“Ghosted” with Nancy French – Part 2

In this episode, Nancy opens up about her personal journey through childhood sexual abuse, revealing how it led her to take on an investigative journalism project that would dramatically alter both her career and her life. As the lead journalist, Nancy exposed the deep-rooted culture of enabling and covering up sexual abuse at one of the largest Christian camps in the U.S.

In the process of confronting her own past, Nancy also faced significant opposition, particularly from Christians who defended the camp. She and her husband endured personal attacks as they distanced themselves from conservative views that no longer reflected their faith.

The backlash Nancy encountered for her work has been intense. Dan comments, “Telling the truth is the root and the rule of freedom. But the price often for those who tell the truth is a form of imprisonment—a kind of being bound and sent out.”

Regardless of political views, Nancy’s story is one of pursuing truth, seeking justice, and finding healing in the most unexpected places. If you’d like to hear more from Nancy, be sure to pick up her book, “Ghosted: An American Story,” available wherever books are sold.

Listener discretion is advised: This two-part discussion includes discussion of child abuse, particularly sexual abuse, suicide, and some coarse language.

About Our Guest:

Nancy French has collaborated on multiple books for celebrities – five of which made the New York Times best seller list – and written books under her own name.  She has conducted a multi-year journalistic investigation, written commentary, and published for the nation’s most prominent newspapers and magazines.

She lives in Franklin, Tennessee with her husband – journalist David French – and family.

You can pick up her new book, Ghosted: An American Story, available wherever books are sold.

Episode Transcript:

Dan: Alright, we jump back in. So

Nancy: I didn’t get to smoke my cigarette. Come on.

Dan: Given the entry into that category, talk about hatred and talk about having been silenced.

Nancy: So it’s interesting, I was a sexual abuse victim when I was about 12. My vacation Bible school teacher abused me. And there’s something about that and you guys, Dan and Rachael, you guys know more about this than I do, but there’s something about that that sort of splits your personality in a way because you have to hide everything. So I was hiding that. So I felt like I always hid a huge part of myself. In fact, I think that’s why I became a ghost writer because I could hide behind other people’s stories and I could sort of enjoy their drama. But I never, even if I was writing a book about someone who was a sex abuse victim, I never volunteered that information. It was just like I wish my own enclosed capsule. Nobody wanted to hear from me. I was a poor kid in rural Tennessee. I regret, for many decades I regretted that I did not tell more people who were adults about my abuse. But in the process of writing the book, I actually called the adults in my life at the time, and they already knew about it. They had already decided to do jack squat about it. So all of that guilt that I had about not speaking out sort of was eradicated because those people weren’t going to help me anyway. But when I started speaking out about my abuse and other abusive situations, everyone was like, shut up. Why would you judge the church? Why would you be so acrimonious? You’re supposed to think about things that are pure and holy and just and praiseworthy, whatever. And it was like the same thing. So there was something about me as an adult trying to speak out about abuse that felt very similar to growing up as a kid where people did not want to know about any of the bad things. And so I don’t know that I’ve fully rectified this in my soul. I just know that I’m not going to not speak. That’s the one thing that I will do. But it’s very isolating. No one likes it, no one, I mean, maybe I think some people do appreciate it speaking out on behalf of some people, but basically I was not met with thunderous applause. Shockingly.

Dan: And to underscore most seers are not. And that whole statement in Isaiah 30 where you’ve got the people of God saying, tell our seers to see no more visions. Tell them to tell us delusions. Tell them to tell us pleasant things. And so the delima is a seer is really the person who is bringing a level of truth into a context where there is violence then taken against the one who tells the truth. And that feels like there has been a long history, again, of violence and hatred perpetrated against you and certainly against your husband. So I come back to this question of how have you remained telling the truth in a world… But I also want to add telling the truth in a way that just feels so gracious. There’s not a vindictiveness, not a kind of like I will tell the truth so you suffer. There’s such an invitation in the truth telling ultimately back to the presence of God. So I’m just asking again, the impossible. How have you come to be able to hold all that?

