Christian music superstar Lauren Daigle says she feels “vindicated” to be performing “America the Beautiful” in New Orleans at Super Bowl LIX a little over four years after the New Orleans mayor criticized her for participating in an outdoor worship gathering during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“​​Do you feel vindicated? Do you think it’s God’s hand that all these years later…you’re on the biggest stage in New Orleans, representing the city, your state?” Fox News contributor Raymond Arroyo asked Daigle during an interview on his new podcast, “Arroyo Grande.”

Daigle nodded and said, “Yes. It was powerful to see all of the people that came around me during that time…you were one of them. The attorney general’s office, the lieutenant governor’s office, so many people came around and said [to the mayor], ‘Hey, this is wrong. What you are doing is wrong.’” 

RELATED: Lauren Daigle Will Sing ‘America the Beautiful’ Before Super Bowl LIX

Lauren Daigle Tells Raymond Arroyo She Saw God Fight for Her

Lauren Daigle is a record-setting, Grammy Award-winning Christian artist and Louisiana native. She will perform “America the Beautiful” with accomplished jazz musician and Grammy Award-winner Trombone Shorty (Troy Andrews) during the Super Bowl pregame show on Sunday, Feb. 9.

Andrews, who grew up in New Orleans, and Daigle have previously collaborated on each other’s work, and it was Andrews who gave Daigle the opportunity to perform at football’s biggest game.

“It was a couple behind-the-scenes things,” Daigle told NOLA.com. “Trombone Shorty got the opportunity to sing and play ‘America the Beautiful.’ And he said, ‘I’d love to play it, but I have someone else in mind to sing it. I would really love it if Lauren sang on this.’”

When Andrews invited her, Daigle said she was “shocked” at his “generosity” and the “opportunity” he was giving her. “That just goes to show the beauty of the music scene in New Orleans,” said Daigle. “What I love so much is that it’s so communal. People are looking out for each other.”

When she realized she was going to perform the song at the Super Bowl, Daigle started asking herself a number of questions, including how she can perform the song in a way that shows people the beauty of the United States.

“Where will it cut through to this generation?” she asked. “The age that we’re living in right now, the political climate that we’re living in right now—how can I use this song to cut through to people who might be jaded toward our country?”

At the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday (Feb. 6), President Donald Trump pledged to eliminate discrimination against Christians, protect religious liberty, and “bring God back” to America. During speeches at the annual two-part event, Trump announced he is creating a task force to root out “anti-Christian bias,” led by new Attorney General Pam Bondi. He is also creating a White House Faith Office, headed by Paula White, Trump’s personal pastor.

Addressing lawmakers on Capitol Hill, Trump issued a call for unity. But then while speaking to a larger audience at a hotel ballroom, the president became partisan, blaming the Biden administration for persecuting people of faith.

“People of religion are going to be happy again,” Trump said about his second term. Touting his efforts during the past two weeks—including banning transgender athletes from women’s sports—the president said, “Woke is gone-zo.”

RELATED: Christian Leaders Praise Trump for Executive Order Aimed at ‘Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports’

Trump also said surviving last July’s assassination attempt “changed something in me” spiritually. “I believed in God,” he told attendees, “but I feel…much more strongly about it. Something happened.”

People “can’t be happy without religion, without that belief,” Trump added. “Let’s bring religion back. Let’s bring God back into our lives.”

Trump Announces Anti-Christian Bias Task Force

The new task force on anti-Christian bias will address “weaponization” of faith and “religious persecution,” according to Trump. He said Attorney General Bondi will “fully prosecute anti-Christian violence and vandalism in our society” and “move heaven and earth to defend the rights of Christians and religious believers nationwide.”

The task force will “immediately halt all forms of anti-Christian targeting and discrimination within the federal government,” Trump added, “including at the [Department of Justice], which was absolutely terrible, the IRS, the FBI, terrible, and other agencies.”

Referring to religious liberty, Trump told attendees, “You’ve never had that before…If we don’t have religious liberty, then we don’t have a free country. We probably don’t even have a country.”

