“Once upon a time, I believed that if only I told my childhood church – again – about the abuse their pastor inflicted on me as a kid, the good people there would surely want to do something. They would care. They would want to protect others. They would feel remorse. They would want to do better in the present than they done in the past. I believed all that.

It was the fairy tale I told myself because believing the alternative would have been too awful. But the awful was what was true. Just as my childhood family had insisted on a ‘happy family’ pretense, so to my childhood church insisted that what had happened was no big deal.

Then, once upon a time, I believed that if only Southern Baptist denominational leaders knew, they would surely want to do something. I thought that if I showed them the scope of the problem, they would take action. They would care. They would want to protect others and plug the safety gaps in their system. They would feel remorse.”