Sex Offenders and Church

The grizzled veteran of a career spent with the FBI as a profiler paused before repeating an observation I was to hear consistently in my early training and preparation for forensic work: "The profile of the typical sex offender is that he is male, white, educated, and religious." Over the years, I heard other presenters repeat the same observation. But what I didn't learn until much later was why so many sex offenders had extensive church backgrounds.

Over the years the "why" seemed to explain itself, at least on a superficial level. "White ... educated .. .religious?" I thought, "Well, that's pretty much America, isn't it?" The answer then, as now, was a simple "No." Back then we may have been a whole lot whiter as a country than we are today, but we weren't mostly in possession of college degrees and we weren't mostly religious unless one took the latter in the most generous possible sense.

Then it occurred to me that the former profiler's description lined up nicely with an observation made in the last installment of this series: Sex crimes may have a diverse number of criminogenic origins, but they can all be characterized as rather spectacular failures to manage sexuality intelligently. Being born to white parents was, apparently, no help. Possession of a diploma from the local university was equally unhelpful. But the thought of churches having anything to do with sexual criminality was downright disturbing to me: One has no choice as to ethnicity and, it can be argued successfully, education is essential to a reasonable life in modern civilization. But religion? Church attendance is mostly, to use a medical term, an elective procedure. We elect (or not) to go to church. And the one claim that it would be a good idea to attend church or embrace any religion really is that it will make my life better, and make my children's lives better. But maybe that's not true.

The idea is that religion will sort things out: We'll no longer be confused about right and wrong, we'll understand how we should live, we'll be surrounded by good examples, and on and on. What could possibly go wrong?

Apparently, quite a lot. We all read the news and it seems that nearly daily there's a new and horrifying story about a Catholic priest who's sexually assaulted a child. But this impression that sex crimes are all about Catholic priests (and their vows of celibacy) is a myth. The rate of sexual abuse in churches by clergy is about the same from Catholics to Protestants, from synagogues to mosques, and from Mormons to Jehovah's Witnesses and everyone else. One day it's a youth pastor who got caught in a sexual relationship with an underage teen, the next day it's the rabbi, the day after that it could be anyone from any religion. If the religion isn't working for those most involved in it, how's it supposed to work for the rest of us?

It appears to be the case that being religious, along with being male, white, and educated, adds to rather than subtracts from the risk of sexual criminality. To try to understand this better I took surveys of hundreds of sex offenders in treatment following their adjudication and, nearly as often, their incarceration. Here's what I found: Among those men convicted of sex crimes, only 15% had never attended church in their youth. The majority (56%) attended church services weekly or even more often when they were children. What might this mean? We probably don't want to say that mere attendance of church as a youth causes sexual criminality. But it seems to be the case that taking our children to church offers them no protection against a future of potential sexual criminality. How can this be?

You decide: What is more difficult, to intelligently manage a part of me that I'm aware of or a part of me that I deny exists? Most of us would say it's far more difficult to manage that which we cannot see, that which we deny exists, or even that which we don't even know might exist. What might exist, what does exist, and what we need to see is that we are sexual beings. What we need to learn is how we are to go about managing that sexuality, intelligently. To do that job intelligently we would have to actually integrate our sexuality with our spirituality. Churches don't do this. No religion does.

Source: Steven Ing

Religion generally teaches about the rules: Thou shalt not do this, that, and especially the other. It's not a libel to simply observe that religion, as it's currently practiced in the U.S., offers no insight into human sexual needs, much less how to manage them intelligently. Remember that terribly vulgar saying about some very rigid religious folks of whom it was said, "He wouldn't say s**t if he had a mouth full of it?" That's pretty much what's happened as a result of the way religion has taught people about managing their sexuality.

It looks something like this: For those of us not quite ready to throw in the towel on religion, there remains pioneering work to be done. People need help and, in church, they are looking for answers that work. We can do better than we have done. I've created a true-crime podcast called Sex Crime Central to help us understand how human judgment becomes so impaired that, on any given day, committing a sex crime seems to make sense to some people, and in my experience, a majority of those people have been religious their entire lives. Their crimes were preventable. We can teach one another (and our kids) how to integrate sexuality and spirituality so that we become able to manage sexuality intelligently.