Nancy: Well, I’m not exactly sure that I am as great as you think I am, but I do appreciate that observation because I carefully curate my public persona. But I’m a completely devastated person. I mean, to be completely honest online, I’m winsome and kind and I try to always be nice. And if I can’t be nice, I just blog silently or whatever. But I feel like all of this almost killed me, Dan. I mean, I saw Dan recently and he was very gracious to pray for David and me, and we were just, I think weeping as you prayed for us. I mean, it’s super lonely. I don’t necessarily think that I’ve succeeded at it. I think I’ve failed a great deal. But the one thing that I have in my heart that is really overflowing, I just love, love people. I love my hillbilly family. I love them. I love my Trump supporting family. I love Democrats who are angry at me online for various things. I just love everybody. And for some reason the chaos of the moment, I’m not an agent of chaos, but I don’t mind it. I just feel like it’s neat to live during important times and I just care about everyone. And I feel like what I’m saying is actually important. And for the first time in my life as a southern woman, I am courageous enough to actually say it.

Dan: Well, and again, the book itself, but as well your honesty in other personal encounters. And even now, there’s no illusion you’ve got it together. It’s that you live death, you have death, you live death, but you live life. And I think that’s the compelling part is that you hold death and life together in a way in one does not get denied and the other obscured and in that playground incredible hard truths, but also winsome invitational laughter, get a chance to be played out. I’d love for you to talk a little bit about your investigative reporting.

Nancy: Yes. So I have been a ghost. So I’m a three-time college dropout. Start with that. So I have no credentials, no journalism credentials, no credentials at all. And so one time, this person, Gretchen Carlson, who used to work for Fox News and took down Roger Ailes called me because I was a ghost writer and she knew me from previous interactions in which she did not hire me to write her book, but she still had my number. But she called me, she was like, look, there’s this camp in Missouri called Kanakuk Camps. It’s in Branson. They have an NDA issue, a non-disclosure agreement issue where there were people who were abused, but they are gagged by NDAs. And so I was like, okay, I will look into this. For one week, I did not want to look into this. I did not want to know about pedophilia. I did not want to say that word. I didn’t want to do any of that. But as I was saying, no, I felt the Holy Spirit sort of tap on my shoulder because I was incensed that the people at Sulfur Well Church of Christ in Paris, Tennessee, the adults, the grownups allowed me to be abused when they knew that the bad guy was bad. And here I was a grown woman. And I was just about to say, even though I knew kids were in danger, that I didn’t want to have anything to do with it and I felt so convicted. And Dan, that’s probably the answer to your question. I just am constantly humbled because even the moral platitudes that I tried to put on other people, I failed to live up to frequently. But in that moment, I felt convicted. And so I decided to say yes, and I am going to do it for one week. Okay, three years later, we’re sitting here talking about it. It took me forever because the Camp Kanakuk not only had one bad guy I’ve been told of I think 61 at this point, I’ve been told of 61 predators, several of whom are convicted and imprisoned, one of them abused and estimated hundreds of male campers, I’ve been told of 17 suicides related to the abuse, including one that was the actual predator. The numbers are staggering. And I thought that I was on, I was Woodward and Bernstein. I was on something important. Of course, I had to teach myself how to be an investigative journalist. So I had to Google what does off the record mean, because I had no idea. There’s apparently levels to that. So I didn’t know, but I went to the New York Times and Christianity today in Washington Post, and nobody would do it. So I just had to do it myself. And so by the time I finished it, I was like, okay, I’ve got it now. This is going to blow the doors off the churches because they’re going to be so shocked with righteous indignation. They will probably carry me into church on a litter to celebrate what I’ve been able to do. But of course, I’ve published it in USA Today and other outlets thanks to the dispatch and Springfield News Leader. And my news was met with a collective Evangelical shrug.

Dan: Again, there are many words and the least offensive as shit. It is such a heartbreaking story. And in that, I keep coming back to the question because I think it’s important for any of us, whether we are given the opportunity to write whether or not we’re just in a conversation with somebody in our family telling the truth has a cost, and usually the cost is way more severe than what the benefit may look like. So the cost ratio of benefit harm, the harm feels more egregious and real than the possibility of good. And the next word is yet you remain. Yet you are faithful to continue that conversation even here. So how now do you live into that?

