It’s ben a terrible couple of days for Christianity — I’ve gotten an awful lot of e-mail reporting indiscretions by those trusted members of the clergy.
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Rev. Don LaRose/Rev. Ken Williams, lunatic who abandoned his family and changed his name. The only thing he kept in common in his identities was his calling as a pious con artist.
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Lay preacher Malcolm Edwards-Sayer, convicted of fraud and theft. (This one is also a lawyer, so maybe we can blame this one on his other vocation.)
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Rev. Cory Cortezis Lewis, arrested for sexual battery on a minor.
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Rev. Richard Roberts, resigned as president of Oral Roberts University amidst allegations of corruption.
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Rev. Leonard Frazier, arrested for rape and sodomy of a 15 year old girl.
I should clarify something, though. Many people assume I post these little tales of deplorable behavior by the religious in some misguided effort to show causality, that I’m trying to argue that they do these wicked things because they are Christian. This is not correct. It’s far, far from the truth — I know many good people are also Christian or Jewish.
The point is simpler: Christianity claims to be a force for morality which encourages good behavior on the part of its practitioners. It’s quite clear that it is not when even its clergy seem unable to find their religion to be a source of moral suasion. Religion doesn’t make you bad, necessarily, but it sure doesn’t make you good, either.
