For The Children

***Author's Note***: The following essay deals with the problem of sexual abuse in American churches. It may be triggering for some readers.

Articles referencing the subject of this essay are tagged throughout.

Church is held up as a traditional American activity. People's right to worship is as fundamental as baseball and Free Speech. Families gathering to worship, to spend time in fellowship with others on Sundays and Wednesdays is part of the national skein of history and experience. But is this apparently innocuous activity as safe as it appears for our children?

It's a worthy question to ask since, as we now know, rampant anger over drag shows and pro-LGBTQ+ books at libraries and bookstores by Christian Nationalists and other believers has become a national problem drawing attention to cities and towns across the country where raging cadres show up to demonstrate or speak out at council meetings. Its source seems to be springing at least primarily from churches spreading a hate message to congregants, sharing homophobia (and other vile doctrines) as a Biblical virtue.

When our local brewery did a drag event, men (so-called) with guns and religious signs showed up to protest it. Several libraries and bookstores in North Carolina have drawn fire (figuratively only, so far) for holding drag story times or for having LGBTQ+ books for teens and children. One of those events occurred at the same time that someone fired a high-powered rifle into an area power station, thereby causing tens of thousands of North Carolinians to go without power during a frigid winter weekend. (Authorities are still investigating whether these two nearly simultaneous occurrences are a coincidence or not, but it seems too convenient to ignore).

The people who are up in arms (quite often literally) over these events and collections always claim the same thing as motivation for their actions: their anger is "for the children". Their reasoning is religious in nature and their placards are always festooned with Bible verses. The preachers who sermonize hate from their lecterns justify their anger with the Bible, where loosely collected bits from around the scriptures are compiled to suit their rabid homophobia. All of those spittle-flecked homilies are supposedly "for the children".

Irony doesn't exist for this insidious mindset. The credulous mind rebels at such nuance. The one place nationally where children are regularly and badly harmed by sexual predators is church. In a new study, sexual abuse of children by clergy in Illinois has raised an imperative question: are the people who are against drag story times and LGBTQ+ rights going to step up and say or do anything about preventing minors from attending churches where they are clearly not safe? I have never seen protesters outside of churches holding up placards that are “for the children”.

Sexual assault of minors in churches, both Catholic and Protestant, though deeply lamentable, is not new or surprising. Anyone who thinks that churches are safe to allow the youth to be alone with clergy or their representatives clearly hasn't been paying attention. At one point, more than a decade ago, as the Catholic church fell under international scrutiny for years of unchecked and covered up abuse, the Southern Baptist Conference (as well as other prominent evangelical Christian organizations across the nation) remained suspiciously silent. We now know why. In 2022, a vast investigation revealed that hundreds of churches in the Southern Baptist Convention had covered up abuse and countless young people had been sexually victimized for decades.

If ever there was a time to open up about such horrid realities—to confess sins and ask forgiveness and allow healing to begin, for example—it was then. But the revelations about these nightmare realities on both sides of the religious schism would wait, causing untold numbers of children to suffer in silence.

We might well ask how such evil has been allowed to go unchecked. Accountability isn't an option church organizations willingly take. Our unreasonable desire to "respect people's right to worship" has created a hell of secrets and coverups within the auspices of many church organizations that—in seeking to prevent bad press that would kill the church’s tax-free revenue stream—protect the criminals in those churches, allowing them to ruin lives again and again.

If and when concerned citizens speak out about this and other concerns, we are shouted down for being anti-religious, even anti-American. A common refrain to questions of this nature is "well, it may happen in those other churches, but it doesn't happen here." If these groups actually cared “for the children”, they might respond by looking inwards rather than defensively seeking to change the subject, lash out at innocent groups or ignore processes in place to report sexual assault.

When caught, the churches very often close ranks to protect their congregations, allowing other horrors to be covered up yet again. When an individual church leader is seen to have been allowed to damage lives in this way, their synods and conferences avoid accountability by distancing themselves from the church in question. The Catholic church and the Baptist Conference both allowed known criminals to be transferred to other states to avoid scrutiny, knowing full well that they were enabling those predators to start again. Additionally, it is rarely mentioned that this is a problem beyond the church where the recent news has broken (this was true until recently, when the SBC released a huge list of sexual predators across the South). If we were to understand fully that this is a systemic problem across all churches, perhaps we wouldn't be so quick to give privacy and "healing" for the churches that perpetuate sexual abuse of children.

