Jeri Massi is done once for all with documenting abuse in IFB churches.
This is my swan song, my goodbye. I am retiring from the work of documenting clergy sex abuse of children. I do this at the advice of every doctor I have seen in the last year, and also two veterinarians. I don’t want this to come across as “Oh poor me.” War is war. It sucks, and you only fight a war because every other option is worse than war. I knew when I began to document clergy sexual abuse of children in Christian Fundamentalism in 2001 that it was going to be a sucky role to play.
Well … dang. Jeri is a genuine-article hero of the effort to expose abusive pastors and hold them accountable.
Go read the entire piece. Anybody acquainted with Christian fundamentalism — whether the IFB or SBC variety — will recognize at once that she knows what she’s talking about.
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It was common for Christa Brown and me to exchange comments on how frustrated we were that our message was not reaching a wider audience. She was doing meticulous work on her own in the SBC, trying to get justice and safety for young people in SBC churches. The man who had sexually abused her as a teenager was (and still is) in church office in the SBC. Christa was going in person to meet with SBC officials at every level. The sheer weight of indifference of grassroots level people, pastors, and executives in the SBC was chilling.
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If you want to show what’s wrong with Christian Fundamentalism, start from their own starting point. Christian Fundamentalist preachers, as a general rule, don’t have a clue about what the Bible actually says. They preach an infrastructure of traditions that they adorn with individual, out of context, Bible verses. And they make their sermons popular by filling them with stories and jokes and shouting spells.
“The sheer weight of indifference …” Here, Jeri understates the case; confronted with dispositive evidence — even confessions! — that Pastor Bubba has been raping their children, congregations tend almost invariably to rally around the pastor and re-victimize his victims. That’s the psychology of the cult at work, and the unhappy truth is that an awful lot of religious life is no more than predatory exploitation of the insecure, the troubled, the damaged.