The great ghetto of Baptist-land

Imagine a country with 16 million people -- a country the size of Chile or the Netherlands. Marauders roam among the population, raping the young and vulnerable… and no one stops them.

Worst of all, the marauders carry the government’s seal of approval. They wear badges. No one can tell they’re marauders. In fact, they look like trusted government officials. So, their victims are much more easily lured.

Despite ample resources and an annual budget of $200 million, the country’s highest leaders refuse to do anything about the marauders.

That’s what’s happening in Baptist-land.

With 101,000 ministers and 43,000 churches, Southern Baptists are the largest Protestant denomination. They're like a whole country.

But unlike other major faith groups, Southern Baptists have no system of oversight for their clergy.

So, when someone says, “That minister molested me when I was a kid,” no one pays attention. There's no system for anyone to do anything. The leaders turn their backs. No one will even bother to look into it or to see whether the accusation can be substantiated. In fact, if they do anything at all, it’s far more likely that they’ll stone the person who says it rather than assessing whether it might be true.

And with a porous network of 43,000 churches, it’s easy for accused ministers to simply roam from church to church, finding new prey at every stop.

There isn’t even any system of record-keeping on accused ministers in Baptist-land. No one can tell you which ones have been accused and which ones haven’t. And no one can tell you how many accusations a minister has had.

If the landscape gets too hot, the marauders just move on... from church to church and state to state.

A system without oversight asks for abuse. And a system with no consequences fosters even more abuse. That’s what happens in Baptist-land. The marauders are simply left at large to find more victims.

A knowledgeable expert estimates that about 3 percent of those 101,000 ministers are pedophiles. It’s a conservative estimate. Some would place the number higher, at 4 to 6 percent.

But even if the marauding pedophiles in Baptist-land are only 3 percent, it would still mean that 3,030 of those 101,000 ministers are pedophiles.

Most people who sexually abuse kids have multiple victims, often dozens. But again, let’s calculate this on the conservative side. Even if you count only the currently active 3,030 Southern Baptist pedophile ministers, and even if you only count 3 victims for each of them, that’s still 9,090 kids who will be molested and raped by Baptist ministers.

In Baptist-land, the leaders don’t seem to think those kids are worth protecting.

And what about all the countless thousands of more abuse victims who were molested and raped by Baptist clergy in the past?

If we all stood in one place, we would fill a great ghetto. Would the high-n-mighty Baptist-land leaders see us then? Or would they simply build a fence around us and hide us?