fett on 13/4/2009 at 14:06

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Since there's not been a fight about religion in roughly four hours here on ttlg, I've come up with a new discussion topic. fett on the case, boys and girls.

I've been watching (http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hFkAcbDiaWNAlvTeLoNfmALikD3gD97HJAEO1) this story with interest. It involves the murder of a five year old girl by her Sunday School teacher (allegedly, as she's only being held on suspicion right now), who also happens to be the granddaughter of the pastor of the church where both the child and teacher/granddaughter attended.

First, I'd like to say that I will resist turning this into yet another "religions attracts crazy people argument" partly because my evidence is mostly anecdotal, and partly because it would be preaching to the choir (no pun intended).

The MAIN POINT the interests me is this little tidbit buried at the bottom of the page, and it's implications:



This has prompted lengthy conversations between my wife and I who, as some of you know, have become atheists in recent years after spending our entire married life (of 17 years) in full time ministry, both in the music industry, the mission field, as well as pastoring a church near Little Rock, Arkansas (but that's a story for another time...).

Now: In this situation, the grandfather/pastor did the normal, scriptural, expected thing by "extending grace" to a granddaughter who was being seen by a mental health professional. Granted, it was for shoplifting, but obviously there was more going on than theft if authorities felt she needed mental health probation. It's fine that churches are a place for the downtrodden to go and be accepted and try to get their life back together (I would argue that it rarely works, but I digress...). But a problem arises when the church authorities, the pastor in this case, puts a person with a history of violence, crime, or mental instability into direct relationship with children or teenagers.

I had many, many, MANY people come through the doors of our church that were ex-this/that/whatever who left angry because I would not let them teach the kids, help with teen events, etc. If I knew their past was dicey, I just didn't take the chance. That may sound harsh, but to me, the risk was simply not worth it, plus, there were a million other ways they could have helped if they wanted to get involved.

Here's what I want some of you to understand if you're not familiar with church culture:

1) When you take your kid to school, the teachers and administration have undergone extensive background checks, both at the time of their licensure, and when they are hired. At my son's current school, this is also true of the janitors, cafeteria workers, etc. Now, by state law, every visitor who enters the school must have a driver's license scan at the check in desk that runs against the federal offenders database. It's not foolproof, but I'm relatively confident of my child's security.

2) When you take your child to church, there is no federal or state law requiring those who work with children to undergo any type of background check. None. If a church is sued because someone fiddled with a kid, the church must show that they at least did random checks, but that is only after the fact. Most small to mid-sized churches have no system in place to check backgrounds.

Here's the crux of the issue--churches, by definition, are places that are open to anyone, but they are especially attractive to the downtrodden, those who are looking for purpose in life, and in many cases, those who have screwed their lives up though drug abuse, crime, etc. Whereas most groups naturally hold deviants at arms length, at least for a time, churches welcome them with open arms. They are given jobs or roles within the church to help them recover, get back on their feet, or make them feel useful. If you polled a thousand churches and asked them where they needed the most help, guess what the answer would be? You guessed it - children's ministry. There is a running joke among pastors that we're all in need of "warm bodies" to watch the kids while we brainwash teach the adults. Even in cases unlike mine where the church isn't filled with ex-prostitutes/murderers/alcoholics/Nick Cave fans, they are so desperate for people to watch kids, security and background checks are the last thing on the pastor's mind.

So, why was a woman who was seeing a mental health professional teaching a Sunday School class? Many reasons: She is forgiven for her crimes. God is changing her. She won't heal until she's participating in the ministry. We must extend the same grace to her that God extends to us. We must see her as Christ sees her, not as the world sees her. To be fair, I'll also mention again that she's the pastor's granddaughter, though this story would likely be the same if she wasn't.

At the end of the day, a little girls has been murdered by her Sunday School teacher because God's grace trumps mental health professionals, psychology, and any instability this woman may have shown in her past. The pastor will not be held accountable for placing these kids in danger, though if a therapist knew she was homicidal, they could be charged with failure to notify. Why aren't pastors held accountable by law in the same way therapists and school administrators are?

You would be shocked and dismayed to learn how many people with histories of abuse, assault, or mental health problems are watching kids on Sunday mornings. "I have come to heal the sick," Jesus said. "The healthy have no need of a physician." Fine. Just don't try to heal them by locking them in a room full of screaming five year olds for two hours. That would cause a mentally stable person to crack.

fett on 13/4/2009 at 14:58

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No, that's all that was wrong with her. What I'm getting at (and communicating terribly - my apologies) is that "mental health" problems could mean anything. It's unlikely that the court ordered her to mental therapy simply for shoplifting. Because of confidentiality, neither the therapist nor the pastor can divulge the implications of that. Maybe this is nothing to raise anyone's eyebrows. But the case itself brings out the contrast between the accountability and safety we seek for children in school and daycare situations (though the latter is questionable IMO), and the assumptions people make about children's ministers and Sunday School teachers. Shouldn't there be legal ramifications for churches just as there are for other institutions that care for kids? Hell, even our local gym does background checks on its childcare workers.

The other thing I'm getting at is that the public teaching profession attracts people whose main purpose for working with kids is to teach them. In a church setting many people who "teach" the children are not there for that sole purpose - there are a variety of reasons people attend church. While the many do so for purely social/spiritual/benign reasons, there are a multitude of churches that reach out to the misfits and fringe members of society (as mine did, specifically), yet have no qualms about putting these people in authority over children. I'm not saying they shouldn't reach out to those people, but it creates a dangerous situation for kids IMO. Maybe this hits closer to home for me because my church was filled with this demographic. We felt that because of their backgrounds we had to be especially careful re: their authority over children. For example, if someone had a history of abuse or crime of any kind, we purposely avoided placing them in situations where kids were encouraged to trust them. By contrast, many churches purposely give these types of people responsibility to encourage them and make them feel a part of the whole. Children's ministry is the default landing strip in that situation.

fett on 13/4/2009 at 15:23

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You have to keep an eye on those fuckers.

demagogue on 13/4/2009 at 17:52

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Not sure what kind of discussion you'd like.

