COLUMBIA (MO)
Religion News Service - Missouri School of Journalism [Columbia MO]
May 26, 2025
By Karen Swallow Prior
For too long, Christian leaders have ignored or covered up abuse.
When I was in high school, and still underage, my health teacher tried to seduce me. Right there in class, in the normal chaos between bells, he rubbed my legs and whispered an invitation in my ear.
I thought it was hilarious and gross. A typical teenager who felt more grown-up than I was, I never reported it to the school or to authorities. In the culture I grew up in, I was made well aware of what we then called “dirty old men.” I shrugged it off.
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Some years later, when I better understood the gravity of such abusive behavior, I wrote about the experience in an essay published by my local newspaper. I didn’t name the teacher or my large suburban public school, but a diligent school board member read my essay, did a little digging to find out which school it was and called me to ask the name of the teacher.
I gave the teacher’s name, but by then he was retired — or dead, I don’t remember — so there was not much that could be done. (The school board member had actually suspected a different teacher, which was sobering.)
But that call has always stood out to me as I look back and reflect on all I’ve learned about sexual grooming, abuse and institutional responses. They were doing due diligence, even if it was many years later.
Such diligence has proved to be too rare in my experience within church institutions. Instead, Christian leaders have ignored or covered up abuse.
My own grooming experience happened in the 1980s. The school board member who reached out so promptly after I wrote my essay did so in the 1990s. We have learned so much more about prevention, care and accountability since then.
I say this because I give grace to those of us on a learning curve — I certainly have been on one. I have since learned much more about the dynamics of sexual abuse, including abusive behaviors by those in authority over both minors and adults, including adult clergy sexual abuse.
But we must demand accountability for those who have been notified of abuse allegations, only to rationalize, cover up and even deny them. It’s one thing not to know; it’s another thing to do nothing over and over again.
The instances of those who do nothing in the church are legion. You can Google the headlines yourself, but I can offer experiences of others — not my own to share in details, but witnessed from my own front-row seat.
My husband and I attended and served in a church for years before we learned one of its ministers was a convicted child sex offender, something all of the pastoral staff had known but kept from the congregation.
I also know by name an entire team of pastors and ministry leaders who paid off a serial predator who groomed and abused more than one young woman working for him. The leadership team “removed” the predator by placing him in a job in a connected ministry, then hired him back to his previous job a few years later. This man continues to be employed, lauded and sought in Christian institutions today.
I sat in a meeting with a pastor alongside a survivor of an alleged brutal sexual assault that was documented by multiple authorities and institutions. All the survivor wanted was a voice in a publicly announced process to bring about accountability and reasonable changes to offer more protection of those in the care of that institution. This survivor was promised that voice, but the promise was never fulfilled.
Long before this meeting, I shared with a different pastor a number of red flags surrounding an executive leader who was later exposed for being involved in a sex scandal so salacious that the case continues to make headlines.
I know pastors who stood by fellow pastors caught preying on and abusing parishioners, but did little or nothing to support the women preyed upon.
I know pastors who held high positions of authority in their church denomination who stood by and continued to promote their young protégé even after they knew he had been accused of sexually assaulting a student under his care. This protégé was eventually convicted and imprisoned for sex crimes against children.
Even those of us who do not hold positions of leadership or authority in church organizations have an obligation to speak up about what we see. For example, when I was a professor at a Christian university, I twice reported and aggressively pursued the removal of colleagues who were preying sexually on students.
These are anecdotes. I understand that readers will have to accept my accounts or not. But these anecdotes track with many documented accounts of cover-ups and denials of abuse.
Perhaps you wonder why I don’t name these people. In cases where the stories have been made public, I’ve provided links. In cases where they are not, these are not, as I said, my stories to tell.
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But the real question is why the leaders who have authority over these predators and abusers have not themselves brought about accountability. Why have so many leaders denied claims, devised schemes to protect the accused, spoken up for predators in courts of law, humiliated and degraded the victims, and protected the institutions at all costs?
Why do these Christian institutions exist at all if not to follow the example of Jesus Christ himself, who left the 99 sheep to search for the one that was lost, to care for the “least of these,” and to heal the sick and wounded?
The only answers I can come up with are not good ones.