Just within the last month, yet more stories have emerged about church personnel exploiting children for sexual purposes. The onetime media director for a California mega-church was caught with a trove of child pornography, including videos of girls in his church to whom he gave computers on which he had installed spyware; the church hired him despite a previous conviction for installing a spycam in the girls’ shower at a Baptist youth camp. The youth pastor at an evangelical Colorado church was sentenced to 13 years after initiating an affair with a 16-year old girl under his care; the church, where his father was head pastor, knew about the affair but failed to report it to police. The elderly minister of a small Baptist church in the Florida keys was sentenced to 6 years after giving sedative-spiked alcohol to a 15-year old girl in his congregation; she woke up to find him also giving her oral sex. A Fundamentalist Baptist pastor in Tennessee who ministered to a Spanish-speaking congregation was sentenced to life without parole after molesting three girls between the ages of 5 and 8. The director of Child Evangelism Fellowship of Vermont, who was also a Baptist deacon, posed online as “princesspantyboy” and was ensnared in an FBI sting after responding to an ad soliciting men to pay for sex with a 9-year old girl and telling his interlocutor that “girls need to be trained as young as possible.” He asked, “How rough would I be allowed to be?” Church may be one of the most dangerous places you can take your kids.
Holy Hypocrites and Baptists
