Clerical sexual abuse of adults is commonplace

Clerical sexual abuse of adult parishioners is widespread.

Baylor University's School of Social Work found in a nationwide, cross-denominational study to be published later this year "that 3.1 percent of adult women who attend religious services at least once a month have been the victims of clergy sexual misconduct since turning 18."

Christa Brown says the number is understated:

The study doesn’t reflect the women who were sexually abused by a religious leader and who completely stopped going to church. Nor does it reflect the women who were sexually abused by a religious leader and who now go to church only sporadically.

Case studies on Baylor's Clergy Sexual Misconduct site bear searing testament to the harm done by clerical abuse, but it is Ms. Brown's documentation of the case of Southern Baptist pastor Daryl Gilyard that is most compelling. Her account demonstrates how, with the complicity of denominational leaders, a predatory clerical career can roll across decades, harming scores of trusting church members.

• It begins more than two decades ago in Texas with the unsuccessful efforts by adult victims to provoke action by then Criswell College president Paige Patterson.
• With Patterson's support, Gilyard served at churches in Texas and Oklahoma.
• After losing Patterson's support in 1991, "Gilyard moved to Florida," where former Southern Baptist Convention president Jerry Vines “agreed to forgive” Gilyard. Gilyard served for 14 years as pastor of Jacksonville's Shiloh Metropolitan Baptist Church, until a complaint was filed with the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office on Nov. 29, 2007 and he began a voluntary paid leave of absence.
• During his career, Gilyard resigned from five different churches over charges of sexual misconduct, in the process accumulating a baffling record of serial sexual abuse with 44 publicly-reported victims, and provoking Tiffany Thigpen Croft's blog devoted the ending his trail of tears.
• On May 21, wrote Bob Allen of the Associated Baptist Press, Gilyard "pled guilty to molesting 15-year-old girl and sending lewd text messages to another at his former church."
• On June 11, 2009, Gilyard began a three-year prison sentence.

This disturbing vignette has no hopeful conclusion.

Why predatory clergy flourish

Sexually abusive pastor profile and technique

Key leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest U.S. non-Catholic denomination, not only failed to stop a predator who began his career in a Texas, one of two states whose law explicitly forbids pastor sexual victimization of parishioners, but they also played an enabling role.

SBC leaders fostered, defended and continue to nurture conditions which resemble those identified by Diana R. Garland and Christen Argueta of the Baylor School of Social Work [.pdf] as creating conditions which permit clerical predators to flourish.

1. Lack of personal or community response to a situations which normally calls for action. This was evident from the beginning. Even though pushed by subordinates, as dean of Criswell College, Patterson failed to respond appropriately to serious complaints. That was a failure of community response.
2. A culture of "niceness" which requires participants to overlook socially inappropriate behavior of others rather than risk embarrassing, angering, or hurting them. In this case, Patterson's protectiveness toward Gilyard and Vines' forgiveness may be seen as misguided "niceness."
3. Lack of accountability by the offending religious leaders for where and how they spent their time. SBC organizational structure makes this the responsibility of the local church, and that as a result typically leaves it in the hands of the pastor. Who is then effectively unsupervised and knows from observing others that if he is adroit enough, he can be pushed out of one church but still find employment at another.
4. Overlapping clerical roles of counselor and religious leader. Such overlap is both commonplace, and recognized as likely to result in abuse, in part because it places too much power in one set of hands.
5. Trust in the safe sanctuary the church congregation and its leaders are expected to create. An attractive quality of church life, but given the preceding circumstances, one which makes it easier for predators to manipulate their victims.

The resulting harm to the victims, almost inevitably acute.

Garland and Argueta write [.pdf]:

Reports based on case studies and on clinical intervention with the offended suggest that the results for the offended include self-blame; shame; loss of community and friends if forced to relocate either to escape the community’s judgment or to escape an angry offender who has been discovered or reported; spiritual crisis and loss of faith; family crisis and divorce; psychological distress, including depression and post-traumatic stress disorder; physiological illness; and failed or successful suicide attempts.

Concern in the SBC about those effects is still too weak to support effective, denomination-wide action against predatory clergy. Instead the SBC takes refuge in the argument that each church is autonomous in these matters, although that is plainly not the case for churches which welcome homosexual Christians into fellowship or which call woman pastors.