Nancy: I don’t do it that well. I feel like this investigation almost killed me. I’m not even kidding. I was surrounded by so much death all the time. My day would be like this because normally this is the type of thing. The Boston Globe would have four people on it going for years. And it was just me. I couldn’t get anybody to show interest in it. Christianity Today, this was before the current leadership said to me, we’d really like for you to write more about The Bachelor and not this. And I was just like, oh my gosh, you guys are trying to turn me into a Buddhist. I don’t know. I’ve been a Christian my whole life, but this is horrible. I couldn’t find any support. And so there was something about that that was so deeply sad. My day would begin talking to somebody who’s like, I think my son committed suicide. I think maybe he did that because he was an abuse victim at Kanakuk. Okay. What years was he there who led his cabin? Okay, I have all the secret information. I have 61 predators. You tell me what year you’re there, I’ll tell you five people that possibly were there. And so I did that. I didn’t do that to put it in the article. I did that to help people together the story, you could not find it at the time that I started, if you Googled Kanakuk camps, it was just sunshine, rainbows, unicorns, and Jesus songs. And now if you Google it, everything, at least a parent can make an informed decision. But anyway, the thing that makes me so despondent and sad is that people are making informed decisions and they know and they still go, that was actually a hashtag I’ll never get over that. I don’t know what to do. Michael W. Smith, who’s this amazing Christian whatever, is still promoting this camp after the articles along with a bunch of Christian singers. If I named them, you’d be shocked. It’s just weird. I can’t resolve it in my mind.

Dan: Well, it’s not meant to be because it can’t be. And even when we use language like, well, people need to be forgiven, they need to be given a second chance. We’re talking about criminality at a level, the depths of harm of the human heart. So as I said, you have stood up against systems, structures, personalities, and in some ways a theology usually taken to hide or enable perpetrators to hide from something of consequence. And in that, I do care that you have come at times near the end, yet again, you’ve been faithful, your husband’s been faithful, you two have taken on systems in the GOP in church structures, denominations, the reality of what you’ve described in terms of this camp, all that. And then to be able to say, and yet you remain.

Nancy: I’m glad someone finally asked me this because I’ve been waiting to wax eloquently, theologically. No, I’m just kidding. I do not understand God. I do not understand any of what is happening currently. I am holding onto Christianity by my fingernails, but I just love God so much. The things that he has done, I feel so thankful because I feel like I was some, we lived below the poverty line in rural Tennessee, and I’m just some kid that I had lice. I was the stinky kid at school. I was mocked, we were poor, whatever. I was that kid. And God was so gracious to me because he just showed up and he was like, hi, I’m just going to be here with you throughout all this. This is going to be awful, but I’m just going to be, I’ll show up occasionally and dazzle you. And he has done that my whole life. And I can’t ever, I really respect and understand people who are deconstructing and all of that. I’m just not. I just love God so much. The church makes me homicidal almost with anger and despair by their lack of attention to, I don’t know, sort of big issues like abuse and stuff like that. I don’t know what to do with the church, but I love God so much.

Dan: And in that interplay, you can find a way quickly in or out of this. But the two of you, as I’ve said, David, in terms of what he writes, I read him avidly go back to articles that he has written because they allow me a sense of sanity in the midst of a structural world right now that feels nuts, beyond nuts. How did the two of you metabolize what you both bear together?

Nancy: We’re not that great. I feel like we’re not doing this exactly right. I don’t know how to do it. I feel like we, for a long time, we were brought up to not believe in counseling or therapy, and the evils of psychology were sort of blasted into us every Sunday morning. And so for a long time, even though David had gone to war, seen genocide, we’d adopted a kid that obviously had trauma just inherently to the adoption process, my sexual abuse. I mean, literally everybody’s lives, y’all could tick ’em off, all the traumatic things that happened. But we were just like, oh no, we are so strong. We’re smart. We are Christians. We don’t have anxiety, whatever. So finally just the fistitudes of life just forced us to recognize that we were not strong enough to do this. So I started going to counseling that changed my life. I read your, was it Sacred Heart, the Wounded Heart? That was the first, what’s the name of that book?

Dan: I think it’s Wounded Heart.

Nancy: It was The Wounded Heart. Oh my gosh, Dan, that was the first time I was introduced to you when I read that book. So I had not gone to counseling when I first read that book. And it devastated me so much. I could not even turn the page. So I thought I might have a problem if Dan Allender is doing this to me. But anyway, so I went to counseling and I would not have been able to write one page of the book if I hadn’t gone to counseling. And I would not have been able to talk to my parents honestly about all of this stuff. I had to have a conversation with them before the book came out. But all this to say is that I try to live, honestly, we’re constantly beat up in a way that I’m not exactly sure how to recover from. I just don’t feel like we figured out the secret solution. And yeah, I don’t think that we’re just over here really dominating life on that realm. I think that we’re just tossed around by a lot of the acrimony and we’re not exactly sure how to handle it.

