The church I grew up in was proud to be an ARBCA church, so today I googled ARBCA just to see what they were up to. It turns out that the whole organization had basically dissolved after a massive child molestation scandal. Growing up in Reformed Baptist churches, people (mostly cis-male people) did seem to get convinced of child molestation a lot more frequently than people in the general population, but specific info was kept secret even from me so I could never speak authoritatively on the matter. It was always something discussed in “members-only meetings” and the concern was always in witnessing to the recently-convicted child molester and protecting the reputation of the church. Nobody ever seemed especially interested in what happened to the children who had been molested or preventing anything similar from happening again, because it was up to the child to “forgive” and it was assumed that if the child forgave, then they would be fine. If they grew up and said “Hey, I’m not fine,” then they hadn’t really forgiven sincerely enough.
I also couldn’t help but remember that when people in church got convinced of sex crimes against a child, nobody seemed all that interested in seeing to it that the motherf*ucking excuse for a human being that did it got prosecuted to the maximum extent of the law and then hopefully got sent to an early grave on their first night in jail when the other inmates slowly ripped them into smaller and smaller pieces starting with their eyeballs until they died and went to child-molester hell. Granted, our church was all about forgiveness and leaving revenge up to God. And like I said, they always seemed worried about the person who committed the crime and never the child victims.
I’m surprised that I’m surprised by this. It’s not that I didn’t know what kind of people ARBCA attracted; it’s more that I just never thought the outside world would ever actually think to look into what was going on with us in ARBCA, and I definitely never thought that I would be able to actually describe specific crimes that occurred.
What bothers me a little bit is that nobody ever told me that this happened. My parents never thought to call me up like, “Hey, we accidentally raised you in a group where pedophilia was going on right and left, and we just wondered if you were okay.”
Spoiler: I wasn’t actually all that okay.
