Michigan pastor, a big time Trumper, arrested on sex crime charges.

[lees1975]

https://signalpress.blogspot.com/2024/10/michigan-pastor-big-time-trumper.html

This kind of thing happens much more frequently in churches than most people realize. The Catholic church has dealt with a massive sexual abuse scandal among its ordained priesthood that extends back several generations and in which there have been tens of thousands of victims, mostly children and teenagers. The church has paid out untold millions of dollars to settle lawsuits, and instead of removing the perpetrators, in many cases they simply reassigned them to another parish where no one knew about the abuse until it happened there.

Southern Baptists, the nation's largest Evangelical Protestant denomination, were the subject of an expose published by the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express News in 2018, regarding sexual abuse being committed by pastors, paid church staff members and even denominational officers and employees. The expose, called Abuse of Faith [click on the title for the link] uncovered hundreds of cases of sexual abuse by pastors and church staff members, mainly of women, but in some cases, teenagers and young children, that had occurred in churches over an extended period of time. The Chronicle/Express News investigation covered only a limited number of cases in a limited number of jurisdictions.

It turned out to be just the tip of the iceberg, as delegates to its annual convention meeting in 2019, angry over the abuse and attempts by denominational officers to cover it up, ordered an independent investigation be conducted by an outside firm that none of the denomination's insider elites could control or alter. The investigation found cases where pastors had been exposed as abusers in one congregation and would move on to another church without their knowledge, under the guise of church independence and autonomy. The investigation even uncovered abuse by a former SBC President, and vice-president of one of its mission boards, and buy multiple missionaries and staff members of the denomination's entities, including two of its theological seminaries.

So it would seem that a student attending youth group in a Catholic or Southern Baptist church stands a better chance of being sexually abused or exploited by a youth pastor or priest than they do in their local public high school, or at a community dance or private party. They're safer at a drag queen show than in their own church.

And this kind of thing happens a lot more frequently than people think. Kids are safer going to the mall or a movie theater or a music concert in public than they are going to youth group at their church. It nullifies the moaning and complaining of Christian political conservatives about the dark world in which we live. They're the ones who are turning off the lights and pulling down the blinds.