The president continued, “We will protect Christians in our schools, in our military, in our government, in our workplaces, hospitals, and in our public squares. And we will bring our country back together as one nation under God, with liberty and justice for all.”

On Wednesday (Feb. 5), President Donald Trump signed an executive order aimed at barring transgender athletes from women’s sports. 

The order, titled “Keep Men Out of Women’s Sports,” stipulates that all funds will be cut from educational organizations that allow transgender athletes to compete in female sports programs and that the United States will advocate for international sports governing bodies to adopt the same policy.

The order notes that “under Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972 (Title IX), educational institutions receiving Federal funds cannot deny women an equal opportunity to participate in sports” and argues in line with at least two federal court decisions that “ignoring fundamental biological truths between the two sexes deprives women and girls of meaningful access to educational facilities.”

“Therefore, it is the policy of the United States to rescind all funds from educational programs that deprive women and girls of fair athletic opportunities,” the order states, “which results in the endangerment, humiliation, and silencing of women and girls and deprives them of privacy.”

“It shall also be the policy of the United States to oppose male competitive participation in women’s sports more broadly, as a matter of safety, fairness, dignity, and truth,” the order continues.

Trump signed the executive order at the White House on Wednesday, flanked by a crowd of young children.

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“You’ve been waiting a long time for this,” Trump said to begin an address prior to the signing. “So have I.” As Trump spoke he turned toward a group of advocates positioned near him. Among them was Riley Gaines, a former college swimmer and well-known activist against transgender athletes competing in women’s sports. 

“Under the Trump administration, we will defend the proud tradition of female athletes and will not allow men to beat up, injure, and cheat our women and our girls,” Trump went on to say. “From now on, women’s sports will be only for women.”

RELATED: Vance Defends Trump Policy Allowing ICE Raids of Churches, Schools Amid Backlash from US Conference of Catholic Bishops

“With this executive order, the war on women’s sports is over,” Trump said. 

WASHINGTON (RNS) — Vice President JD Vance addressed a group of religious leaders on Wednesday (Feb. 5) at the International Religious Freedom Summit, arguing President Donald Trump will prioritize the right to worship freely abroad even as his administration faces lawsuits accusing him of infringing on religious freedom at home and criticism from faith groups whose funding has been affected by the president’s actions.

“Our Founding Fathers rightly recognized this, listing freedom of religion first among the liberties enshrined in our great Constitution,” Vance told the crowd gathered at the Washington Hilton. The annual summit is co-chaired by Sam Brownback, who was appointed as ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom during Trump’s first term.

Vance, a Catholic, dedicated a significant section of his address to framing religious liberty as a product of Christianity.

RELATED: Was What Vance Told Hannity About Immigration Actually a ‘Christian Concept’?

“Religious freedom flows from concepts central to the Christian faith, in particular the free will of human beings and the essential dignity of all peoples,” Vance said, later insisting it is the “church fathers of classical Christianity to which we owe the very notion of religious liberty,” a historical argument popular in conservative circles.

“We remain the world’s largest majority-Christian country, and the right to religious freedom is protected by the people for everybody, whether you’re a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim or no faith at all,” he said.

Vance celebrated several of Trump’s actions in his first term and over the past two weeks, such as executive orders to “end the weaponization of the federal government against religious Americans,” along with efforts to combat antisemitism and the pardoning of anti-abortion protesters.

Vance also said Trump has worked to “stop the federal censorship used to prevent Americans from speaking their conscience and speaking their mind, whether it’s in their communities or online,” an apparent reference to Trump’s executive order “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship.” Among the main sponsors of the summit is Meta, the parent company of Facebook owned by Mark Zuckerberg, who attended Trump’s inauguration.

Near the end of the vice president’s remarks, he pivoted to a discussion of international policy.

“In recent years, too often has our nation’s international engagement on religious liberty issues been corrupted and distorted to the point of absurdity,” he said. “Think about this: How did America get to the point where we’re sending hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars abroad to NGOs that are dedicated to spreading atheism all over the globe?”

