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The feedback to Monday’s piece entitled “Wrong from the Start: How Christian Culture Keeps Pulling Us Away from Jesus” has been largely curious and receptive. There’s one good-natured question that keeps being asked, though: yeah, but is Christian culture any worse? They’re wondering if these problems are unique to Christian culture or systemic to all of humanity. It brings me no joy to say this, but, yes, I believe these problems are worse in Christian culture.
Take the clerical sexual abuse of children as one horrific example.
Quite often the parents know it’s happening but choose to look the other way. Why? Because they believe it’s wrong to “harm God’s anointed.” Some will go so far as to cite Psalm 105:15, 1 Samuel 26:23, etc. How jacked up is that? Even when parents intervene, however, they’re often bullied, dismissed, gaslighted, manipulated, scapegoated, and threatened both in a top-down fashion by the clergy and in a bottom-up fashion by the laity. The default is to protect clergy, not children.
Make no mistake, Christian culture enables sexual predators to get away with it.
Predators use Christian culture to their advantage. They often hold places of spiritual authority and have a meticulous understanding of the ins and outs of Christian culture. Like Darth Sidious in the Galactic Senate, they manipulate the loopholes, inconsistencies, ambiguities, power dynamics, etc. They knowingly exploit beliefs like forgiveness and grace, consciously leverage the bureaucratic structures, and intentionally cultivate interpersonal relationships–all for protection.
These defense mechanisms don’t exist in quite the same way in other settings.
Such abuse certainly happens in other settings, but it’s a helluva lot harder to get away with it without the pious covering. Pastors receive a degree of institutional protection and interpersonal trust that isn’t received by teachers, coaches, or doctors. If a kid comes home from school in a bad mood and says his teacher touched him “down there,” most parents are livid and call the cops. But if the kid says it about a pastor, it’s presumed there must be some kind of misunderstanding.
Never underestimate the moral repugnance of built-in deference to spiritual authority.
Outside the area of sexual abuse, the same pattern holds true in my employment experience as well. I can usually find ways to make it work with secular people or institutions where they don’t Jesus juke at the first sign conflict. We can usually find other ethical or rhetorical frameworks with which to move forward. Everything is way murkier when they overtly believe in forgiveness and appeal to it as a shield to avoid ever taking responsibility for their actions.
That is the difference; that is why Christian culture is far worse.
It’s not just that Christian culture boldly claims the high ground of love, truth, and grace only to fall short of these ideals. That inconsistency and hypocrisy is itself troublesome, but that’s not my primary or even secondary concern. (Maybe it’s tertiary?) My primary concern is the way Christian culture deceptively leads people away from Jesus while my secondary concern is the way that Christian culture’s built-in defense mechanisms systematically inhibit accountability.
By the way, Jesus’ default is to protect children.
Anyone else remember Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 18:6? “If anyone causes one of these little ones… to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.” Yet another bleak example of a Christian culture zig where The Way of Jesus zags. Christian institutions should report them to the police, defrock the bastards, and defrock the institutional bastards who protected the predatory bastards.
^ Yes, I did just call for Pope Benedict XVI to be defrocked for violating The Way of Jesus.
