A Culture of Impunity

The Epstein Scandal in Context, Part 2

There are a whole bunch of these photos.

In Part 1, I began to set the context for the controversy over the Jeffrey Epstein investigation—and Donald Trump’s reluctance to release information about it—by describing how systematic sexual abuse of children is not some outré innovation of decadent secular elites in the big cities but a recurring reality of life in communities where traditional religious views are still dominant, with a constant and steady drumbeat of cases of sexual abuse of minors by priests and pastors.

If there were such a persistent pattern for any other group, there would be a full-blown panic, with op-eds and congressional hearings warning us of the danger and asking what when wrong. But religion has such a historical monopoly on morality that it is considered unseemly to attribute this pattern to religion itself or to any particular denomination or institution.

To be sure, any large group will have such cases. There are hundreds of millions of religious believers in the United States and by the best estimate I could find, a little under half a million members of the clergy. If only a very small percentage of them go wrong, that’s still enough to produce cases of the type we’ve already examined.

What should worry us is not so much the number of these cases, but the way they have been systematically covered up by religious authorities. This, in turn, is a symptom of a broader culture of impunity based on status.

“The Culture of Clergy Impunity”

There is long history of sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church, of course. As you might have been reminded by the recent death of ex-Cardinal McCarrick, the scandal wasn’t just the abuse itself, but the fact that the abusers were often protected by the church hierarchy, which suppressed public reporting of the cases and took little disciplinary action against the perpetrators. Some of them, like McCarrick, rose to the top levels of that hierarchy.

Something similar has happened among American Protestants. The Mormons have had their own versions of this kind of scandal, but the most notorious is the Southern Baptist Convention. Complaints by victims and whistleblowers and an exposé in the press in 2019 pushed the SBC to appoint an independent investigator, which in 2022 produced a damning report.