HARTFORD (CT)
New York Times [New York NY]
January 22, 2025
By Jessica Grose
Daniel Reece attended church every Sunday as a child growing up in Connecticut, and he went to a Roman Catholic middle school. His parents are still deeply observant — his mother goes to Mass every day at noon, and his father is part of the church choir. Reece, who is now 37, still finds the moral values he learned through Catholicism to be profound. He feels, he explained to me, a sense of “awe of the sheer perfection that God has achieved with this planet.”
Yet he no longer attends church, and he did not have his daughter, who is now 4, baptized.
That’s because he finds the behavior of the Catholic Church, as an institution, to go against its own teachings. “The contradiction of the Catholic Church’s actions and scandals and obsession and reliance on wealth is something that simply confuses me,” he said. He felt dishonest practicing Catholicism when the institution couldn’t live out the values he was taught as a child. He was particularly appalled by the behavior of the church around the sexual abuse of children. “It really betrayed my trust just because it’s not just the scandals themselves, but the efforts to cover them up or to not be transparent about them.”
While the Catholic Church’s sex abuse scandals have been widely publicized, other major denominations have had sex abuse scandals of their own. In 2019, The Houston Chronicle published a blockbuster investigation of the Southern Baptist Convention, finding that 263 church officials and volunteers had been convicted of sex abuse crimes over the preceding 20 years in 30 states and the District of Columbia. And just last week, The Washington Post published another heartbreaker, about an Episcopal Church youth minister named Jeff Taylor who was accused of sexual abuse by children over many years and was not held accountable by several of the organizations that employed him.
“Ultimately, throughout three decades, Taylor ministered at multiple churches — two of them high-profile — despite many of those organizations either questioning his honesty, investigating him for possible rules violations or learning that Taylor had been accused of sex abuse, ” The Post’s Ian Shapira wrote.
There’s a dispiriting uniformity to how violations by clergy play out. (And it’s dispiriting to see how Shapira’s excellent reporting barely broke through the social media noise. These scandals are no longer shocking; they’re expected.) Often, church or temple leaders learn about accusations, and instead of dealing with them, they try to make the problem disappear by moving the perpetrator to another location. Upholding the public image of the institution is more important than protecting the vulnerable or seeking justice for them.
It’s bad enough when secular institutions do this. But religious institutions are supposed to provide a moral example, even when it’s not easy. When spiritual authorities ignore their values and their responsibility to the parents and children who trusted them, it’s crushing.
As a secular, mildly observant Jew, I don’t feel strongly about whether other Americans attend religious services or believe in God. But I do care about the pervasive — and honestly, warranted — cynicism that young people have about religious institutions, because I think it is contributing to a more disconnected, careless and cruel society.
In October 2023, Harvard’s Making Caring Common Project published a report about youth mental health problems that found that “nearly three in five young adults (58 percent) reported that they lacked ‘meaning or purpose’ in their lives in the previous month. Half of young adults reported that their mental health was negatively influenced by ‘not knowing what to do with my life.’” However, they found that young adults who belonged to any religion were more likely to report having meaning and purpose.
Religious institutions are certainly not the only potential avenue for meaning, purpose and value in society. But we can’t underestimate the power of their reach, even in an increasingly secular world. When they have epic moral failures, it affects all of us, because it makes everyone more suspicious of potentially welcoming communities. Religious organizations are one of the few kinds of groups left in America that are free to join and have few barriers to entry. Faith groups are among vanishingly few organizations that are meant for people of all ages, where the entire family can ideally feel welcome. I wish there were more secular communities that offered the same kind of support across life spans that religious groups provide, but at least for now, there are few nonreligious alternatives.
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As Steven Tipton, a professor emeritus at Emory’s Candler School of Theology, points out in his new book, “In and Out of Church: The Moral Arc of Spiritual Change in America,” millions of Americans who say they have no religion in particular are actually “liminal” in that they may leave religious communities “only for a season.” It would help bring these liminals back if religious communities pursued “a truer, wider path toward the common good.”
Ryan Burge, an associate professor at Eastern Illinois University and the author of the newsletter Graphs About Religion, looked at the decline in trust around religion in the United States and found that “in the most recent data, about 15 percent of folks expressed a great deal of confidence in religion, while the share who had hardly any trust has risen from 15 percent in 1972 to 35 percent today.”
Burge found that trust in religion hasn’t just declined among Gen Z-ers and millennials, who tend to be less religious than older Americans — trust has declined among every age group, even among religious people, especially Catholics. “There’s a striking reality when looking at Catholics in the sample: They are the only group that currently is more likely to say that they have ‘hardly any’ trust in organized religion than to say that they have a ‘great deal’ of trust,” Burge notes.
I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that the well-documented sex abuse scandals and cover-ups in the Catholic Church have greatly contributed to that declining trust. I asked Tipton how religious institutions can restore confidence when their flocks obviously feel such a deep sense of spiritual betrayal.
He said openness is the first step — not just about accusations of abuse, but also about money and power. “Make your budget transparent,” he said. “More to the point, if you have sinned, confess, or at least apologize. And in every great religious tradition, Judaic, Christian, Buddhist, Islamist, there are forms of confession that are public. And we can say: Be transparent and accept and claim responsibility.”
That would be a good start. Most Americans, Tipton told me, still have “a kind of yearning and desire and a good one, a true one, to be a moral community.” Religious institutions need to hold up their end of the bargain.