According to The Daily Beast, some American Protestant Churches are refusing to hire individuals who were sexually abused as children. The rationale is that such individuals are likely to become abusers themselves. But the real rationale is that insurance companies are reducing the amount they’ll indemnify churches for sexual abuse, so churches have to protect their own interests—and pocketbooks.

I’m not quite sure what Faller is getting at in the last sentence, since the 2001 study showed that there is a relationship between males being sexually abused as children and their own propensity to abuse. Perhaps the study dealt only with males abusing male victims, but that’s not clear. Dismissing the data as irrelevant seems premature.

“Moreover, since most offenders are men and most victims are women, the hypothesis that a major contributing factor to sex offending is a history of sexual abuse does not make sense.”

“That is a very old paper and based upon a clinical sample that came to our program at the University of Michigan and all were intrafamilial sexual-abuse cases,” Professor Kathleen Faller told The Daily Beast. “Therefore, the sample is not relevant to clergy cases. [ JAC : Well, it might be; only further study could show that.]

And according to the author of the 1989 study cited by the Alaska Supreme Court, justices and churches are misusing her work.

This is not true, though. As a 2001 study in the British Journal of Psychiatry found, “The data supports the notion of a victim-to-victimiser cycle in a minority of male perpetrators, but not among the female victims studied.”

By 1998, Hammar’s questionnaire was included in sample volunteer application forms ( PDF ) made by Lifeway Christian Stores, a major Baptist bookstore chain. That year, Lifeway’s representative for its Bible studies division told the Baptist Press : “All people who have been abused do not become child abusers, but almost all child abusers have been abused themselves.”

The second question is this: “What’s the evidence that those who are sexually abused as children become abusers themselves?” And here the data are scanty. The first paragraph below refers to a sample church employment application, including a question about childhood sexual abuse, produced by Richard Hammar, editor of Christianity Today’s Church Law and Tax Review. The Alaska case involved a court finding a church culpable for a case of child molestation because it didn’t ask the employee whether she had experienced sexual abuse as a child:

“Under the ministerial exemption, religious institutions are allowed to violate employment-discrimination law when hiring and firing their ministers,” said Greg Lipper, a lawyer for Americans United for Separation of Church and State. “Not everyone who works for a church is a minister, but the exception applies to employees with significant religious responsibilities, including clergy and religious-school teachers.” So asking the janitor about their past abuse might be prohibited, but asking the Sunday School teacher is fair game.

The first question you should ask is, “Is this legal?” Well, in America the answer is “yes,” thanks to the exemption churches get from nondiscrimination laws:

The Faith Assembly of God in New York mentions that, “answering yes, or leaving the question unanswered, may not automatically disqualify an applicant for youth or children’s work.”

The questions are shocking, but not rare for Protestant churches and religious organizations across the United States. These groups want to know the personal histories of prospective employees in an attempt to protect themselves against liability for potential sex-abuse scandals based on the false belief that victims of sex abuse as children are destined to become abusers as adults.

“Have you ever been physically or sexually abused as a child?” is one of the questions on the Urbana, Illinois, church’s job application . “If yes, when, where, and what were the circumstances?”

What’s driving all this, of course, is largely money: if you’re going to be sued because you didn’t ask the questions, you’re going to ask them in the future. And if there were a strong correlation between having been abused and the likelihood of becoming an abuser, perhaps that’s a relevant factor.

But against this weigh four factors. First, it’s a severe invasion of privacy to ask somebody a question about whether they were sexually abused, and surely most people who were would want to disclose that only to confidantes or law enforcement.

Second, if you’re a pedophile, you’re not going to answer the question honestly, especially if you know why it’s being asked.

Third, the notion that this is all driven by insurance liability rather than protecting children sticks in my craw. It’s the wrong motivation.

Finally, only churches are allowed to ask this question—for people with “religious tasks”. Why does the need to ask the question outweigh the right to privacy—but only for those with religious jobs? Why can churches re-traumatize victims but schools can’t? After all, there’s plenty of sexual abuse of minors in schools as well. Here we once again see the unwarranted privilege given to religion in America.

In the end, the religious-privilege argument tips the balance for me against asking about abuse. If childhood sexual abuse does say something important about your likelihood of becoming an abuser—and we’d need better data on that—there’s no reason why such considerations should apply only to churches. If such questions are considered “employment discrimination” in secular positions, no matter what the data show, then that should apply to churches as well. Despite the child-abuse scandals of both Catholic and Protestant churches, if the courts have already decided that invasion of privacy outweighs the risks of abuse, then that should hold regardless of whether an organization is religious.