The question appeared to be a reference to a conservative argument criticizing work done by the U.S. State Department to promote a version of religious freedom that includes protecting the rights of nonreligious people. Recently, Republican leaders have listed the argument alongside criticism of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which the Trump administration has aggressively gutted in recent days and placed under the leadership of Secretary of State Marco Rubio. From fiscal years 2013-2022, the largest single recipient of USAID funds was Catholic Relief Services, according to Forbes.

Vance’s speech was met with hearty applause, with several summit attendees celebrating his remarks. The Rev. Greg McBrayer, an Anglican Church in North America priest and a presenter at the conference, said he was “absolutely thrilled” with Vance’s speech, calling it “very encouraging.”

“There’s an administration in place right now that will give us the opportunity to continue to grow as a people and grow our faith,” McBrayer said, adding that he hopes the U.S. will be “used as a global instrument to promote that kind of growth and receptivity around the world.”

But there was also disagreement in the room. Shortly after Vance finished, an attendee walked quickly past where press were gathered and said in a loud voice, “That was gaslighting!”

The Rev. Mae Elise Cannon, head of Churches for Middle East Peace, one of the sponsors of the conference, also expressed frustration with the address.

“Vice President Vance gave lip service to international religious freedom and liberty for all. However, the subtext of his message included deeply disturbing assumptions about the superiority of Christianity and the idea that only the ‘right kind of people’ should have complete freedom and human rights,” Cannon, who was present for the speech, said in an emailed statement a short time later.

“As a follower of Jesus, the idea that America is a ‘Christian nation’ ignores the multi-faceted, complex, and often oppressive history of the United States,” she wrote.

Cannon also wrote that Vance “did not say that our churches and Christians are protected when we seek to live out our faith by ‘welcoming the stranger’ and protecting the undocumented,” a possible reference to the Trump administration’s decision to rescind the sensitive locations policy — an internal government policy created in 2011 that discourages immigration raids at schools, hospitals and churches. The decision is currently the subject of a lawsuit filed against the administration by Quaker groups who argue the government’s actions violate the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. At least one immigrant was reportedly arrested while attending worship at a church in Atlanta last week.

RELATED: Despite Vance Attack, Catholic Bishops Press Ahead on Defending Migrants

Cannon, whose group has long advocated for Palestinians, also criticized Vance for not mentioning that “the rights of Palestinian Muslims and Christians have been violated in the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas” or “the ways Jewish people have been suffering from increased antisemitism around the world because of being unilaterally associated with the unjust policies of the State of Israel.”

A Washington, D.C., judge has awarded Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church the trademarked name of the far-right group, the Proud Boys. The Proud Boys, whose members destroyed the historic Black church’s Black Lives Matter banner in December 2020, are also barred from selling their own trademarked merchandise or using their trademark without the church’s consent.

“The Church has a long history of standing up for justice and against all forms of hate,” said the church’s pastor, Rev. William H. Lamar IV, to CNN. “We are determined to hold the Proud Boys accountable and we will continue this fight.”

Proud Boys Leader Compares Judge and Church to Judas

The Proud Boys are a controversial group that got national attention during one of the presidential debates leading up to the 2020 election. During one of those debates, the moderator and Joe Biden asked Donald Trump to denounce white supremacy. Trump said he would be willing to denounce white supremacy but then said, “Almost everything I see is from the left wing. Not from the right wing.” 

When Biden named the Proud Boys specifically as a group Trump should denounce, Trump said, “The Proud Boys? Stand back and stand by, but I’ll tell you what, I’ll tell you what. Somebody’s got to do something about Antifa and the left, because this is not a right-wing problem.” 

RELATED: ‘Stand Back and Stand By’—Who Are the Proud Boys?

On Dec. 12, 2020, members of the Proud Boys were filmed destroying Black Lives Matter signs belonging to churches following a “stop the steal” event in Washington, D.C. One of those churches was Metropolitan AME, and another was Asbury United Methodist Church.

