Why so much church news is bad: only the little people are accountable

 Fred Clark writes many posts of this type on his Patheos Progressive Christian blog.  At least once or twice a month, some Evangelical or other conservative Christian grandee is caught with a sexual abuse, embezzlement, or cover-up charge.  Other bloggers write about ecclesial gaslighting and emotional abuse.  On NetGrace, Boz Tchividjian writes, based on an interview with the late Rachel Held Evans, that "Child sexual abuse is not merely a personal offense. It is a serious crime. Child sexual abuse does not even fit into the paradigm of which Jesus was speaking about in this passage.  Jesus never intended these statements to be twisted into the required method for handling murder, rape, torture, kidnapping, or genocide. Child sexual abuse is not a private matter, but rather a public offense against the victim, society and humanity as a whole. It is not a matter which can be handled quietly between two persons or between two families, as is wrongly done in many communities.  It is a matter of public alarm..."

So why does this keep happening? One theme that keeps coming up in these abuses of authority is the worship of authority. Believers are so hag-ridden with attachments to precise hierarchical structures that they forget what these structures are for, and which social orders would actually serve their purpose better than others. "You're just the help/a woman/a child/ a mental case; we don't have to listen to you." will never do for a workable family or community relationship. Authorities who don't address complaints from "below" are not doing the work of keeping up a healthy organization.

Posted by Jennifer A. Nolan