As archdiocese builds new system to address clergy sex abuse, trust grows

I recently watched the movie Spotlight again. It’s the true story of the extent of abuse in the RCC and the absolute and harmful folly of dealing with these things internally. As one comment stated, the initial reaction should be, “Call the cops!”

Call me crazy, but when people talk about building something like this out for the SBC, everyone loses their mind. But if the Archdiocese of St. Paul does it…then “trust grows” according to the paper and nobody bats an eye.

It’s long past time for something like this. I get the dangers inherent in creating and maintaining a systemic database of sex offenders/abusers, but the old method of paper trails and missing information simply isn’t sufficient anymore, and the courts are not going to look favorably on the “well, we terminated his employment and sent him on his way” defense offered by a church (a la Jack Hyles’s sons). I don’t think that SI is the place or has the capacity to do this, but surely the FBFI or GARBC or CBA someone like that could, right? And isn’t that worth supporting even if we aren’t in ‘their camp’?

We watched “Spotlight” recently for the first time. I was astonished at the extent of abuse within the Roman Catholic Church. Did you see the list of known offenders in scores of cities in the USA and around the world? As I recall, Boston had around 350. The total must be in the thousands, and that’s only cities where investigations took place. The true, but unverified figure must be in the tens, if not hundreds of thousands.

Which makes the number of offenses in FBF, SBC, and other evangelical organizations pale by comparison. Yes, it’s shameful whenever and wherever it occurs. But to compare others to the RC is simply misguided. Nobody else comes even close.

This fact was reinforced in my mind just recently. Where I live (the Mpls./St. Paul, MN area), the local RCC Diocese has been the focus of a widespread child abuse scandal for several years.

At my (Baptist) church, we recently opened a new auditorium addition. As the finishing touches were being completed, one of our Children’s staffers happened to overhear something as he was walking past the new Green Room (comfortable seating area, kitchenette, attached restroom, and attached dressing room). It’s very nice. Being “backstage” (if you will), it’s also relatively secluded. As used for its intended purpose, it’s also a place where children are not likely to be.

Nevertheless, here’s what our staffer overheard one worker say to another: “I wonder how many kids will be abused in here.”

My church has never had even a hint of an abuse scandal. Yet there’s apparently some perception of guilt that abuse scandals, in whatever church or denomination they may occur, cast on all churches in the minds of the general public.

Folks, the apparent disparity in relative numbers derives from the simple fact that with 70 million members, the Catholic Church dwarfs any one evangelical or fundamental denomination, and quite frankly outnumbers evangelicals and fundamentalists as a whole by a fairly significant margin. It also results from the fact that the media furor over priests molesting children and teens—mostly teens actually—gives other victims a reason to come forward.

So for us, by and large, “our turn” hasn’t come up yet that would expose predators in our midst. The apparent disparity between the Catholics and “us” may simply be an artifact of the fact that “our people” haven’t seen one of their own step forward.

The Boy Scouts had their turn, and worked with outsiders to come up with a child protection program that is still world class, and then the Catholics had their turn, and they’re working with outsiders to come up with child protection programs and culture that are world class. With MSU and USC, it’s arguably higher education’s turn, and the smart schools (which sadly does not include my alma mater, MSU) are working with outsiders to make their child protection world class. As I’ve noted before, that’s not just policies; it’s corporate culture, audits, and the like.

Brothers, our turn is coming (may have already started), and we have a choice; we can learn from what these groups have learned and suffer a little, or we can push our heads into the sand and suffer a lot.

I didn’t mean to imply that the abuse in our circles is as epidemic as those of the RCC. (I am angry that the RCC gets a general pass in the MSM media. If I were a RC parent with a child I would run away from the church as fast as possible.) I am saying that we need to guard ourselves against self-policing. I watched one serial abuser avoid justice for years and I’m determined to never see that happen again. I had a deacon who was accused of abuse by his somewhat rebellious step-daughter. I ignored advice to “get all the facts first” and physically escorted him to the police station. He got jail.

For reference, the best statistics we have are that about 4% of Catholic priests are implicated in child/teen sexual abuse (again, mostly teens), and if we take nationwide statistics seriously—about 20-25% of girls are molested by people who abuse an average of eight victims, and about 16% of boys are molested by people who abuse an average of hundreds of victims. That would imply about 3% of adult males (the vast majority of perpetrators are male) are guilty of this crime. For comparison’s sake, about 850,000 people are on Megan’s List, and a look at DOJ statistics indicates that only about half of likely offenders have a previous felony record—indicating that the number of offenders likely is somewhere in the 3% of adult males range (plus maybe 0.5-1% of women or so).

