Nancy French, a conservative Christian who was herself once the victim of sexual abuse, has written a column for the Washington Post explaining how sexual predators use their positions of authority within churches to prey on the young.

“I used to admire men like Roy Moore, because I loved everything about church — the off-key a cappella rendition of ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers,’ the typos in the bulletin, the ladies who smelled like Aquanet with little round rouge circles on their cheeks, and — yes — men like Moore who said long prayers and ran the show,” she begins her column.

ADVERTISEMENT

French then explains how, when she was 12 years old, a priest offered to drive her home from Bible school and then eventually kissed her.

“At 12 years old, I swooned over my good luck,” she writes. “He picked me out of all the girls at church. But the relationship, especially after he moved on, reset my moral compass. If all the church conversation about morality and sexual purity was a lie, what else was fake?”

Reading accounts of Roy Moore’s alleged sexual advances made toward minors, French realized there was a pattern to the ways that purportedly religious men use their authority to take advantage of others.

“The evil of sexual predators is that they attack the weak, make them weaker, then discredit them because of their weakness,” she writes. “These arrogant monsters go on to bigger and better things, leaving a collection of wounded people in their wake.”

Read the whole column here.