Marty’s photo of the day #4608: A few years ago I publicly asserted that over 1 million children have been sexually molested in Christian churches. While I doubt I’m the first to make that claim, two things have surprised me: The first is that I haven’t seen the media ever make such a claim. The second is that no one has ever challenged my numbers.
Coming up with more than 1 million Christian church-based child sexual molestations was easy. All one need do is start with the 330 thousand children sexually abused in France (based on a 2,500 page document provided by the Catholic Church in France) and extrapolate from there.
Over the years, countless news stories and documents have been published covering child sexual molestation by Catholics, Baptists, Evangelicals, and just about every other denomination. The most recent story in the national news is about the Mormon Church attempting to keep their child sexual abuse problem secret. Combine just what we know, and 1 million child sexual molestations isn’t a difficult number to come up with, but with so many denominations keeping their problems hush-hush, the actual number is likely substantially greater.
Yet, if you have a big extended family Christmas dinner and bring up the problem of child sexual abuse, you’ll likely find more people knowing about Jeffrey Epstein or the fake Democratic “pizzagate” pizza parlor!
So despite large numbers of stories from the Associated Press, NPR, and other reputable news sources about child sexual abuse in Christian churches, all of those stories have short lifespans. The reason, of course, is that no politician wants to touch the issue for fear of losing Christian votes. And since politicians ignore the problem, there’s little to keep such stories recirculating in the media.
Therefore, parents continue to leave their children unsupervised at church functions, and churches that get caught can largely avoid the consequences of their crimes by declaring bankruptcy.
Frankly, I can’t think of any other organization that could have such a horrific child sexual abuse record and be allowed to survive.
I shot today’s photo at a Catholic Church in Plasencia, Spain.