Public disgust over the scourge of sexual assault in religious institutions has focused on the Roman Catholic Church, and not without reason. But sexual impropriety has infected other religious groups as well, including those associated with evangelicalism, even though these offenses have attracted less attention.

The scandal of priestly pedophilia has reached every level of the Roman Catholic Church, from the parish to the Vatican. The victims themselves suffered the most tragic losses, of course — losses of hope, innocence and (all too often) faith itself. The toll in credibility for the institution has been incalculable, especially because the Vatican insisted that it could handle the matter internally and then failed spectacularly to do so. The pedophilia scandal extended into the highest levels of church hierarchy in the United States, notably Bernard Law and Theodore McCarrick, both of whom had held the titles of archbishop and cardinal.

The financial costs have yet to be tallied, but they will reach into millions, perhaps billions, of dollars. In New Mexico, for example, the Archdiocese of Santa Fe has been selling off property for several years now in an effort to satisfy the claims of approximately four hundred victims of abuse.

Protestantism is by no means immune, although to the extent that generalizations are useful in sorry cases like this, the abuse tends more often to be directed against women and less toward children. Misogyny, as in the case of Mark Driscoll and Mars Hill Church in Seattle, frequently figures into these abuses, a reflection of evangelical cherry-picking of the scriptures to conclude that women are subordinate to men.

Conservative evangelicals are fond of quoting the Bible about women being subject to their husbands, but they gloss over St. Paul’s declaration of equality — that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female. And they ignore Jesus’ compassion toward women; nowhere in the New Testament does Jesus condescend to women or treat them as inferior.

Even so, there is no excuse for some of the behavior reported in recent years. Bill Gothard, one of the evangelicals who spent his entire career preaching that women occupied a lower place in the biblical “chain of command,” was forced to step down as head of the Institute of Basic Life Principles in 2014 because he had acted in an “inappropriate manner” toward female employees and volunteers.

The recent resignation of Brian Houston, founder and global senior pastor of Hillsong, an international megachurch, was due to sexual impropriety. A pastor of the Hillsong congregation in Dallas congregation resigned earlier because he was accused of rape, and a former Hillsong congregant insisted that the church had ignored her allegations of sexual assault.

For years, leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention failed to take seriously allegations of sexual misconduct on the part of pastors and lay leaders, dating to 1998. Bill Hybels, founder of Willow Creek Community Church, resigned ahead of his planned retirement in 2018 after allegations of sexual misconduct, first made public in the Chicago Tribune, were leveled against him, allegations later found to be credible. A mutual friend told me recently that Hybels has all but disappeared.

A report about the Willow Creek situation released in 2019 found that church board members were “unable to provide effective oversight” to keep Hybels accountable. That analysis gets at the heart of the problem, especially for evangelicals.

The radically decentralized nature of evangelicalism — evangelicals typically are not bound by liturgy, creeds, hierarchy or tradition — leaves it susceptible to the cult of personality and the concomitant dangers of authoritarianism. Charismatic individuals typically galvanize followers into congregations and, through media, larger audiences. Especially among groups with no denominational affiliation, however, this often leads to a lack of accountability. The televangelist scandals of the late 1980s provide perhaps the best example, but more recent controversies around abuses of authority and sexual behavior leave little doubt that the problem persists.

For me, the most chilling disclosure of sexual impropriety came recently from the offices of Christianity Today magazine, which is generally considered the flagship magazine of evangelicalism. The former editor, Mark Galli, and former advertising director, Olatokunbo Olawoye, engaged in sexual harassment for more than a decade, including “demeaning, inappropriate and offensive behavior.” Olawoye was sentenced to three years for attempting to have sex with a minor.

To my knowledge, I never met either man, although I spent the better part of a decade on the magazine’s masthead as senior editor and editor-at-large. I contributed book and film reviews as well as nine feature articles, including several cover stories.

It was during this time that Galli was chosen as editor. I was not consulted about the matter, although I knew the identity of one of the other candidates, who would have done a superb job. Galli struck me as a poor choice, a judgment that proved prescient. Put simply, the lad had a problem with boundaries — not only sexual predation, which became public after his resignation, but he used the magazine to publish excerpts of his own books, a clear violation of journalistic ethics.

Galli’s most recent book was an account of his conversion to Catholicism. To its credit, the publisher has withdrawn the book in light of the serious charges against the author.

That may provide cold comfort to Galli’s victims, but the only effective deterrent to the scourge of sexual misconduct is accountability.

Randall Balmer, author of Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right, teaches at Dartmouth College.

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