On Jan. 4, 2021, Metropolitan AME Church sued the Proud Boys “for engaging in acts of terror and vandalizing church property in an effort to intimidate the Church and silence its support for racial justice.” The church requested damages and a jury trial. Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and other Proud Boys members were later convicted of seditious conspiracy related to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. 

In July 2021, Tarrio pleaded guilty to burning a Black Lives Matter banner from Asbury United Methodist Church. He also pleaded guilty to one count of attempted possession of a large-capacity ammunition feeding device and was sentenced to five months in jail.

In the summer of 2023, the Metropolitan AME Church won a default ruling ordering the Proud Boys to pay $2.8 million in damages, which the Proud Boys did not do.

Tarrio was serving a 22-year prison sentence when President Donald Trump took office and granted clemency to Tarrio and more than 1,500 others charged with crimes related to the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol. Trump’s decision freed some people from prison and dismissed numerous pending cases.

RELATED: Franklin Graham Compares Trump to Moses, Vance to Aaron in Inauguration Prayer

Christian apologist Wes Huff is becoming a household name after he presented the gospel in such a succinct and powerful way to nearly six million viewers on “The Joe Rogan Experience.” Huff recently sat down with Christian YouTuber Ruslan to discuss the history of a controversial Bible passage and whether or not it should be referenced from the pulpit.

“I do not think it is an inspired piece of Scripture that John wrote,” argued Huff.

‘I Don’t Think It’s Scripture,’ Says Wes Huff of the Story of the Adulterous Woman in John 8

Within John 7:53-8:11, Jesus teaches the crowds who have gathered. He is interrupted by a group of Pharisees who bring an adulterous woman to be tried against the law and stoned. Testing Jesus, they ask him what to do. Jesus writes something in the sand on the ground and says, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” After the crowd leaves, Jesus doesn’t condemn the woman—instead, he tells her to leave her life of sin.

In modern translations of the Bible, however, the above verses are preceded by a note, “Most ancient Greek manuscripts do not include John 7:53-8:11.”

“What’s to say there isn’t a story floating around of something Jesus actually did that testifies to the character of Jesus,” said Huff, the Central Canada director for Apologetics Canada.

“There is a lot of evidence for that being something Jesus would have actually done,” argued Huff, “because it is not outside the realm of the character of who we know Jesus [to be].” Jesus often called out the hypocrisy of the Pharisees. Ruslan also pointed out that under the Mosaic law, the man should stand trial for adultery right alongside the woman.

Regardless of the story lining up with the character of Jesus, Huff claimed, “I don’t think John wrote it.”

“This is what some scholars refer to as a ‘floating passage,'” explained Huff. It’s “looking for a home.” He continued, “Scribes seem to think this is an authentic story,” but added, “We just don’t know where it goes.”

Of course, not every word and action of Jesus and his ministry was recorded in Scripture. John mentioned that if that were so and if the whole sky were a scroll, it wouldn’t contain all of it.

“I treat it like I do the writings of the early church fathers,” explained Huff. “It’s valuable for edification and understanding and kind of gives us another angle on who Jesus is, but I don’t think it’s Scripture.”

Huff said he understood when preachers use the passage alongside scribal editions of the text. “I still think it testifies to the character of Jesus,” he said.

“I wouldn’t preach through it,” admitted Huff, especially within an expository context. “I would have a conversation with my congregation about textual criticism.”

More than a year after Mike Bickle stepped away from ministry amid a sexual abuse “crisis,” an independent investigation revealed that he sexually abused at least 17 women, including several minors, beginning 50 years ago. Bickle, 69, is founder of the International House of Prayer Kansas City (IHOPKC), a charismatic ministry that cut ties with him in December 2023 due to “inappropriate behavior.”

Editor’s note: This article refers to reports of sexual abuse that some readers might find triggering and/or disturbing.