So first of all, we are not talking about a night and day difference between the Roman Catholics and the nation as a whole. There are great reasons not to be Catholic—sacramentalism, rejection of the Solas and the Council of Trent for starters—but given that the Catholics have just purged a huge number of offenders and taken big steps to deal with known risks, it could well turn out that one of the safest places in the world today is as an altar boy in the U.S. Just like one of the safest places for a boy today is, for all the organization’s faults, in the Boy Scouts.

That leads to the second reality; given that we can expect that up to about 3% of men walking into the church may have committed such a crime, or may be “bent” in such a way that they might do so, what are we going to do to deal with possible risks like the room Larry discussed? It ought to be more than simply assuming kids won’t go back there.

So, according to Bert’s statistics, we know that RC priests are sexual molesters above the national average. We have no way to know if church staff in Evangelical churches represent the national average, but my observation would lead me to believe it’s below average. While even one is too many, the RC rate of abuse could easily be two or three times higher than evangelicals.

GN, this is one place where you cannot make a confident assertion simply because the confidence ranges are so wide. To draw a picture, ABWE, MSU, and USC looked pretty good until the world learned about Ketcham, Nassar, and Tyndall, no? The Catholic Church looked pretty good until the dam broke, and so did the Boy Scouts and the public schools.

Where we are now, really, is in the position of having had a number of scandals in our ranks, and with a huge number of churches that are not even doing basics like two-deep and background checks. Couple that with a huge resistance to take known scandals seriously—e.g. SGM issues—and the ugly reality is that when it’s our turn, it’s going to leave a mark. Best guess is that we are, plus or minus, statistically similar to what the Catholics experienced.

Or, put differently, known experts on the matter like career prosecutor/investigator Boz Tchividjian are sounding the alarm that we are setting ourselves up for huge problems. We need to take people like him seriously.

Granted that there have been a number of serious cases of sexual molesters among Evangelicals. (I use the term broadly to include Fundamentalists.) Every case is destructive and inexcusable. Still, where the Bible is believed and taught, the percentage of offenders must surely be lower. There will always be some who are hypocrites, but the truth of Scripture stands as an effective barrier to discourage such behavior. The more serious a church is about preaching the Bible with conviction, the less likely they are to have sexual predators in their ranks. If you do not believe this is so, you must not believe in the power of God’s Word. If the incidence of Roman Catholic abuse is no greater than that of Evangelicals, the gospel proclaimed by Evangelicals is no more true than that proclaimed by Roman Catholics. The true gospel is the power of God unto salvation. The RC gospel has no such saving and life-changing power.

….those who get into children’s ministry are actually believers, maybe. But in too many “easy-believism” churches, what are the odds you’re going to lay on that? I dearly want to believe you’re right on this, GN, but in a world where the test for starting work in children’s ministry is basically whether you can fog a mirror on a cold day, I’m not betting my mortgage payment on it.

An argument that we could be worse; evangelicals have also been far more successful at getting numbers into kids’ programs. So if you’re a sicko, do you volunteer at Easy Believe Baptist with 200 kids in the bus ministry, or do you go down the road to the United Methodists where they’re scraping to get 50?

My comment above was predicated upon churches preaching Truth. Easy believism is as much a perversion of the gospel as RC doctrine. So, you may be right. If the number of churches that preach the gospel is so low that they represent only a small fraction of Evangelical churches, the percentage of sexual molesters is probably no better than in RC.

Yes, obviously we are talking about churches that practice truth.

I’d just like to take a minute to advocate for the several different platforms that allow our churches to screen their potential nursery volunteers. Our church has used Care of God’s Children and another program that I can’t remember right now. Aly Raisman is personally subsidizing the cost of Darkness to Light, which may be good as well. GRACE has a certification program as well and other tools. I’m not pushing a specific program as much as that our churches put some kind of policy / training platform in place (at a bare minimum). There are lots of options out there, and many are affordable and accessible via the Internet.

We ought to be leading the charge against abuse, and that starts with learning what to look for and what to avoid. That’s where education is a key aspect.

Let’s not forget that the Bible predicts that vipers and wolves will creep in to the church; I don’t know that we ought to say “we’ve got theology right so we’re going to have far fewer problems”, as Scripture records a few humdingers among churches taught by the very apostles, including at least one case (the lover of his stepmother) where those watching today’s sex scandals would say “sounds familiar.”

No objection to good theology, no problem with the notion that those who have it might be less likely to offend, but we need to remember that SGM had non-easy-believe theology and intensive discipleship structures and had nasty issues, and ABWE had a lot of the same, as did BJU. It’s not for no reason that the ancients warned that hubris—overconfidence, really—was the biggest thing to watch out for.

Plus, even the best churches scramble for youth volunteers, and that tends to cause problems.