Pursuing Baptist predators

Holy Rollers might want to hold on to their crosses. The same folks who put the clamps on the Roman Catholic Church over its negligence of child abuse perpetrated by priests have refocused their cross hairs on the Southern Baptist Church and its failure to rid itself of abusive ministers.
Today the Associated Press reported that Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP) is launching a campaign against the Southern Baptist Church, the nation's biggest Protestant denomination, after receiving about 40 reports of rape or sexual child abuse perpetrated by ministers and pastors. Leading the cause is Christa Brown from Austin, Texas, who claims to have been sexually abused as a child by a Southern Baptist minister and maintains the Web site Stop Baptist Predators.

Though the Southern Baptist Church has admitted that some cases of abuse have occurred, it offered a sort of über-defense that it can't conduct investigations about abuse complaints because of the decentralized nature of the church. Unlike in the Catholic Church, Southern Baptist churches operate independently, hiring their own ministers and conducting investigations. This fact, which is also true of most Protestant churches, may make pursuing institutional justice difficult. But if SNAP has even a shred of the evidence that it had against the Catholics, it promises to be one more wild ride into the American id.

What's striking is that in almost any other context, SNAP's allegations would have the taint of paranoia run amok: All those nice men in those nice communities preying on children and more nice people knowing about it and doing nothing. Can you imagine a similar campaign about schoolteachers? Or doctors? Or social workers? It would look like insanity. Of course, no profession is immune to criminals who use their social standing to cover their abuse. But these professions all have things called background checks, independent professional boards, government oversight and perhaps less of a sense of innate moral righteousness. The Southern Baptist Church, like many of our religious organizations, has none of these things.

But since hundreds of cases revealing that the Catholic clergy was a haven for egomaniacal pedophiles, we've all become inured to a weird reality about the duplicitous niceness of our God-fearing nation. On the one hand, it's well known that sex sells, violence is ubiquitous and porn funds most Internet portals. At the same time, we're told that America is filled with God-fearing, upstanding "communities of faith." But the facts are simple: Most churches have little independent oversight. In the end, when confronted by scandal they often seem more worried about institutional survival, appearances and reputation than the morality they preach.

-- Carol Lloyd

http://www.salon.com



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Will we ever learn?

It's always the same: A few powerful men chase off most of the other men (keeping a few on hand to do their dirty work), beat the children and women, and sleep with the children and women.

Religion, especially in the US, is a business. It should be regulated, taxed, and licensed by the government like any other business. Honestly, drug companies can't get away (at least not for long) with selling snake oil. Why should religio-bidness men enjoy such tax-friendly, hands off status?

-- belladonna

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I wondered when we'd finally hear about the Protestants
I'm trained as a mental health professional and the mental health system sees perpetrators and victims of sexual abuse. My first experience with a pedophile patient was an Episcopal priest. Protestant denominations do not have the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church, but the decentralized nature of these denominations may make it even easier for abusers to stay in the system and I would guess that elders and deacons feel compelled to hush up allegations of wrong doing and happily foist predators on other churches. Denominations to have some authority they can exercise and the Southern Baptist Convention are happy to discipline over churches that admit gays or do other things that displease those in authority. Celibacy creates its own unique problems, but a common problem with most religious denominations (Christian or otherwise) is that they recruit young, normally rather unworldly people into the seminary and then turn around and give them great moral authority (and ample opportunities to compartmentalize and rationalize their problems). That is a recipe for all kinds of "giving in to temptation" and the nature of churches and the middle class respectability that's part of church membership means that that the laiety keeps a lot of things quiet. Catholic, Protestant, Fundie, evangelical, unitarian, druid, whatevr--I suspect that this is a problem and poorly dealt with throughout the religious spectrum.

-- raj

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Yes, there are sexually immature predators in all walks of life. Most of it, per the experts, occurs within families.

Those 'humans' who abuse in God's name are the worst of the worst. The leaders in any organized religion who lie to survivors and their memberships, move their predators, refuse to be audited and hide their files are, as the ex-governor of Oklahome once said, as bad as the Mafia. (He later apologized to the Mafia for making that remark.)

True, Baptist churches are more locally autonomous. Thus, "ousted for indiscretions" ministers can move freely and get a new job elsewhere. So what's the difference?

Those kind and "Christian" folks out in Utah not only ex-communicate their VICTIMS, they order their members not to communicate with them,

Organized religion has become both a joke and a travesty. It has become big business, with the bottom line as it's idol...

The message of Christ is simple: God is love, and in each of us. He did not say to rape the children and use them as toys to he thrown away when broken. Children are not chattels. The rest of it is church law. Rites and rituals have been added, changed, redeveloped since the 4th century AD.

At least the Mafia (or any organized group with criminal intent) does not pretend to be the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong.

-- Kay Goodnow