How Can Conservative Christians Stop Calling LGBTQ People Groomers and Look Inward at Sexual Assault Inside the Church?
Spencer Macnaughton | Uncloseted Media Weekly Newsletter
Last week, I interviewed the founder of “Hetero Awesome Fest,” which is essentially an anti-LGBTQ Straight Pride under the guise of a religious event that’s meant to celebrate “faith, family and freedom.”
Mark Fitzpatrick told me he’s taking the festival to the next level this year by launching a 501(c)(3) charity called “Heterosexual Awesomeness, Inc.”
Fitzpatrick, a devout Christian, has said his motivation for starting this charity is that the LGBTQ community is “wicked, perverse and [one that] victimizes children” and that Pride is associated with “disgusting and criminal activity.”
There are so many Christian Americans who, like Fitzpatrick, believe LGBTQ people are one-dimensional: hypersexual predators or pedophiles coming for your kids.
And the data just doesn’t support that. Between 1950 and 2020, there were about 216,000 victims of sexual abuse carried out by the French Catholic Church’s clergy. And a 2019 investigation into the Southern Baptist Churches revealed over 380 individuals were accused of sexual misconduct, resulting in 700 victims since 1988.
It got me thinking about how much wasted time, money and resources people like Fitzpatrick are putting toward a problem that doesn’t need fixing. What’s worse is this energy is being taken away from the support that could be given to the countless innocent children who have been victims of sexual assault in churches around the world.
I have met many conservative Christians who are well-meaning but—for whatever reason—are trying to save queer people while the predators are often sitting in the pews of their very own churches.
If we were able to get all the Mark Fitzpatricks on board with taking a data-driven approach to fighting back against grooming and pedophilia, there would be transformative work done to dismantle the systemic, pervasive epidemic of sexual assault in conservative Christian spaces.
The Fitzpatricks could chip away at and start to erode patriarchal governance structures. They could train pastors to encourage child survivors of sexual assault to feel like they have the agency to come forward. They could dismantle the notion that so-called gossip is sacrilegious if it has to do with assault or abuse of power. And they could teach kids that there can be exceptions to forgiveness and that you can and should do what it takes to hold rapists, abusers and pedophiles accountable.
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Spencer Macnaughton, Editor-In-Chief — spencer@unclosetedmedia.com
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I might add that, according to the NIH, most child molesters are heterosexual. The ratio is an astounding 11:1 (heterosexual to homosexual offenders).
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1556756/
Thank you for this post. I’m remembering that time in 2023 when I, with a few others, discovered that there was a pedophile in our community of roller coaster enthusiasts who was clearly looking for (and likely found) other victims. I found that we worked at a multi-site church and that he had access to minors and had gone on overnight trips with them. Yeah, the church hired a convicted pedophile and allowed him to plan overnight trips with minors. I began my transition a month later. One of us was looking out for the kids and it wasn’t the one calling me a pedophile.