I tell people they need to know two things about Evangelicals and Southern Baptists: they are more okay with brutal violence than you want to imagine, and more fearful and weird about sex than you could ever imagine.
When I was a teenager, one of my only few friends disappeared, as if his own family had placed him in witness protection. He fell in love with a girl from our group. He participated in swooning acts of courtship (that is what they still call it, as if the buggy is around the corner): he carved her furniture, he wrote stories where every main character was her name. He touched her too. Turns out he also touched his sisters. And took illicit photos of the girls he wanted to touch but didn't. Just like those priests, he went to live somewhere else, and no one spoke of it, except all they did was speak of it through a myriad of back channels.
I wish I was more surprised when I found out, more shocked, more disgusted, more inclined to write him off as a liar, someone totally different than who I knew. But it all seemed so terribly of a piece with the glimpses I would get behind the curtain of his family, the details he would let slip when we were talking boy-to-boy behind some stairwell while younger kids were dancing. Like my few other friends of that religious persuasion, every time a feeling normal to budding men would begin to bubble up verbally, suddenly there was a feeling of paranoia in the air, as if the Stasi lived somewhere behind his own eyes. I'm sure it came from his Dad. The first time I went over to their house when his father was home, I swear I could feel something thick and black permeating the air of the interior. I couldn't believe the smoke detectors weren't going off. He was the sort of person who knew he created that feeling in his space, and liked it. My friend spoke of connecting to his father through violence, almost thankful for the existence of violence, for here was *some* acceptable way to connect: watching bloody zombie shows the girls weren't allowed near, backyard gun ranges for birthdays, wrestling matches to settle scores.
His sister was commanded not to violence but purity, in the form of a literal ring around her finger. Too bad that ring wasn't powerful enough to protect her from her own home. Her Mom dressed as if she had been beamed in from Little House on the Prairie, but of course she had not been. She was an educated person before she gave her heart to an oppressive form of love, both from the man in her kitchen and the man up in the sky. Her kindness couldn't be snuffed, and when it came to her daughter, sometimes a bit of her own mind would assert itself again. The mother saw to it that her daughter could be seen in front of her friends wearing normal clothes, carrying the "family phone" as if it was her own, speaking into it with as much personality as she could find within her.
My friend's sister took that inch her mother gave her and then took a mile in her own name. She took off the purity ring and got out. She took some of her friends with her. and when she did, they were called whores to their face. Just as Jesus would have done, I'm sure. I guess Jesus looks more forgivingly at those who must be sent away than those who choose to send themselves. I ran into her years later at the county fair, hair in the wind, fashions mismatched, and bearing the proudest nose ring I have ever seen in my life, and a sense of relief and justice coursed through me.
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