone has broken the cycle.
Some people who were sexually abused as children continued their abuse as adults. One was Clint Massiewho pleaded guilty to four counts of sexual conduct with victims under the age of 13 in Duluth, Minnesota, in 2024, and is currently serving nearly eight years in prison. The police investigation into Massie provided insight into his upbringing. Raised in an OALC family in western South Dakota, Massie told investigators in a videotaped interview that when he was a teenager, he had already been sexually touched by relatives. He described it as a part of childhood routine.
“Kids our age, who play, you know, are stupid,” he said in the videotape.
When investigators asked for more details, Massie described his behavior with other children as “stroking, petting, sucking, sucking.” As the officers shared these experiences with him, he became visibly shaken and raised his voice.
“It bothers 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 guess that’s probably the case, yeah,” he said softly.
In another case in Minnesota, a church member went to police in January 2023 and confessed that he inappropriately touched his daughter and fondled his young son in bed, and forced them to perform sexual acts on him. The man told police he contacted investigators because “he didn’t want this to happen again,” 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. During his sentencing, the judge noted that the man and his siblings, who grew up in the church, had also been victims of sexual abuse as children. The judge said it was “almost incomprehensible” that no adult knew what they were going through, adding that “faith didn’t help stop this.”
If he had not surrendered, the judge said, the situation could have continued. “The kids would just keep a secret, until it caused problems for them in their adult lives.”
The stories of Massie and the father in Duluth help explain the world that 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 coming to terms with what had happened to them.
“Rather than teaching skills and tools and coping mechanisms, it was always about forgiving and forgetting,” Lynn said. “So this whole thing of forgiving and forgetting was like an umbrella of forgiveness. Like it didn’t matter what happened if you forgave it.”
Using scripture is a common method of asserting authority and prolonging abusive relationships in religious communities, and it can also be a form of spiritual abuse, said Sandy Stevens, executive director of the North East Wyoming Advocacy Resource Center, a nonprofit located near an OALC community. Far from being a solution to overcoming trauma, Stevens said, the doctrine of forgive and forget likely harms victims more.
“Forgiveness without accountability is not healing,” she said. “And you can’t pray to eliminate a crime.”
Lynn tried to warn people about the older brother who had mistreated her. She said he taught 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 heard about the accusation both from her brother’s ex-wife and from the victim herself.
Lynn decided to help provide for this family member. She wrote a letter to the sheriff’s department in the Washington state county where her brother lives. Copies were sent to two OALC churches where her family was a member and to authorities in another jurisdiction where the abuse against Lynn and the other family member took place.
She said the letter was an attempt to force intervention where the Church had failed them as children. The abuse she suffered at his hands, she wrote, “greatly affected my life, my relationships, my physical and mental health.”
She wrote that she wanted to “make sure you are aware of what happened and try to do what I can to protect others from having to go through this hell.”
She said she immediately received a call from an investigator to acknowledge receipt of her letter. But the other family member withdrew her complaint, the investigation stalled and she has not heard anything since. Lynn said it had been several years since she last spoke to her older brother.
OALC Church leaders in the United States 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 aware of Lynn’s claims, but said they were confident local authorities would have “considered this matter and the local congregation would 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 is still a member of an OALC church; she asked if she could visit him at his home in another state.
“I told him I did something inappropriate to him when I was young,” she said. She told him: “‘I don’t know if you remember that or not. I feel really bad and I’m really sorry. It’s been a heavy burden for me to bear.'”
When she arrived, she said, and he hugged her and told her her sins were forgiven.
“Regarding the course,” she said. (Through Lynn, the brother declined to comment.)
Forgiveness was not what she had come looking for. She wanted to acknowledge what had happened and say that if he ever wanted to talk about it – with her or anyone else – she would support him.
“I don’t think we should forget,” she said. “That’s part of the problem. To forget is to perpetuate the cycle.”