Yep. Doesn't matter what religion it is. People just put too much trust and faith in religion, in that they expect persons who are religious to behave "righteously". So, sadly, almost any religion can be a paradise for pedophiles.

Hm, following up on this, the newspaper that did the investigation had this to say:

"Then the church’s pastor, Bob Ross, was arrested in April on a charge of failure to report child abuse. People who had known Ross from his days as youth director at Windsor Hills Baptist Church in Oklahoma said he’d ignored their own abuse allegations and worked for a pastor who wielded absolute control over his congregation by telling members that they would die if they left the church or disobeyed him.

"As more and more ex-members of the independent fundamental Baptist movement came forward to the Star-Telegram, a pattern emerged: Despite their use of the word independent, many of the churches were connected with other independent fundamental Baptist churches through colleges and pastoral friendships. And those connections, as well as the church culture, allowed abuse to flourish and abusers to move around the country without consequence."

This has clearly evolved into more of a cultish extreme than I grew up with in the IFCA. If a pastor is willing to say you're going to actually die if you leave, that's off the rails. And of course it will lead to disempowerment and abuse, just as surely as night follows day.

They also make the point that there's no "accountability" for pastors and that's the downside of local governance. A wily pastor just has to figure out how to manipulate the local board and he's good to go. There was accountability by design in the IFCA, at least enough to prevent most such excesses. The IFCA may not have governed the local congregation but the local congregation had to meet certain standards in order to belong to the IFCA and to have the benefits, which were a sort of "good housekeeping stamp of approval".

For those who might not know, Independent Fundamental Baptist is a particular Baptist sub-denomination. It is not Baptists generally, and in fact, the "Independent" in the name reflects an aversion to joining any sort of denominational hierarchy and so to be autonomously governed at the congregational level. I belonged to a similar sect, the Independent Fundamental Churches of America (IFCA) which is a bit more generic doctrinally but the same general idea. The IFCA provided a common doctrinal "creed" to which all member churches subscribed, and provided some a la carte services like providing guest speakers and candidate pastors (known as "pulpit supply" ) and arbitration / conflict resolution services. But governance was 100% local.

So it is interesting that this is being presented as a systemic problem of IFB churches. Maybe there's something with the informal quasi-denominational culture that is causing that, perhaps a stronger emphasis on patriarchy. I never heard a whiff of this in IFCA circles, but then again I was a male, and may have been some combination of lucky and blissfully unaware.

One thing is certain, there is a #MeToo moment waiting to happen in some Protestant circles too. Child rape may be especially common in the RCC due to the unintended consequences of the celibate priesthood and the particularly non-transparent zeitgeist of the RCC, but they don't have an "exclusive" on it, either.