Civil Commotion

Bruce Gerencser regularly publishes a feature entitled “Black Collar Crime,” a round-up of clergy crime stories; he has just published the 6ooth story, and has a few hundred more he hasn’t linked to yet.

Sounds believable to me. Ten years ago I launched a Website named Piety, Inc. that aggregated clergy crime stories, and got so overwhelmed by the sewage that I closed it down after about 8-months. Jeri Massi focused on clergy crime in IFB churches and severely damaged her health, the Wartburg Ladies seem to me to be getting short-tempered, and Gerencser remarked once in a comment left on this site that the stories often left him feeling sick and dirty.

In consequence of which I firmly believe that, proportionally, there are far more screwed-up men standing behind the pulpit than sitting in the pews.

Anyway, he reflects on this dubious milestone:

Sixteen months ago, I posted the first story in the Black Collar Crime Series. Yesterday, I posted the six-hundredth post in the series. Focused primarily on clergy sexual misconduct, the sheer level of reports puts to rest the notion that such crimes are committed by a “few bad apples.” Numerous times a day, I receive notices from Google Alerts, notifying me that a new report of alleged clergy crime has been posted to the Internet. I look at every notification, choosing to only publish the stories that are publicly reported by reputable news sites. I am often contacted by victims who are looking to expose their abusers. I do what I can to help them, but if there’s no public news reports or other information that can corroborate their stories, I am unable to do anything for them. Believe me, I WANT to help them, but it would be legally reckless of me to post a story without sufficient evidence. I generally also only publish reports about clerics from the United States — mostly Protestant, Evangelical, Southern Baptist, and Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB). While I post stories featuring Catholic priests from time to time, I usually leave such reporting to others. The same could be said of widespread clergy sexual misconduct in Africa. The point I am trying to make here is this: 600 published reports is just the tip of the iceberg. As of today, I am also sitting on over 300 clergy sexual misconduct stories I have not published due to a lack of sufficient evidence or a shortage of time to do so.

The clergy, abetted by psychologically damaged followers, are the most corrupt class of men in society.

Have I ever mentioned that, taking instruction from a 1^st-Century cult, modern Southern Baptists don’t actually approve of marriage? I think so.

Linger on that thought for a while, think about what is being said: Marriage is an instrument for serving the cult; it is not — NOT — about building together the satisfying lives you and your spouse want.

No wonder evangelicals have the highest divorce rate in society.

I say again, then: If pleasing an Invisible Wizard who lives in the sky is the most important thing in your life, then …

• You are a fool …

• Who is committing a fraud against your spouse, and …

• Not actually married at all.

Russell Moore, y’all will be comforted to learn, has the answer: Fools ought to marry only other fools. From advice given to a Christian man who has got his non-Christian girlfriend pregnant, and wonders what he ought to do.

If you were merely dating this woman I would counsel you to immediately end the relationship. But the situation is, of course, more complicated than that.

[ … ]

The question here is not whether you will be yoked unequally with an unbeliever. You are. The question is whether you can or should get out of it.

Well … I don’t know. After all, she doesn’t claim to be godly, and isn’t the one who does claim to be godly, fooled around anyway, and then went looking to Russell Moore for help getting off the hook.

It looks to me as if the question ought to be this: Should she marry this sniveling li’l hypocrite? — and on first impression, the answer is … No. But, then, I am well-known to be extremely wicked.

The media have been a-titter the past few days because of the justly infamous case of the lenient treatment accorded Jeffrey Epstein, the serial billionaire rapist of pubescent girls. The prosecution case was apparently superintended by Alexander Acosta, who is now the Secretary of Labor. Acosta took the podium yesterday to (unconvincingly) defend himself.

I don’t blame anyone for feeling peevish about the kid-glove treatment given Epstein — but pardon me if I’m feeling a bit jaded toward all the huff-and-puff.

Where were the indignant when congregations frankly urged leniency for pastors who admitted raping half the children’s choir — and got it? Where were the indignant when Broadus Crabtree, the confessed murderer of Shelby Rigsbee, was given probation? Where were the indignant when the investigation of the murder of Kathryn Nankervis went cold when she was scarcely buried?

As I wrote about such cases three years ago:

I’m put in mind of the sad story of Shelby Rigsbee, the Durham, North Carolina prostitute whose killer was sentenced to probation. She, like Kathryn Nankervis, was on the outskirts of polite society; her death was scarcely noticed, and not much effort was given to finding justice for her.

The irony is that, though it’s true that violent crime might strike just about anywhere, it most often does strike amongst those for whom there is little public sympathy or concern. The obscure, the out-of-step, those with no knack for fitting-in — they know that: Nobody cares if they leave the party early.

Though it is doubtless true that Epstein’s money helped grease the wheels of justice, it would be misguided to think that was the decisive element. It’s the obscurity of the victims that is critical; nobody cares about nobodies, and so they get eaten with scarcely any public notice.

And the weekend drinking hasn’t even started.

Communiques between the British ambassador to America, and his government back home, make plain that the First Felon is not much admired by, you know, adults:

The British ambassador to the United States described the White House as “uniquely dysfunctional,” told his counterparts back home that President Trump was “inept” and “insecure,” and warned that his administration could collapse in “disgrace.”

In a cache of leaked diplomatic cables dating from 2017 to the present, Sir Kim Darroch worried Trump might be in debt to “dodgy Russians.” He also said that Trump could wreck the world trade system and that his administration might go to war with Iran.

In one cable, the ambassador wrote: “We don’t really believe this Administration is going to become substantially more normal; less dysfunctional; less unpredictable; less faction riven; less diplomatically clumsy and inept.”

The world will not soon forget that the United States elected this corrupt buffoon, and doubtless marvels that our elected representatives have so far failed to do their plain duty to remove him from office. It will be a long while — and probably not within my lifetime, if ever — before America is again trusted.

Meantime, evangelical Christian support for Donald Trump is unflagging.

Last week, Ralph Reed, the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s founder and chairman, told the group, “There has never been anyone who has defended us and who has fought for us, who we have loved more than Donald J. Trump. No one!”

Reed is partially right; for many evangelical Christians, there is no political figure whom they have loved more than Donald Trump.

Ever since Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority w-a-a-a-y back in 1979, evangelicals have been going around quoting Scripture and spouting pieties and wagging their finger under everybody’s nose — and now, with their enthusiasm for Donald Trump, even the most obtuse can see them as they actually are: stupid and malicious. Scarcely a day goes by that I read the headlines without asking myself: Did the evangelicals think that nobody would notice the incandescent hypocrisy of their support for Trump, or were they so captivated and charmed by his squalid conduct that they never even saw it themselves?