Decades of documented sexual abuse by clergy, covered up by bishops and denominational leadership across Catholic and Protestant institutions alike, show that the church cannot be trusted and its moral authority is a sham.

Why people find it persuasive

The scale is undeniable: the 2004 John Jay Report documented over 10,000 credible abuse allegations against Catholic clergy in the US alone between 1950 and 2002, the 2018 Pennsylvania grand jury report detailed over a thousand victims across six dioceses, and the 2019-2022 Southern Baptist Convention investigation documented widespread abuse and cover-up in America's largest Protestant denomination.

Important distinctions

• • Individual predatory clergy vs. institutional cover-up and enablement by leadership.
• • The moral failure of specific persons and institutions vs. the truth-value of Christian doctrine.
• • Abuse rates and institutional response in religious contexts vs. base rates and institutional response in comparable non-religious institutions (schools, sports organizations, secular youth institutions).
• • Historic institutional failure vs. the current state of safeguarding reform.

Christian response

• • This should not be minimized or relativized away: the documented scale of abuse and, especially, of knowing institutional cover-up — bishops reassigning known abusers to new parishes, as extensively documented in Boston (exposed by the Boston Globe's 2002 Spotlight investigation) and elsewhere — represents a grave moral and institutional failure that caused immense, lasting harm to victims, full stop.
• • The logical relationship between this fact and Christianity's truth-claims needs to be stated carefully: that church leaders sinned gravely, including by covering up sin, does not bear on whether Jesus rose from the dead any more than a scientist's fraud bears on whether the laws of thermodynamics are true — the objection is a powerful indictment of specific institutions and persons, and a non sequitur against the truth of the underlying claims.
• • Comparative data matters without excusing anything: multiple studies (including a 2019 analysis reported by the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse) found that religious institutions do not have categorically higher abuse rates than comparable youth-serving secular institutions, including public schools and sports organizations, though the comparison in no way diminishes the specific severity of church cover-up patterns given the moral authority churches claim.
• • Substantial institutional reform has followed, however belatedly and unevenly: the US Catholic bishops' 2002 Dallas Charter established mandatory reporting and 'zero tolerance' policies; the Southern Baptist Convention created a dedicated abuse reporting hotline and database after its 2022 investigation; these reforms are themselves evidence that, once exposed, the institutions were forced by internal and external pressure, including from faithful Christians demanding accountability, to change.
• • Jesus' own words apply with particular force against exactly this kind of institutional betrayal: 'whoever causes one of these little ones... to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened round his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea' (Matthew 18:6) — the strongest scriptural condemnation of child abuse available comes from within the tradition's own founding text, not from outside critics discovering something the tradition had missed.

Christian counterresponse

That structural critique is largely accepted by serious contemporary Catholic and Protestant reform voices themselves (including some cardinals and the John Jay researchers), who argue clericalism and unaccountable hierarchy, not Christian doctrine as such, enabled the cover-up pattern — which is a claim about ecclesiology and institutional design needing urgent reform, not a claim that the resurrection did not happen or that Jesus' teaching commends any of this.