Bad Pastors: Clergy Misconduct in Modern America

Sociology of Religion, Summer, 2004 by Alain P. Durocher

Bad Pastors: Clergy Misconduct in Modern America, by ANSON SHUPE, WILLIAM A. STACEY, AND SUSAN E. DARNELL (eds.). New York and London: New York University Press, 2000, 240 pp.; $60.00 (cloth) $19.00 (paper)

Twelve authors contributed the twelve chapters that make Bad Pastors. Several of these authors are sociologists, including Nason-Clark, Greeley, Iadicola, Spickard, and Shupe. This is Shupe's third book on the topic. His first, In the Name of All that's Holy: A Theory of Clergy Malfeasance was published in 1995, and Wolves within the Fold: Religious Leadership and Abuses of Power came out in 1998. Bad Pastors is divided into four parts: "How Shall We Name It?," "Responding to Accusations of Clergy Malfeasance," "Monitoring Clergy Malfeasance," and "Epilogue and Overview."

The editors should be commended for their diversity of perspectives (conflict theory, criminology, feminism, deconstructionism, constructionism, politics, theology, and descriptive empiricism (5)), for their range of scientific approaches (qualitative and quantitative), for their effort to examine clergy misconduct from multiple religious denominations, and for their broad definition of clergy malfeasance, which includes sexual, financial, and spiritual abuse. The editors have even integrated "extra" chapters including one about churches' management of domestic violence against women (Nason-Clark), and another about the struggles that Jesus People USA ("an evangelical Christian commune in inner-city Chicago") (156) has experienced fighting false accusations (Trott). The editors have also asked Andrew M. Greeley to include his own critical assessment of the book. He did!

But this rich and encompassing strategy may also be part of the limitations of this book. First, the editors claim that "The purpose of this volume is to move toward a better conceptual definition of clergy malfeasance as a real, pervasive, persistent phenomenon in modern society." (4) This follows Nancy Nason-Clark's perspective that we should move beyond a "naive conception of [clergy] malfeasance as personal spiritual failure." {6) Clearly, we have had enough cases in Canada and more recently in the United States to understand that, on the psychological level, this is more than a mere spiritual failure, and sociologically more than a few isolated individual cases. Bad Pastors appropriately points to the nature of power and to the hierarchical structures that define these religious organizations. Still, is there anything more conceptually specific to clergy malfeasance than the fact that perpetrators are clergy? How is clergy malfeasance different than similar abuses perpetrated by other leaders in society?

Moreover, what is the difference between the leadership of secular or semi-secular social institutions trying to deal internally with accounts of abuse and the attitudes of religious leaders who have adopted similar practices? As Stockton recalls, using a quote from Marie Fortune, "An institution acts first on what it perceives to be its self-interest." (132) Why should it be a surprise if religious leaders are guilty of the same mindset? It would probably be very helpful if future studies on this topic included not only a sociology of these groups' ecclesiologies but also a sociology of the theologies that shape their identities. In brief, a conceptual definition of clergy misconduct should be able to explain (not excuse) this phenomenon, and should enable the authorities to bring proper corrective measures that could help prevent further occurrences.

However, once an abuse has been committed by any ministers (lay or clergy), church leaders cannot and must not be the only authorities involved. It is not because religious authorities have failed to deal with cases of clergy malfeasance that civil authorities should now be involved; civil authorities should have been involved from the start. Given the current context, Spickard's essay on moral relativism seems misplaced. He claims that since "religion has a sufficiently elaborated moral code, there is no obstacle to judging clergy malfeasance from within." (101) This is philosophically true but recent events have shown that judgment should not remain exclusively internal. What victims and the general population have legitimately requested is moral and especially legal accountability. Here again, a sociology of the ecclesiologies and theologies at play could perhaps explain why religious leaders could even think that their institutions were a-secular to the extent that the law would not apply to them.

Finally, in their conceptual essay, Shupe and Iadicola suggest an "expansion of the definition of clergy malfeasance" that should include the "history of conquest and imperialism" of some religious groups. (18) The authors recall the Spanish Inquisition, the Crusades, and the conquest of the Americas. Spickard, who supports that "[a]n act is only "malfeasance" if it violates a group's own morality and worldview," would disagree with this interpretation. (94) However, the major problem with this expansion of clergy malfeasance is that it confuses collective and individual wrongdoing, which is not to say that clergy malfeasance does not often point to those two levels of responsibility. Bad Pastors raises all the good questions and provides many hypothetical answers, and for these reasons alone it should be read by all sociologists of religion with an interest in wrongdoings.