Savage had met the teenager when he was in college and serving as an intern at a Baptist church near Houston. Instead, the congregation at Highpoint Church gave their pastor a long standing ovation. Savage’s story joins a long and growing list of reports of sexual abuse and harassment in evangelical churches and ministries that have come to light in the last several years. What all these stories have made clear is that the problem of sexual abuse and assault is as rampant within American evangelicalism as it is in any of the supposedly godless precincts of Hollywood, Wall Street or Capitol Hill. That so many of these accounts involve the sexual abuse of underage women, however, suggests there might be something particularly unique about the culture of American evangelicalism that leaves young women especially vulnerable to sexual violation.

Source: Huffington Post January 27, 2018 12:56 UTC