I don’t know how to separate our culture’s willingness to accept that kids are going to die in their schools so that we can be “free” with our culture’s willingness to cover up for horrific and widespread child abuse in our religious institutions. It seems like the same thing — that some small subset gets to do whatever the hell it wants and the rest of us pay for it with our bodies and sometimes our lives.
You can wonder how the Uvalde police could just stand around keeping parents out of the school while students called 911 and begged for help, but isn’t it the same impulse that Southern Baptist leadership acted on when it kept its list of known sexual abusers secret instead of saving victims? It's just that one took place in minutes and the other took place over years.
There will always be bad people. That much is obvious. Some people are just wired (either by nature or nurture) to hurt others. But being a bystander who enables evil? That’s a choice. It is a choice to not go into the school. It is a choice to prevent others from entering. It is a choice to just quietly move a pastor to a new congregation. It is a choice to write his name down on your long list and then hide it.
Last week’s episodes of the podcast Behind the Bastards were about genocide. During Thursday’s episode, Robert Evans and his guest, Joe Kassabian, spent a lot of time talking about how to stop genocides before they start, and one effective way is to confront the people who are doing evil, to make a scene, to make the perpetrators uncomfortable. And let me repeat — this is effective. Telling people publicly that you see what they’re doing and you want it to stop works. You might have to do it a bunch of times. It might not always be 100 percent effective. But being polite and quiet and keeping your head down does nothing. Bystanders have to start choosing to speak up, to not be neutral in the face of injustice.
I don’t know what more there is to be said about gun violence in this country. Something is deeply wrong with so many American men. Rather than talking about their feelings with their friends or seeing a therapist, they shoot people, usually starting with a woman they “love.” It’s deeply fucked up. We need to address how many of you guys have guns, but that’s just a tourniquet to staunch the metaphorical bleeding. The underlying issue is that y’all love violence and aspire to be feared, and it takes a long time for those of you who do figure out that this is a deeply childish approach to life to actually figure it out. Most of you never do. And we’re all paying for it.
But I do know what to say to Christian leaders who stood by and stand by while pastors sexually assaulted and abused children. You know and I know you don’t believe that the Bible is true. You are frauds and con artists. Sure, you’ll nod along as the man in the pulpit rails against gay people, because “that’s what the Bible says,” but you shrug off the parts of the Bible that tell you the scope and magnitude of your own sin. I see you for the frauds you are.
Christians love to quote Bible verses, but any one verse can be taken out of context and made to support just about any position you already hold. That’s why I’m suggesting Christians take some time to read all of Matthew Chapter 25. In it, Jesus is speaking about all the ways godly people are separated from God — they’ve half-assed their tasks and expect others to pick up the slack; they chicken out of doing bold things to increase God’s abundance; or they don’t recognize the divine worth of others.
If you’re a Southern Baptist Convention leader right now — someone who knew abuse was happening but looked the other way or helped the abuser move churches or blamed the victims or denied anything was wrong — you must know that Jesus says in the aforementioned chapter that this is what you are doing to God. Sexual abuse, especially sexual abuse at the hands of a religious leader, is devastating. It affects people for their whole lives. And when viewed through the lens of Matthew 25, it is an assault against the divine. “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these, you did for Me.”
It’s darkly funny how we have these Satanic panics every 30 years or so, and church leaders always tell us the most twisted shit these make-believe Satanists do: reciting the Lord’s prayer backwards, desecrating altars, murdering babies, so on and so on. Meanwhile, Jesus is saying, “Whatever you do to them, you do to me,” which means that lots of Christians are out here molesting Jesus, and a whole lot more Christians know it's happening and look the other way. Nothing they could make up about Satanists tops that in terms of blasphemies.
Which brings me back to my point. If Southern Baptist leaders, and Catholic leaders before them, and all the rest of you who are coming next, believe that Jesus speaks the truth, then you would know that you are fundamentally betraying your followers and God, and you would — at the least — step down. You could follow biblical principles and tie a millstone around your neck and throw yourself into a lake if you’re a true biblical literalist. If you’re standing by while you know children are being harmed, either start taking your Christian beliefs as seriously as you claim you do, or stop bemoaning the fact that people are fleeing from the church. Your marks are wising up. That eventually happens in all cons.
OK, now listen. I’m not a Christian anymore, not in any meaningful way. I’m just a loudmouth on the internet. I find Christianity incredibly painful. If you see me in a church, it’s to appease my parents. And it is one of the saddest things in my life, that I’m in exile from the place I grew up and the people I grew up with. But it wasn’t and isn’t safe for me there. Still, I think a lot about it. And I am thinking a lot about y’all who needed the church on your side, and instead it was on the side of your abuser. I hope you know that it is not your fault. You are not ruined. You have not been desecrated. If there is a God, no human being is powerful enough to do something to you that could cause God to turn away from you. And a bunch of us are out here rooting for you and hoping that you find peace and ways to be OK. We are on your side, even if your church isn’t.
I can’t answer why, if God is all-powerful, God doesn’t intervene to stop suffering. Theologians have been wrestling with this question for millennia, and you’re not going to find a definitive answer in the Nashville Scene.
But I do know that people are in positions to stop suffering. A Uvalde parent jumped a fence to save her children. Victims of clergy abuse have been demanding justice for years in order to validate the stories of other victims and to prevent more people from being abused. And now we have names.
I think the people who do this evil count on it feeling impossible to stop. But intervention works. And so that’s the work we must do.
