UNITED STATES
Religion News Service – Rhymes with Religion
A common struggle amongst Christian child advocates is how to love the church that too often fails to protect children and turns its back on abuse survivors. This has been my struggle. As I take a step back from writing for a few weeks to enjoy some time with my family, I am grateful for these powerful words from a dear friend who has given his life to child protection and who knows this struggle all too well. – Boz
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As a Christian who also happens to be a child protection professional, I have a strained relationship with the church. It is a struggle borne by many who share my faith and my profession.
In my personal life, the church is my friend, the center of my world. As a baby, I was baptized in the church. As an adolescent, confirmation classes steadied me through the awkward years of puberty and pimples. When I gave my confirmation vow to die rather than abandon my faith, I uttered the words with grave seriousness. The church pronounced me married, educated my children, and comforted me through the death of loved ones. The rhythm of the church calendar marks the passing of each year and my morning and evening prayers soothe me at the outset and close of the day. Without the church, I would be lost.
In my professional life, though, the church is often my adversary. In the 26 years I have worked in the field of child protection, I have seen the church repeatedly used as an instrument of abuse. We all know of priests and pastors who have sexually abused children. What we fail to realize is that most sex offenders claim to be religious and often use the church to great advantage. When sexual abuse is found within the church, parishioners often rally around the offender and ostracize the victim. I know brave children who testified against the person who hurt them only to look out in the audience and see the courtroom filled with elders and other church members supporting the accused sex offender. Upon witnessing such a spectacle, a girl victim once asked me “does this mean that God is against me too?”
In cases of physical abuse, many Christians spout corporal punishment proverbs as if they were their life verses and pay little heed to the impact of their words. According to research from the Centers for Disease Control and Kaiser Permanente, 28% of all children are hit so hard that they receive injuries and, each year, a large number of substantiated physical abuse cases involve parents who claim they are “disciplining” their children out of Christian love. Some of these children die and those who survive often grow up to associate God with pain. Many of them will one day leave the church.
With respect to medical care, there are at least 20 sects, most of them Christian, who withhold even life-saving treatment from their children. As a result, hundreds of children have died from diabetes, meningitis, measles and numerous other preventable or treatable conditions. Consider, for example, the case of a 4 year old girl who developed a tumor behind her eye. Eventually, the tumor blinded her and grew to the size of her skull. After her death, police officers found streaks of blood on the walls in her room where her head had bumped. Rather than take the child to the doctor, her parents relied on prayer.
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