I'll take a big picture route.
The kind of way I think is that major institutions ... religions, civic groups, politics, law, and within different cultures ... all come around to deal with major humanist issues in their own terms, and all have their own hooks for them to hang that people will respect (whether or not they recognize they are actually the same "hook" in different forms, which they are IMO). That is, there is always pressure to get the hooks in, in one way or another, and ideologies not only eventually cater to them, but they even meld together.

So when we're trying to get e.g., South or Southeast Asian cultures to respect human rights, it's very effective to couch them in terms internal to their culture, and getting locals to be activists using their own language and latching them on to very deeply rooted ideas, not just "black letter" Hinduism or Confucanism, but as they really developed in that culture. That is, you want people inside the culture to be selling humanist ideas, not outsiders. I don't mean Hindi or Confucian monks, just normal people that have that cultural background and understand how it "lives" in the real world.

Then you often get this knee-jerk western response, "But human rights is a Western idea. We really need to get American/European advisers in there telling them how to do it, because they can't do it alone and won't be effective; they don't even have the vocabulary for it. But then alas we don't want to push our culture on them because we're still liberals, what a crisis." And this is all bull-shit because actually, if you looked, they do have indigenous narratives of human rights and should be mobilized to use them.

Aaanyway, after working on these kinds of issues, it got me thinking back internally about things like Christianity. As a mature, developed religion, it actually has a lot of humanist thinking deeply embedded in it and has a lot of these hooks, even from early on, but especially as its developed through history.

And when I hear stories like what fett is talking about, one of my first thoughts is, it's not just that they aren't literate about humanist thinking ... They aren't literate even about Christianity as a social, historical "living" entity itself.
There is a whole strain ... well a story will get to that:

I got into this when my mother felt pressured to a strict form of discipleship and celebacy (even marital) in her church, when she likes to enjoy herself but still wants to be a good person. And I'll tell her, the preacher is being much too restrictive than what biblical Christianity allows. There's this whole strain that the Church has different parts, people with different talents, and people need to find their niche and, just as importantly, stay away from the niche that's not right for them. This is such a critical hook! So many churches take it casually, especially in the "warm body" situations fett mentioned that are familiar to me... "well you seem to like teaching, so go for it." They seem to be inverting it actually! To them it's about matching people & jobs so the gears turn (a little selfish perspective), when as the hook actually developed it should be about serious soul-searching and putting a person where they honestly belong, not where you want them to belong. And by "honestly", I mean really, tear down the blinders and look without prejudice, where does this person belong.

When I did a little study of it, I learned that this hook has a pretty deep edge ... It was actually developed exactly in the early celebacy debates that was polarizing early Christianity, and Paul was very pragmatic ... it's funny, like at first Paul/the movement wants to say celebacy and extreme discipleship are the only proper form of Christianity, then he moderates says well it's a preferred form but you don't have to live like that, then at points moderates even more and says there are many parts all equal to each other. And you can literally see the pressures behind pushing that position. He's realizing that there are some Christians whose talents just aren't being celebate, but there are still ways they can participate in the church. And the issue of grace paints him into a corner that he can't say some Chistians are "more equal" than others (esp when we're talking about the married parishoners with the good jobs supporting us unemployed aesthetic types). It's not just celebacy, but he comes to this realization that there are a lot of ways of life out there in the complicated world, and to say there's a preferred one way to develop/reform a Christian isn't just counter-productive ... it's dangerous, and when you add the being "honest, soul-searching" part, it's even anti-Christian. That's a pill these guys really need to swallow.

What we see these days is Christains looking at the black letter of a doctrine, but not looking at the real-world experience that carefully crafted it. There's another strain that Christians really should think of themselvse as still along side the guys in Acts, as apostles in a living and developing relationship with the theology ... not just coldly, legalistically reciting the words. When Paul came to that understanding about "one Church, many parts", if a Christian is serious about building a church, they need to go through that struggle with him and take it seriously as a time to do the right thing in that situation.

That's all a long detour, I know... But it comes right to this sort of issue. Here's a dangerous person. There's all this humanist literature about keeping dangerous people away from kids or vulnerable people, even if you want to get them into a reform mode (this sort of problem comes up in criminal/penitentiary policy contexts too; not just a Christian problem btw). But my point here is that these ideas also have an indigenous place in Christian thinking if you'd look, where it's not only non-threatening, but in fact it'd be anti-Christain not to respect it. Forcing people into niches in the church where they manifestly don't belong isn't just a social problem (which is enough), but for those that care about it, it's also a big problem for what the Church is supposed to be. People should realize that just from being good humans! But if you look the hook is there so that even the most obtuse, dogmatic religioid nut should see the case, so you can at least quiet him down while you do the right thing.

Edit: This actually isn't a Christian post. I guess I've just become so accustomed to the whole cosmopolitan thing that I can swing in and out of narratives and take the ideas as they were meant to be taken and see how things connect and can be the same thing in different forms. There's an important point there actually, but that's for another post.

Beleg Cúthalion on 13/4/2009 at 18:37

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Demagogue's post reminds me of a German proverb (I haven't found an English version just now, so if you can tell me...) saying: Tradition is not about worshipping ashes but about passing on the fire (or matches, if you like).

Just my two cents before I start something like ranting about Creationists, Evangelicals or Dawkins et al.. :p