This week, Firefly Independent Sexual Abuse Investigations made public its 68-page investigative report into Bickle. After interviewing 210 people and reviewing more than 6,000 documents, Firefly concluded that Bickle perpetrated “sexually abusive misconduct, including sexual abuse, rape, clergy abuse, and spiritual abuse” against 17 women “beginning to our knowledge in the mid-1970s.”

RELATED: IHOPKC Founder Mike Bickle Steps Away From Ministry Because of ‘Credible and Long-Standing’ Sexual Abuse Allegations

In addition, IHOPKC’s leadership team suppressed and minimized reports of abuse, “rather than supporting the victims or staff who reported these incidents,” according to the report. Survivors experienced additional trauma, Firefly found, when IHOPKC staff blamed and discredited them, retaliated against them, forced them to apologize, and urged them not to contact police.

Investigators also uncovered 16 cases of sexual abuse and misconduct by other unnamed individuals linked to IHOPKC. That points to “a broader issue within the organization that requires immediate attention and action,” stated the report, funded by Tikkun Global.

IHOPKC, known for its 24/7 prayer room, has struggled in the wake of the abuse scandal. Its Forerunner Church held a final worship service in May 2024.

Bickle, who did not participate in the investigation, has not responded to media requests for comment. ChurchLeaders contacted Bickle and IHOPKC and will update this article with any replies.

Mike Bickle Misused Authority To Groom and Abuse, Report States 

As ChurchLeaders reported, in December 2023 Bickle repented publicly of “moral failures” from decades ago but did not admit to recent abuse or “the more intense sexual activities that some are suggesting.”

The new report paints a different picture. Firefly’s investigation, led by former Pennsylvania police chief Jim Holler, detailed how Bickle allegedly groomed, manipulated, and sexually assaulted girls and women. The report said Bickle isolated some of them in church-owned housing, pushed boundaries through objectifying comments and physical touch, and used prophetic language to justify sexual abuse.

Survivors described to investigators how Bickle commented on their appearance and touched them sexually in settings including the IHOPKC prayer room, his office, and at restaurants. The behavior included Bickle putting his hands down women’s pants and rubbing their legs, commenting on whether they had shaved.

During worship services, Bickle would “grab girls by their throats, kiss them on their faces, and ruffle their hair,” the report said. That was “a calculated tactic to desensitize his victims to physical contact,” it added, “gradually pushing boundaries until they were normalized.”

Survivors and witnesses said other IHOPKC leaders were aware of the touching. One person described telling Forerunner Church Pastor Isaac Bennett about concerning behavior, and Bennett reportedly replied, “That’s just the way Bickle is.”

Other interviewees told investigators that Bickle sent “hundreds of secretive communications” to someone else’s wife, received “personal massages” in his office, and created “circumstances where victims would observe him undressed and aroused.”

Survivors Detail Controlling Behaviors By Mike Bickle

The unredacted report names Deborah Perkins as the survivor who first made abuse allegations against Bickle, in October 2023. She said Bickle manipulated and abused her for three years in the late ’90s, starting when she was 19.

RELATED: Mike Bickle Accused of Sexually Abusing 14-Year-Old Prior to Founding IHOPKC

According to the report, Bickle added Perkins to his Friend of the Bridegroom team of young women who lived together and were required to “fast and maintain celibacy.” Bickle reportedly controlled the team members, gave them gifts, and gained the trust of their family members.

He offered the women “Papa time” with him, wrote them notes with messages such as, “You’re mine,” and told several women (separately) that he’d marry them after his wife died.

Zane Black didn’t grow up going to church, reading the Bible, or talking about Jesus with his peers. In fact, he said he had patterns of destructive behavior and would sell drugs to pay for his bad habits.

“A dude I literally partied with told me my life was out of control,” he told ChurchLeaders. “When you get one stoner telling another stoner that their life is out of control, you know you’re in a dangerous place.”

“I couldn’t break the chain and the bondage of addiction,” he said. “I got kicked out of my house and was living with a friend’s family.”

