December 27, 2021
When I was very young, I was taught that if you do bad things, then you’ll get in trouble.
- I learned this from my parents. When I misbehaved, I was punished.
- When the “bad kid” in class acted up, the teacher made him miss recess or sent him to the principal’s office.
- I was always told that when adults broke the law, then they went to prison.
Pretty much all of society works under this assumption. It makes sense. If you do something bad or wrong, or you harm someone else, or you break the law, then you will be punished. Simple.
But as you grow older, you slowly begin to realize that the world isn’t black and white. As with everything else, justice doesn’t always work the way it “should.” In a perfect world, everyone who did something wrong would be punished for it. But is that how the world actually works? No, of course not.
When I was growing up, the big legal case of the era was the OJ Simpson trial. I was a bit young to understand all the nuances, but from what I could gather at the time, everyone knew he was guilty, yet he was not convicted. The nation was dismayed as this obviously-guilty murderer walked free and the victim’s family saw no justice.
Not too long after was the murder of six-year-old JonBenét Ramsey. The entire nation eagerly awaited new developments in the case, hoping to see the vicious child murderer locked up. Except that never happened—the case is still unsolved to this day. Once again, the perpetrator of an unthinkable crime saw no justice.
As I got older, I witnessed this more and more. Not only that, I noticed a pattern: while members of impoverished communities were regularly sentenced to decades in private prisons for minor offenses, high-ranking politicians, bankers, government officials, and world leaders who were caught committing crimes more or less walked free.
I couldn’t help but notice that the rules were different for different classes of people.
I think that on some subconscious level, Christianity and the idea of a literal hell resonated so much with me because it meant all people who needed to be punished would be, eventually, even if they are never caught and punished in this lifetime. It was kind of comforting to believe that someone like, say, Hitler was in a place receiving eternal torture as opposed to the reality, which is that he’s just simply ceased to be.
Politicians, bankers, government officials, and world leaders aren’t the only group of people who regularly walk away from serious crimes. Pastors enjoy much of those same privileges.
Despite professing to be holy men of God, pastors quite regularly turn out to be closet criminals and/or morally bankrupt. The crimes they commit vary. Some embezzle large amounts of money. Some commit sexual assault. Others cover up the sexual assaults of their friends and colleagues.
Pastors who commit these crimes sometimes face the consequences when their actions come to light. However, due to the nature of how churches usually work, the actions are often first dealt with internally. Discussions and debates on how to handle it are had amongst the leaders and elders, behind closed doors, before the general population is alerted to any wrongdoing.
Why is this? In my estimation, what happens in these meetings very much resembles what likely happens when a government official or world leader gets caught doing something wrong. They don’t consider what they could do to achieve justice. Rather, they ask all the wrong questions:
- If this person goes down, who else is doing down with him by association?
- If this person goes down, how much money will the organization lose?
- If this person goes down, how will our future plans be harmed?
For example, say the head pastor of a megachurch was accused of sexual assault by a handful of women. Outrageous, I know. Maybe I’m being cynical, but it’s hard for me to imagine that at any point, the people who deliberate on this matter have any regard for the women involved and their well-being and helping them find justice. To these people, the “bigger picture” of the church and its mission is far more important than the isolated claims of a few women in their congregation numbering in the tens of thousands.
Why do I feel this way? Because of the outcomes we most often see from similar types of scandals. Everything seems hushed and brushed under the rug. People work very hard to silence the victims and conceal any wrongdoing.
When celebrity pastors get caught doing something wrong, there’s almost always an element of the story where the church and other leaders knew all about it and tried to bury it. Only after the info leaks is the pastor in question punished, usually by merely being removed from his position.
But the punishment is usually only temporary. I swear there’s a PR firm for disgraced pastors out there somewhere. The removed pastor hires them and they coach him through the next couple of years, bringing him through the template they’ve applied to the others before him:
- Stay silent and out of the public eye until we say so.
- Don’t delete or disable your social media, but don’t post on it anymore—until we say so.
- Move your family to another city.
- Become an associate pastor at another church half the size of your former one.
- Work there for a year before starting a new church.
Meanwhile the victim(s) are left with the trauma for a very long time, perhaps the rest of their lives.
What if you were the one harmed by a pastor or church leader, who then went on to not be punished for what they’d done? How do you handle that?
I’ve written before that the path to happiness and freedom is to align your life as much as possible to objective Truth and live according to it, even if the objective Truth is uncomfortable. Unfortunately, the concept of justice is one of those areas where the objective Truth can be uncomfortable or emotionally difficult. That is to say that depending on who the person is and the connections they have and the shared interests he has intertwined with others, that all might prevent certain authorities above him from pursuing justice. But of course, this isn’t the whole story.
The objective Truth is also comprised of your story, your testimony, of how you were harmed by the individual. Aligning your life with this Truth means speaking the Truth of your experience. In my opinion, living in accordance to the Truth and speaking the Truth is a spiritual act, and there are rewards and benefits that come from that, both seen and unseen.
You may not ever see the justice in the way you were led to believe when you were young, but by aligning with and speaking the Truth so that others can hear, you will be making the world a better place, and a safer place for all.