by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist
For years, generations even, Roman Catholic clergy have been the go-to villains when it came to children being sexually abused by representatives of God on Earth, but the ugly truth of the matter is that people who are sexually aroused by children tend to gravitate towards places where vulnerable children are available: schools, child care centers, and especially churches - many of which even sponsor groups, likes scout troops, to pull more children toward the church and its activities.
It should therefore come as no surprise to anyone to learn that protestant churches are also prime stalking grounds for people who seek sexual gratification from contact with children.
The Southern Baptist Convention is America's largest protestant denomination. Last year delegates at the group's annual meeting aired concerns that they had been hearing regarding the church's Executive Committee routinely ignoring reports of sexual abuse of children by church officials. The delegates pressed for an outside investigation into those complaints. The group, Guidepost Solutions, was hired to look into the situation and issue a report. Their investigation lasted seven months, and yesterday the 288-page report on the matter was made public.
According to the report, the investigation revealed that for at least two decades leaders of the Southern Baptists within the Executive Committee had "stonewalled" and "denigrated" survivors and others who had tried to bring matters of sexual abuse within the church to their attention. The report even said that the survivors and others who told of the abuse were sometimes met with "outright hostility" by members of the Executive Committee.
The primary motivation for the active avoidance of the reports of sexual abuse appears to have been to protect the church's money and property. One highlight of the findings was this:
"Our investigation revealed that, for many years, a few senior EC leaders, along with outside counsel, largely controlled the EC's response to these reports of abuse . . . and were singularly focused on avoiding liability for the SBC."
That situation, where church leaders operated in a cocoon of denial, led to abusers being quietly transferred among congregations, and churches who received the miscreant ministers were never notified of their predatory pasts - the exact same dynamic that had played out in many Catholic dioceses with clergy who were sexual predators. One staff member who worked for the Southern Baptist Convention's Executive Committee reportedly kept a list of clergy on whom they had received reports, a list that numbered in the hundreds, but no one took any action to insure that those accused predators were no longer in positions of power within the church.
Ed Litton, the President of the Southern Baptist Convention, said that he is "grieved to my core" over the facts revealed in the report and he is calling on the membership of the church to "lament" and prepare to change the culture within the denomination.
Yesterday's report listed several recommendations designed to begin changing the culture with respect to the on-going patterns of sexual abuse within the church, and those recommendations will be front-and-center in discussions when the SBC holds its annual meeting in Anaheim, California, next month.
The problems are out and on the table, and now they must be dealt with. It's the Christian thing to do.
2 comments:
There should be no quarter given to these abusers or their protectors. They belong in jail and the church organization should pay damages through the nose. I don’t care if it goes bankrupt. The same goes for the Catholic church. We should not give religious organizations a pass to let them deal with their own problems. The First Amendment doesn’t protect sexual abuse, it protects the establishment and free exercise of religion. If a religion includes sexual predation, or any other type of abuse, it’s gone too far, it is criminal, and it shouldn’t be protected.
I hadn't heard the First Amendment argument as a defense to sexual predators. Perhaps that's because protections of Constitutional Free Speech and Free Exercise of Religion do not extend to pandering to perverts. We do not live in a society where rule of licentiousness prevails. Everything does not go!
Indeed the Tenth Amendment's Police Powers doctrine specifically authorizes, as unenumerated powers, States to broadly regulate "[p]ublic safety, public health, morality, peace and quiet, law and order;" Berman v. Parker, 348 U.S. 26 (1954). Conduct of church leaders who abuse children as sex objects certainly falls within the doctrine's sphere.
When we were children there was little public discussion about s-e-x, even the perverse side in which those in positions of trust abused that trust. Today we at least voice our concerns and rage about such conduct. But today we have the vantage of hindsight, the benefit of survivors, and numerous civil and criminal court verdicts roundly criticizing such heinous conduct. Today we know that this evil can be lurking in our midst and that monsters are among us.
Today churches know they have to be proactive when it comes to protecting not only children, but everyone from sexual predators. Failure to adhere to rigorous protections is not acceptable.
I cannot speak for to what those standards are for all church organizations. I can say that this is a point of focus for the Episcopal Church in America. There are various levels of training depending on the extent of contact adults have with childen. I taught Sunday School for a few years. The training was eye opening, alarming, and kind of repulsive. There are things on the topic of keeping children safe that I had never heard of before nor considered until I had that training. And if I was an adult overseeing kids at an overnight event or transporting kids to a camp or another event then there was more training.
Now the training has been expanded to include issues of sexual harrassment. And that is as it should be. The training is called
Safe-Church. See, https://www.episcopalchurch.org/safe-church/. Other denominations and religions must have similar safeguards in place.
There should be no disagreement that Christ put little children at the center of his focus. We read about it in Matthew 19.
Jesus Blesses Little Children
13 Then children were being brought to him in order that he might lay his hands on them and pray. The disciples spoke sternly to those who brought them, 14 but Jesus said, “Let the children come to me, and do not stop them, for it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs.” 15 And he laid his hands on them and went on his way.
There is judgment waiting for those who stopped the children from going to Christ. And while our laws and our courts - civil, criminal, and ecclesiastical - do not have jurisdiction in heaven we must do all within our power to respect the dignity of every person and that means protecting the children, each other, and holding those who don't accountable.
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