Organized religion must stop tolerating sexual abuse

I write this letter after reading the article, “Maryland AG report: ‘No parish was safe’ from ‘rampant sexual abuse’ in Baltimore’s Catholic archdiocese” (Nov. 17), by Lee O. Sanderlin and Jonathan M. Pitts about the extensive sex abuse by priests from the Archdiocese of Baltimore of both boys and girls, from preschoolers to young adults.

Let’s not pretend that this is unique to the Catholic Church. In 2018 the Dalai Lama confessed to Dutch TV that he had known about sex crimes in Europe that had happened in Buddhist temples committed by Buddhist teachers against their followers in Europe. These crimes included rape.

In 2021 a man named Shailesh Patel of Michigan, the husband of a youth leader at a Hindu temple, pleaded guilty to sexually abusing a child for years at his home and abusing another at a temple kitchen. In India, the sexual abuse of girls and boys by Hindu priests is a wellknown phenomenon.

Rabbis have sexually molested and abused their congregants, and an investigation into this resulted in a book by Elana Sztokman, “When Rabbis Abuse: Power, Gender, and Status in the Dynamics of Sexual Abuse in Jewish Culture.”

No organized religion is immune to the shenanigans of bad actors. Religion seems to render an air of authority and invincibility to abusers, hiding behind their habits and their ochre robes.

Recently, sex abuse scandals have been unraveled in the Evangelical and other Protestant denominations. In the name of God, international terrorists of the Muslim faith, like the Taliban and the mullahs of Iran, torture and oppress women and girls, imposing dress codes and sexual mores on females that they themselves do not follow.

I ask, what’s the virtue in organized religion? Why do churches have tax-exempt status in the United States, especially when they meddle in politics against the law? I am told the good they do, the charities, the education and other efforts, balance out the bad. I disagree.

The air of superiority that the religious assume over atheists, the number of times atheists are told by believers that that they must believe in God to redeem their souls or that their redemption will come from the prayers that the religious are offering on behalf of nonbelievers, is a mockery of the existing reality that the religious must clean house before influencing the irreligious to change or convert to their ethos.

Add to this insult the injury of politicians, especially on the Republican side, playing to the churches and the cycle of religious hypocrisy is complete. It seems one of the requirements to become a

U.S. president is to be a man or woman of faith, openly declaring so.

I firmly believe the U.S. will elect a woman or an LGBTQ person to be president — as long as the person is one of faith — before it ever does an open atheist, whether heterosexual, LGBTQ, woman or man. Even agnostics are suspicious of open atheists.

As long as so many organized religions hide or tolerate sexual abuse and other crimes in their ranks, they have no right to preach the virtues of faith to nonbelievers.