Decades of documented sexual abuse cover-ups across Catholic dioceses, evangelical institutions, and other denominations — protecting predators, silencing victims, prioritizing institutional reputation over child safety — show that Christianity as a lived institution is morally bankrupt, which is strong evidence it isn't the vehicle of a good God at all.

Why people find it persuasive

This isn't a hypothetical philosophical puzzle about abstract evil; it's a well-documented, repeated, systemic pattern of institutional betrayal by people who claimed special moral and spiritual authority, protecting abusers instead of children, across multiple denominations and countries — if this is what God's church actually produces at scale, that is strong direct evidence against its divine origin or backing.

Important distinctions

• • Christianity as a set of truth claims about God, Jesus, and salvation vs. the moral track record of institutions and individuals claiming to represent it.
• • Individual sin/hypocrisy (predicted by Christian doctrine itself) vs. systemic institutional cover-up (a distinct, additional moral failure).
• • Abuse rates and patterns unique to religious institutions vs. comparable patterns found across many types of powerful institutions (schools, sports organizations, secular NGOs, other religions).
• • The scandal as evidence against the truth of Christian claims vs. as evidence about human sinfulness even among the professedly faithful, which Christian doctrine explicitly predicts.

Christian response

• • Christian theology does not predict, and in fact directly contradicts, the idea that institutional religious authority guarantees moral perfection — the doctrine of total depravity/original sin explicitly teaches that all people, including clergy and church leaders, remain deeply capable of serious sin and self-deception, and the New Testament itself repeatedly warns of wolves within the fold, false teachers, and the corrupting effect of power even among the apostles' own circle (Judas among the twelve, Peter's public hypocrisy rebuked by Paul in Galatians 2, Ananias and Sapphira's deceit within the first church) — abuse and cover-up by professing Christians is a devastating moral failure and a real betrayal, but it does not constitute a violation of some Christian prediction that faith reliably produces sinless institutions; the doctrine anticipated exactly this kind of moral failure as a permanent feature of a fallen world, even within the church.
• • It is nonetheless a real and additional moral failure — institutional cover-up specifically (not mere individual sin, but leaders knowingly protecting predators, moving them to new parishes, silencing and disbelieving victims, prioritizing reputation and donor relationships over child safety) is a grave institutional betrayal that deserves the strongest condemnation, full legal accountability, truth-telling, and structural reform, and Christians should not minimize it or rush to theological explanation before reckoning honestly with the specific, serious institutional and personal accountability failures involved, including at the highest levels of church hierarchy.
• • As evidence against the truth of Christian claims specifically, however, the abuse scandals are more directly evidence about human sinfulness (including sinfulness that persists inside religious institutions) than about whether God exists or whether Jesus rose from the dead — the truth of the resurrection or the moral teaching of the Sermon on the Mount does not depend on the moral performance of every subsequent institution claiming affiliation with it, any more than the truth of a scientific theory depends on whether some scientists committed research fraud, or the validity of civil rights principles depends on the personal failings of activists who championed them.
• • Comparable, sometimes worse, patterns of institutional abuse and cover-up have been extensively documented in secular contexts with no claim to divine backing (USA Gymnastics/Larry Nassar, the BBC/Jimmy Savile, elite boarding schools, youth sports organizations, secular humanitarian NGOs like Oxfam) — this doesn't excuse the church's failures at all, but it does show the underlying dynamic (institutional power, hierarchical deference, reputational self-protection, access to vulnerable children) is a generic feature of powerful human institutions as such, not something specifically generated or uniquely enabled by Christian doctrine, which suggests the relevant causal factor is concentrated unaccountable institutional power rather than the truth or falsity of the underlying belief system.
• • It's also worth noting that most of the public reckoning, investigative journalism, and demand for accountability regarding these scandals has come from within Christian communities themselves — survivors, journalists, and reform advocates operating explicitly out of Christian moral conviction that abuse is a profound betrayal of Christ's own teaching about care for 'the little ones' (Matthew 18:6's uncompromising warning about those who cause children to stumble) — the moral standard being used to condemn the church's failures is itself substantially a Christian one, which is a strange output for a worldview supposedly shown bankrupt by the scandal.

Christian counterresponse

This is a legitimate and serious challenge that should not be answered too quickly; a fair response distinguishes between the claim that the church's teaching authority makes it doctrinally infallible in faith and morals (a specific claim some traditions make about formal doctrinal pronouncements) and the very different claim that its human leadership and administrative culture are thereby protected from serious, sustained corruption — the latter has never been a mainstream Christian doctrinal claim, and the scandals are best read as a severe indictment of specific human leaders, cultures of clericalism, and inadequate accountability structures that professing Christian institutions built and failed to fix, which calls for structural reform and full accountability, not as evidence bearing directly on whether God exists or Jesus rose from the dead.