Privacy & Secrets
How much does your congregation know about you? How much should they?
If you are an ordained leader of a congregation, chances are at some point you’ve felt a little exposed. Not only are you a public person, subject to more scrutiny and observation than others, we are also deep into the information age. Social media has been around for decades now. And there are cameras everywhere! That creates a LONG record of words and images, related and unrelated to your work, that people can find- or have served up by an algorithm.
Clergy interact in so many spaces- worship (online and in-person), rites of passage with guests and family, public witness, the media- that our faces are known by more people than we can possibly recognize in return. This makes public spaces feel a bit fraught. You never know who may be observing you in an unguarded moment.
A colleague friend of mine once received an email from a congregant to the effect of, “Hi! Just wanted to let you know I sat directly behind you for two hours at [public venue] on Friday.” The congregant had not identified herself at the event and my friend had not recognized her. What had she overheard? Her decision to preserve her own anonymity next to my friend, who in that moment was not anonymous, left my friend feeling violated.
These things take a toll. Everyone needs and deserves some privacy.
The ethicist Sissela Bok describes privacy as “a condition of being protected from unwanted access by others,” including physical access, personal information, and attention.
[i] Breaking it down further, Alan Westin describes four types of privacy:
Solitude- in which we have opportunities to be apart from others, unobserved
Intimacy- being alone with others, without interference
Anonymity- freedom from identification or surveillance
Reserve- in which we are able to limit how much we disclose about ourselves
Privacy is the sense that you have protected, personal domains in your life. It supports a sense of self by forming a boundary between self and others. Privacy is a matter of human dignity.
It’s also important for mental health and healthy relationships. We use privacy to regulate social interactions. When we have privacy, we are able to make decisions about where to draw our boundaries- who to let in, how much, and when. It allows us to have agency over the types of interactions we have with others and avoid unnecessary conflict. It also protects others from certain unwanted or inappropriate interactions with the privacy-holder. In leadership, poorly defined boundaries or a lack of privacy around the leader’s personal life cause discomfort and distraction, and can sabotage the pastoral relationship.
So for personal and professional reasons, we clergy take steps to protect our privacy. Choosing friends who won’t gossip. Being intentional about when and where we “let our hair down.” Asking not to be tagged or mentioned online sometimes. Creating spaces where we can be our whole selves.
This doesn’t mean we hide who we are. If we preach and lead without ever (or rarely) speaking from personal experience and conveying that we are, deep down, actually quite a lot like the people we lead, we risk coming across as out of touch, cold, pedantic, or worse yet—because we seem so guarded—untrustworthy. Being unrelatable or enigmatic may not be an issue in conservative or orthodox traditions that are very hierarchical. But in progressive traditions, a sense of relatability between congregation and leader tends to be highly valued, if not expected.
So we use our agency to lead with a personal touch, while reserving what is private.
The personal side we share is like the tip of the iceberg because your ministry is not a sensational (or tedious) tell all. The rest of our personal lives (the rest of the iceberg) is private.
Of course, people will inevitably make assumptions about their leaders’ private lives, which may be very different from reality.
There’s a long history of progressive congregations expecting their clergy to be more conservative/traditional than the tradition that ordained them. How many times have congregants sheepishly apologized for swearing in front of you? “My office is fuck-affirming,” I explained to one understandably potty-mouthed pastoral care seeker who had stage 4 cancer. Congregations also expect clergy to conform to certain mainstream cultural expectations in their private lives, and those expectations are almost always unexamined, unspoken, and entrenched.
This means there are potentially lots of private things that are ethical but that could nonetheless scandalize a congregation. For example, I know many clergy whose tradition explicitly accepts diverse relationship structures, but who are afraid they would lose their jobs if it became known that they have more than one partner. They are not wrong.
The UU Minister Association’s Guidelines acknowledge the tension between privacy and perception in this way:
The ways in which ministers and their families conduct their private lives, choose their friends, spend their money, rear their children and express their sexuality are private concerns. However, there is a public facet to the minister’s life. Perceptions of the public will have a bearing on the effectiveness of the ministry and therefore implications for private choices.
Clergy can be dismissed for behavior that is not unethical, but which is perceived as “unbecoming to the ministry” (wording that has been used in the past).
In my early years in ministry, I worried about this amorphous guideline a lot. I was afraid of so many of the things I wanted for my private life, especially when it came to my wild-woman side. I am an intellectual, religious, and serious person. I loved blessing people, preaching, rigorous study, and steadfastly tending a tradition and institution that had been handed down for generations. I also loved cussing, dancing, whisky & cigarettes (in moderation!), short skirts, and raunchy humor. I was pretty sure this was both ethical and somehow unacceptable. (Later, at collegial gatherings, I learned I was far from alone.)
