I rarely write or tweet nowadays about stories involving sex abuse in the church environment because …
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Life is too short to spend it wading through sewage, and …
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It’s nonstop, and …
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Anybody who doesn’t know by now that church is a dangerous place for women and children is an inattentive fool who probably can’t be helped by exposure to facts anyhow, and …
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Sexual abuse in the church inheres in the innate degradations of Christian teaching, so there is more sex abuse in churches than elsewhere in society, and abusive churches and predatory pastors will persist till the last spire crashes to the ground.
Even so, a local story is worth noting.
“There’s this culture of fear and you have to obey the ultimate leader and authority,” said Cherith Roberson, 32, a former church member. “And it starts from the beginning.”
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“It was taught, it was preached about, that you break a child’s spirit. And you do that by whatever means necessary,” she said.
Her little sister, Beka Foust, was just 5 years old.
“I knew this was not normal,” Foust said. I didn’t know what normal was.”
The sisters say all the children attended school at church. They say they were told what to wear, what to believe, and were not allowed contact with anyone on the outside.
“You were ostracized from everybody else,” Foust said.
I don’t doubt a word of any of that. I live in a seminary-dominated town, have known many seminarians through the years — and the most serious-minded of them believed and lived the same things. The difference between them and a ‘cult’ is a difference not of kind, but of degree.
This should not surprise anybody. The first century Jewish sect that became Christianity following the failure of the Jewish Rebellion was a persecuted cult, and the New Testament is the literature of a cult. When people are so foolish they take it seriously, there are bound to be problems.