It is well known that all churches have a propensity to harbor sexual deviants. Only the very stupid would continue to encourage their children to attend in these dangerous circumstances. For parents who force their children to attend, either falsely believing that the rumors are untrue or feeling that it won’t ever happen to their kids, their complicity is nearly as bad as their willing blindness to the abuse in their chosen church organization.

Even after the release of information naming names and the mass firings of preachers across the South, other evangelical and non-denominational churches have remained silent or diffident about their own internal issues. These revelations are enough to set whole towns ablaze with wrath. And yet, we rarely (if ever) see angry preachers banging on their pulpits about sexual abuse occurring in their own and neighboring churches. They are quick to scream about gay people, trans rights, bathrooms, books, drag events, "grooming" and anything else that draws attention away from the real problem, but they never look at the realities within. I often wonder if this is the real reason that church attendance in the last few years has taken a serious hit.

People who fall for the church’s scapegoating tactics are everywhere. Religious belief is predicated on the sense that religion is everywhere under assault by “progressive” ideologies. Revving up congregations with emotional topics like LGBTQ+ rights or drag events is a great way to keep membership up among a dwindling group of believers who like to nurse their grievances. If people believe their way of worship is under attack, they will become angry and believe anything that justifies their rage, like LGBTQ+ ‘agendas’ so-called and overt prejudice against anything that doesn’t fall within the nefarious dogmas of hate.

Religious homophobic propaganda has found its way online where hundreds of small groups across all platforms, usually using the term (unironically) "liberty" in their titles, promote safety for their children as they bombard bookstores and libraries to "audit" collections or crowd streets with guns and placards at drag events, looking for anything that they think might harm young people. This again, is always branded as "for the children".

The hypocrisy necessary to ignore the real problems and face out against unreal issues is a hint at just how deluded these organizations have become about their own culpability and sense of misplaced self-righteousness. Actually, like most of the far-right ideology, it is full of self-loathing and pathos and false victimhood mentality.

Far right political leadership across the country has adopted this mindset and has been fighting hard against LGBTQ+ rights recently by rolling back rights for their constituencies, but the evangelical movement has been seeking to nationalize their homophobic dogma for years in their own right. Political candidates have stepped up their fanaticism by adding religious values to their platforms. Their rhetoric has risen to the point where LGBTQ+ individuals are actively oppressed around the nation and every day their rights are being eroded. This clearly harms children and teens.

Meanwhile, right under our noses, children in churches right in our own towns are at risk, and in immense danger of being horribly victimized. There has never been one account of a child being harmed by men in drag at story time events, nor of them being "groomed" or victimized by getting the help they need finding books that affirm who they are.

The people fighting against LGBTQ+ rights have never heard of (or wouldn't understand if they had) the psychological phenomenon called projection. Projection causes a person (or group) to project its worst internal realities on an innocent group or individual in order to keep from facing their own culpability. It has a long and storied career as a tool by nefarious organizations that promote ideologies intended to remove the rights from people justified by motivations very much like “for the children”.

The most reasonable thing most of us can do to support and protect children is to be vigilant. Nowhere is perfectly safe, but clearly church organizations are the least safe. As summer begins and schools let out, the temptation to take one's children to church-run "Bible school" events will be strong. Perhaps with our refreshed understanding of how dangerous churches are to the well-being of our little ones, we might think twice about giving them over into the hands of organizations that have a long reputation for destroying lives.

If church organizations wish to protest this reality, they must first seek to remove the log from their own eyes. We now know just how culpable they are. Only a united effort led from within all church organizations to root out and deal with sexual miscreants in their ranks, and to once and for all acknowledge the unsafe realities of churches for children can be accepted. Until then, no child is truly safe.

No children are harmed by seeing a man in a dress or by reading life-affirming books. They are harmed by the ludicrously blinkered idea that churches are a safe place "for the children".

If you know or suspect that your church is covering up sexual abuse, notify the local law enforcement authorities immediately.