Black shared that this family took him in even though he had been selling drugs to their kids. Black even said that the “youngest son [was] selling drugs for me. He got kicked out of school for having a gun.” But this family, Black said, “invited me into their home, and they invited me to their church, and it was there that I heard about Jesus for the first time and having a personal relationship with Jesus.”

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God rescued Black at that church. Black said that he began reading his Bible and attended Torchbearers Bible School in Colorado. Black’s radical life change prompted him to sell his car, which he had bought with drug money, to pay for tuition at the school.

“Now, fast forward, 20-something years later, we are now starting a Torchbearers program in Santa Cruz, California,” said Black.

For two decades, Black has worked at a Torchbearers center, has served as a student pastor, and he has been given the opportunity to tell his story across the globe.

Two years ago, Black and his wife of 16 years had the opportunity to start another Torchbearers ministry. “Our whole marriage, we prayed about wanting to start a Torchbearers experience. She had gone to the one in Austria, and God had used that to change her life,” Black said.

The idea of a Torchbearers program is for a student to take a gap year between high school and college. “Something that birthed to me,” Black said, “was like, not every person has opportunity to take a gap year—plus nine months is costly sometimes.”

“And so we began to dream about what would it look like to take what I like to call a ‘gap summer,’” he added, which would be the “summer between your senior year in high school and your freshman year in college or before you start your career.”

Texas Pastor Timothy Daniel Nall has been arrested and charged with sexual assault of a child. He has previously been accused of similar crimes.

Editor’s note: This article refers to reports of child sex crimes that some readers might find triggering and/or disturbing.

Nall was the pastor of Mt. Pisgah Missionary Baptist Church in Mineola, Texas, at the time of the alleged abuse, according to CBS19. Nall is accused of luring a young child into his office with candy in order to assault the victim. 

The incident allegedly occurred in the fall of 2022 at the church. The parents of the victim reported the assault to police after the child spoke about “a bad guy who touches her belly” during counseling sessions. 

RELATED: Anglican Denominations’ Record on Abuse Prompts Calls for Victim-Focused Reform

The parents of the victim began taking the child to counseling after noticing her exhibit strange behavior. At some point during the counseling sessions, the child identified Nall as her abuser.

The mother later recalled having found her child sitting on Nall’s lap eating candy but had not thought much of it at the time. 

The child reported that Nall touched her “all over” and indicated that she feared Nall, saying that he threatened to lock her in his office forever if she told anyone what happened. 

Nall was arrested and booked into the Smith County Jail on Saturday (Feb. 1). He was subsequently released on a $100,000 bond. 

RELATED: VA Pastor Pleads Guilty to Felony Sex Abuse Charge, Will Spend 8 Months in Jail With 11-Year Suspended Sentence

According to KLTV, Nall was previously arrested on similar accusations in 2023. In July of that year, he was charged with indecency with a child by sexual contact. The victim also reported being lured to Nall’s office with candy. 

(RNS) — When Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby resigned in November over his failure to report a serial child abuser in his own denomination, the drastic step, it was thought, would preserve the Church of England’s ability to discipline its clergy in other cases of abuse — and its moral authority overall.

Before Welby could leave office, however, the bishop of York, who was to run the Church of England in the interim, was hit with questions about his own management of abuse, and on Jan. 28, the bishop of Liverpool resigned after being accused of making unwelcome sexual advances. (He denies the allegations, saying he resigned so as not to be “a distraction.”)

While the clergy sexual abuse crisis has most famously struck the Catholic Church, every faith tradition and every kind of clergy (though mostly male) have been implicated: celibate monks and Protestant ministers who are family men. In the past five years, three Anglican denominations in the United States and Canada have all been rocked by abuse and misconduct allegations.

RELATED: Justin Welby’s Tenure as Archbishop of Canterbury Officially Ends

Though two — the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada — are members of the Anglican Communion and recognize the authority of the archbishop of Canterbury as their convener, all three have distinct cultures and separate protocols for handling abuse.