The tension between privacy and perception can put clergy in the undesirable position of either a) giving up a valuable part of their lives to conform to unspoken assumptions and expectations, or b) feeling that they are keeping a secret.
Having a secret feels different than having privacy.
“Secret” has a scandalous connotation. Bok says that to consider something a secret means you know that there is conflict between what you, the secret-holder, are hiding and what others would think about that. Maybe there would even be some scandal. Privacy is protection from unwanted access. It is time/space/life of our own. Secrecy is intentional concealment.
Now, ministers intentionally conceal others’ private information all the time: we call it pastoral confidentiality. But when we do so in our own lives, it comes with a feeling of personal risk- that if others were to learn our secret they would judge or reject us or we would experience a loss of dignity. That feeling of risk is uncomfortable. It can bring up shame.
Secrecy also carries a connotation of deception, but the two are distinct. Deception is causing someone to believe something that is not true. It is intentional falsehood. With deception we are in the ethically fraught territory of lying. A secret becomes deception if you have said one thing and done another. That includes violations of employment agreements, letters of call, and ethics rules you have agreed to follow. Except in rare circumstances, a congregation that finds their clergy has deceived them has every reason to question their trust in that person. Clergy should try very hard to avoid deceiving others. But not all secrets fall into this category.
All deception requires secrecy, but not all secrecy is deception.
At times, privacy requires that we intentionally conceal something to protect ourselves from intrusion and judgment. Stashing a journal in a hiding place is an example of intentional concealment. Privacy also sometimes involves things that could cause tension or discomfort with others, but is none of their business. Such as what you write in that secret journal.
Where does this leave clergy? What are we to do with the need for privacy, the assumptions and unspoken expectations of others, and the fact that “there is a public facet to the minister’s life?”
This is one of the thousands of things they don’t teach in seminary. For those who are struggling with feelings of shame that have everything to do with others’ assumptions and unspoken expectations, and nothing to do with actually unethical behavior, I hope seeing it named here will help. As we say in therapy, you “name it to tame it.”
We all need to tend all four areas of our private lives: solitude, intimacy, anonymity, and reserve. We do so by carving out time and space for ourselves, setting aside time for loved ones (without our phones or emails barging in), spending time in places where we do get to be anonymous, and making intentional decisions about what to share and when.
And sometimes we make a personal calculation. If something in your private life could become a distraction, divisive, or threaten your employment if it were revealed, is it necessary? Maybe it has to do with something out of your control: a sensitive issue in your family, for example. If it is within your control, is it worth it? How important is it, and why? Your calculation may change over time, and that’s important to pay attention to as well.
In my early years in ministry, I was more conservative in my personal life. I had a few things stacked against me: being young, female, petite, from a lower class background, and newly ordained. I felt like I had to prove my credibility. Over a decade later, I was less concerned. I had a well established relationship with the congregation. They had gotten to know me more. I had found appropriate ways to express my edgy side in ministry and preach about assumptions, diversity, and unpacking mainstream culture. As my inner and outer self started to feel more aligned, the things that had worried me didn’t seem as risqué anymore. But there was another factor, too: during and after the pandemic, the job (and, honestly, life in general) became too hard to do if it meant cutting off or repressing a part of myself.
The pandemic forced all of us to reckon with important things. In the midst of a lot of destruction, it gave us that gift. It also sent droves of clergy into burnout. Including me. This is important to acknowledge because burnout causes people to take chances they wouldn’t otherwise. If you’re too stressed and tired to think clearly, if your own needs are not being met, or if you’re fantasizing about leaving anyway, it’s easier to do something that could blow it all up.
Ministry asks a lot of clergy. We willingly make personal sacrifices for a life of public service and mission. And, because we are humans with human needs, we reserve parts of ourselves from public view. The art of ministry takes shape in the decisions we make when rules and guidelines can only carry us so far.
[i] Her book is Secrets: On the ethics of concealment and revelation. Pantheon: New York, 1982.
hugely helpful!!!
Great tips, Angela. I appreciate how you dug deeper than the usual “boundary guidelines” that accompany ministry training. I recall a volunteer who struggled to work with me when my now husband, then fiancé, and I lived in what she considered sin. We had different faith traditions since, as a chaplain, I ministered to all. We ended up working it out.