Dan: Well, I think for my two cents, that’s what again, is so compelling that you both seem to be able to enter both realities of death and life. There’s something of the sweetness of the presence of God, and almost again, that depth of simplicity that we want for ourselves, want for our children, want for our grandchildren of a very young, deep faith. Yet the harsh and cruel realities of the so-called adult life has not dissipated that beautiful presence of your love of Jesus. And yet, if we don’t feel to some degree, so confused, so angry about the nature of how the church in our era has compromised itself on so many big levels in terms of refusing to be honest and prophetic and a seer and giving place for seers to disrupt us. And that’s where I would say I think my experience of working with Rachael has been, I’ve been living in a comradeship and professional relationship with another seer. So again, what do you find yourself experiencing Rachael as this other seer with a very similar story?

Rachael: Are you asking me that?

Dan: Yeah.

Rachael: Oh, I’m still honestly trying to recover.

Nancy: She’s dissociated.

Rachael: The reality that, again, I wasn’t unaware of, but I think so much of what I learned through your investigation, those stories are not out there. They’re not surprising to me because they are very much a reenactment of many structures, hierarchical structures with I think sometimes toxic Christian theology, even if there’s goodness in it, because we know God can bring beauty out of anything. So that’s not to discount the good experiences people have. And yet when the system is covering and we’re seeing that unveiling right now in so many systems. So I think I was thinking about my own experiences with Kanakuk. I was thinking about my experiences with a church and my formative youth with many people who have committed suicide and knowing so much of that death comes out of just harm of violation that’s happening in the midst of God’s authority, God’s voice, attachments to God. This is just stuff I’m very fierce about. And I just was thinking about how we all have a role to play because I think on the political spectrum, I’m probably very different than both of you in my own love of God and the ways my relationship with God compels me to live and to love and to wrestle, and similarly to deconstruct the heck out of the church, but still be like, and I love Jesus. And so I feel a gratitude in some ways that there’s a movement of the spirit at work doing something with our mess. And yeah, I think the places where we as a seer, another word, just thinking of the prophetic and where an invitation and the prophetic is so often less like you’re bad and you should be destroyed. There’s certainly an element of that usually comes after a lot of, it doesn’t have to be this way and you’re actually meant for something more. You’re capable of something more. There is another way possible. And there’s something about that exposure that when people’s foundation is actually built on shame and fear and contempt and scapegoating, that just actually feels so exposing to people that they have to double down on the, shut up, go away. You are bad. There’s something wrong with you. And I just actually feel a lot of grief around that because I think we are hidden in Christ in a way. There’s the work that God has done that actually makes a different way possible. And I know full disclosure, I could just join Nancy in your human size vulnerability to say, and I’m not getting it right most of the time. I’m not taking the other way most of the time. So I’m not here to judge anybody else. It’s just that it has life or death implications.

Dan: Yeah. Again, I go back to that simple phrase that telling the truth is the root and the rule of freedom. But the price often for those who tell the truth is a form of imprisonment. A kind of being bound and being sent out. And again, I go back to these two core words, you and your husband have been hated, and you and your husband have many who wish that you would be silenced. And your faithfulness, deep, rich faithfulness that may not feel that way from your own inner world, but I don’t think I’m a naive reader of your or other lives. You will move forward and you will keep telling the truth. And in that, all I can say is we are both to say fans would not be strong enough of a word, just deeply, deeply moved. I know that when Becky and I read the book, it was we got to a point where it was like she just looked at me one night and said, get your own book. And I said, I, I bought the book. It’s my book. She said, you ordered it for me. I said, I did not. So as we’re having this conflict, she said it was very simple. And she said, now let’s just read it out loud together. And so that became at least two thirds of the book. And there were just so many moments in the reading where again, it’s not unusual in the reading where we’re laughing, but two to three paragraphs later we’re weeping. And that’s what I mean by you and your husband are people who know in your body the death of Jesus. You live it every day and you live in your body every day, the life of Jesus. And so as we who have not suffered anything comparable to what you two have endured, I think it began for us to be, again, a volume of book to be able to say, we’re called in our own sphere to tell as much truth as we can, and will there be persecution? Indeed, it is inevitable, but in that, there’s the possibility and the fragmentation of the repetition of harm, hatred, violence, to actually somehow hold and be held by goodness, by delight in life and by the love of Jesus. And I think for our listeners, once they step into your book, they as well may be fighting as to whether or not it’s wise to get two copies. So Nancy, thank you. Thank you so much for being with us.

Nancy: Thank you. Thank you guys so much. This has been so much fun.