“These churches have spent decades attempting to reform their policies and procedures for handling complaints against their clergy and lay leaders, but we see the same kinds of complaints surface again and again from people brave enough to go public,” said Matthew Townsend, a former communications executive with several Anglican organizations who quit because of his dissatisfaction with how abuse was handled.

Mark Rivera is imprisoned at Danville Correctional Center in Danville, Ill. (Image courtesy of Illinois Department of Corrections)

In the Anglican Church of North America, which split from the Anglican Communion in 2009 over acceptance of LGBTQ clergy and same-sex marriages, the reckoning with abuse began with a 9-year-old girl who came forward in 2019 with sexual abuse allegations against Mark Rivera, a lay minister in ACNA’s Upper Midwest Diocese who is married with four children. Ten others eventually claimed Rivera abused or groomed them.

Rivera, who served in two churches in the diocese, was convicted of felony child sexual assault in 2022 and later pleaded guilty to felony sexual assault in a case involving an adult. For years, however, the abuse survivors said, those in charge were slow to respond and stood by Rivera even after he was arrested. Stewart Ruch, the bishop of the diocese, has admitted to “regrettable errors” in his handling of the Rivera case and is awaiting a church trial.

At Falls Church Anglican, a historic church in Virginia in a different ACNA diocese, leaders waited 16 years before investigating alleged sexual abuse in the 1990s by a married former youth pastor, or informing the congregation that it had happened, and only after the national church leadership demanded they do.

RELATED: Sex Should Be ‘Within a Committed Relationship,’ Whether Straight or Gay, Says Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby

“The Welby case provides a template for how most churches have responded, unfortunately, that unless there’s outside pressure, no change occurs,” said the Rev. Gerard McGlone, a Jesuit priest and senior research fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs at Georgetown University. “What we see is what I call a perpetrator-based approach, where the perpetrator and protecting the institution and the reputation of the institution is paramount, as opposed to really walking with those who’ve been most egregiously harmed.”

While conservative denominations are often presumed to be more prone to these shortcomings, experts say abuse knows no theological bounds. Since 2021, two bishops in the Anglican Church of Canada, including Mark MacDonald, a national Indigenous archbishop, resigned due to sexual misconduct allegations. In 2023, Julia Ayala Harris, president of the Episcopal Church’s House of Deputies, the second-highest-ranking officer in the denomination, made public a letter detailing the church’s response to her formal complaint against a retired bishop who, she said, had subjected her to “non-consensual physical contact” and “inappropriate verbal statements.” The church referred the bishop to pastoral counseling.

The Rev. Gerard McGlone. (Photo courtesy of Georgetown University)

Asked why clergy misconduct continues even after the reckoning of #Churchtoo, an echo of the #MeToo movement that brought down movie producer Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby and others, McGlone cited the concept of “acquired situational narcissism.” When they assume influential roles, clergy, like other celebrities, can experience a new sense of power that distorts their perceptions and impacts behavior. Theologies that paint clergy as the “voice of Christ” can exacerbate this dynamic.

Parishioners tend to buy into clergy’s status. “I think there’s a lot of default trust in pastors or other clergy who have success in one way,” said a former parishioner of The Church of the Resurrection, an ACNA church in Washington, D.C., who filed a complaint alleging the rector, the Rev. Dan Claire, had been spiritually and emotionally abusive. “Because they have some people who think they have good character, that doesn’t mean that they’re not treating others in a way that is lacking in integrity.”

McGlone, a survivor of childhood clergy sexual abuse who has authored several sexual abuse prevention programs, added that churches often fail to see themselves as “high-risk organizations,” where those in power are serving children and vulnerable adults. High-risk settings, he said, require outside accountability to become highly reliable.

Townsend, the former ACC and Episcopal Church employee, said the danger of abuse is present whenever humans congregate, but especially so in churches. “The spiritual intimacy of churchgoing is a major component of that heightened danger, and it is not one that is diminishing as Anglicanism declines,” he said.