Child Rape, Penn State and the Catholic Church: Is Religion Especially Bad?

I can't be the only person who heard about the Penn State child rape scandal and thought, "Holy crap -- it's just like the Catholic Church." The abuse of power by a trusted authority figure; the coverup by people in authority; the unwillingness of witnesses to speak out; the grotesque, morally bankrupt defenses of a beloved institution by its followers... all of it is depressingly familiar.

And I can't be the only critic of religion who's been wondering, "Hmm. If Penn State has been acting like the Catholic Church... then did the Catholic Church child rape scandal actually have anything to do with religion?"

I still think it does. But it's a complicated question. Let's take a closer look.

Apologists for the Catholic Church and its role in the extensive child rape scandal often use the "But everyone else does it!" defense. "Priests aren't the only people in positions of trust and power over children who abuse that power," they say. "Parents, relatives, teachers, babysitters, coaches -- they rape children as well. It's all terrible... but it's unfair to single out the Catholic Church as if it were special."

Atheists and other critics of the Church typically respond to this defense -- after tearing their hair out and screaming -- by pointing out: The rapes aren't the scandal. The coverup is the scandal. The rapes of children are a horrible tragedy. The scandal is the fact that the Catholic Church hid the rapes, and protected the child-raping priests from discovery and prosecution: lying to law enforcement, concealing evidence, paying off witnesses, moving child-raping priests from diocese to diocese so they could rape a whole new batch of children in a place where they wouldn't be suspected. The scandal is the fact that it wasn't just a few individuals in the ranks who protected and enabled the child-raping priests: it was large numbers of Church officials, including high-ranking officials, acting as a cold-blooded matter of Church policy. The scandal is the fact that the Church treated their own stability and reputation as a higher priority than, for fuck's sake, children not being raped.

And many critics of religion have concluded that the nature of religion itself is largely to blame for this scandal. They have argued that religion's lack of any sort of reality check, and its belief in a perfect supernatural moral authority that transcends mere human concerns, makes religious institutions like the Catholic Church far more vulnerable to abuses of this kind.

I've made this argument myself. And in my own writings on this subject, I've asked what I thought was a rhetorical question: "If these scandals had taken place in any organization other than a religious one -- would you still be part of it? If it were your political party, your softball league, your university, your children's school, your employer? Would you still be part of it? Would you still pay your league dues and show up for softball night? Would you still pay your tuition and send your kids off to the school every day? Or would you be walking out in moral outrage?"

But it seems that this question wasn't so rhetorical. It seems that, at least sometimes, the answer to that question is, "Yup -- we'd be defending our school."

At least sometimes, the answer is, "If we see our coach raping a child -- we won't alert the police. If we're in positions of authority in a school and we hear reports about our coach raping a child -- we won't alert the police, and we won't investigate. And if we hear that a coach at our school raped children, and that the authorities at the school knew about it and didn't alert the police or investigate, we will become outraged -- not at the fact that the rapes occurred, not at the fact that the witnesses and school authorities did nothing, but at what we see as unfair treatment of the perpetrators, and at the very fact that the media is covering it."