NY Times Op-Ed: Even Religious People Don’t Trust Religious Institutions

New York Times Op-Ed: Even Religious People Don’t Trust Religious Institutions, by Jessica Grose:

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 were convicted of sex abuse crimes over the preceding 20 years in 30 states and the District of Columbia. And 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, it found that young adults who belonged to any religion were more likely to report having meaning and purpose. …

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.”