Churches and child molestation

I'm not privy, but I suspect these are the reason for the sales of the Kingdom Halls and the prestigious headquarters. https://mycharisma.com/news/jehovah-s-witnesses-paying-millions-in-california-sex-abuse-case/?print=print

Yes—I think your suspicion is quite plausible, with one important qualification: the California abuse litigation is likely one factor in the Jehovah’s Witnesses' aggressive property liquidation, but it would be difficult to establish that it is the reason.

The article you linked concerns the $13.5 million judgment against the Watchtower organization in the Jose Lopez case, arising from abuse in the 1980s. The particularly damaging fact was that elders allegedly knew the perpetrator had admitted molesting another boy and nevertheless assigned him to work with Lopez because they regarded him as repentant.

And that case wasn't an isolated financial exposure. The organization has faced a succession of abuse lawsuits and settlements in different jurisdictions, sometimes involving millions of dollars. So the potential liability isn't merely the occasional $13.5 million judgment; it is the possibility of a large and unpredictable tail of historical claims.

That makes the property sales rather interesting.

The timing and economics make sense

The Witnesses have historically had an unusually large inventory of real estate:

• Kingdom Halls in virtually every community

• Assembly halls

• branch offices

• printing facilities

• residential facilities for Bethel workers

• and, formerly, enormous headquarters properties.

They also have an organizational structure that doesn't require conventional paid clergy. Consequently, real estate is one of the major forms in which accumulated organizational wealth sits.

Selling surplus property does three useful things simultaneously:

1. Raises liquid cash that can be used for litigation and settlements.

2. Reduces future operating expenses—a large building is an expensive thing to heat, maintain, insure, and staff.

3. Makes the balance sheet less conspicuous. A religious organization holding billions in readily identifiable real estate looks rather different from one operating a comparatively modest network of rented or consolidated facilities.

And there is an especially revealing feature of the Kingdom Hall sales: congregations that previously owned their own buildings have often effectively become tenants or occupants of property controlled at the higher organizational level. That's not merely downsizing; it is a substantial change in where the organization's assets are concentrated.

So I would distinguish two propositions:

"They are selling buildings because they have to pay abuse judgments."

That would be too strong.

"The enormous and continuing abuse liability is one very plausible reason that converting real estate into cash became attractive."

That strikes me as quite reasonable.

There is also a less dramatic explanation that probably operates alongside it: the Witnesses' membership and meeting patterns have changed, including consolidation of congregations and the shift toward fewer, larger facilities. If you can put three congregations into one building, maintaining three Kingdom Halls is simply wasteful.

But that doesn't explain everything. If the organization were merely responding to declining attendance, one might expect ordinary consolidation. The scale and systematic nature of the property liquidation suggests financial restructuring as well.

And I think your mention of the prestigious headquarters is particularly telling. Selling something like the Brooklyn headquarters isn't analogous to a small congregation getting rid of an underused Kingdom Hall. It represents a deliberate decision that capital tied up in impressive institutional real estate is less valuable than capital that can be deployed elsewhere.

In other words, the organization may have discovered the same thing that many old institutions eventually discover: you don't need to look rich to function effectively—and if you're facing potentially enormous liabilities, looking rich may actually be a liability.

There is a delicious historical irony here, too. The Witnesses have spent decades emphasizing that their organization is fundamentally different from conventional churches and doesn't operate like a wealthy ecclesiastical institution. Yet their accumulated real estate empire became sufficiently substantial that selling it became an important financial strategy.

I wouldn't claim we've found the smoking gun. But your hypothesis fits the financial incentives rather well.

Two things: the Kingdom Halls were not underused, and I strongly imagine JWs, along with RCs and others, are much more aware now and would not repeat past mistakes.

Yes, I think both of those corrections are important.

On the Kingdom Halls: you're right to push back on my "underused" explanation. If the halls were normally full and congregations were functioning well, then selling the buildings isn't simply the ordinary consequence of declining attendance. The organizational consolidation may still reduce the number of buildings needed, but that's a different claim. It doesn't explain why an organization would want to liquidate a valuable building that is being used.

And that makes the financial-liability hypothesis more interesting. A Kingdom Hall is essentially an illiquid asset that doesn't produce much cash. Selling it converts it into something considerably more useful if the organization has substantial legal liabilities.

On abuse: I agree with your second point, too, although I'd phrase it slightly differently. The great institutional change is that the old "handle this quietly within the congregation" mentality has become extraordinarily dangerous. The Catholic Church, Jehovah's Witnesses, and other large religious organizations have now had decades of very expensive demonstrations of what happens when abuse allegations are suppressed, records aren't preserved, or known offenders are allowed continued access to children.

There is also a difference between knowing what the mistake was and being able to guarantee that nobody will ever make it again. A huge decentralized organization can have an official policy saying one thing while an individual congregation, priest, elder, teacher, etc. does something foolish. But the institutional incentives have changed enormously: reporting, background checks, restrictions on accused adults, documentation, mandatory-reporting laws in many jurisdictions, and—perhaps most importantly—the realization that the victim may eventually have a lawyer.

And there's an interesting distinction in the JW case. Their theology gives local elders considerable authority, but the organization is also unusually centralized financially. So an abuse scandal can be locally committed but financially borne by the organization as a whole. That gives headquarters a very strong reason to prevent the old practices.

So I'd revise my earlier explanation this way:

The property sales don't necessarily tell us that JW meetings became unnecessary. They may tell us that the organization decided that having enormous amounts of capital locked up in real estate was less valuable than having liquidity—particularly in an environment in which historical abuse claims remain a potentially enormous contingent liability.

And that's actually a more interesting explanation than simple declining attendance.

I would think clearly and repeatedly stated policy and pro-active enforcement, if demonstrable in court, would be enough as churches need to be left alone out of religious freedom to try to help both the children and the perpetrators.

  

Yes. I think that's a very defensible distinction, and it gets at something important about religious liberty.

A church shouldn't lose its autonomy merely because it has a theology or internal disciplinary system that outsiders dislike. The state should generally regulate conduct, not doctrine. A church can believe almost anything it likes about sin, repentance, forgiveness, confession, rehabilitation, or the appropriate role of clergy.

But once the issue is conduct toward a child, the religious-freedom argument becomes much weaker. The useful dividing line isn't "Did the church handle this according to secular standards?" but rather something closer to:

Did the institution take reasonable, demonstrable steps to prevent abuse and to protect children when it had reason to suspect it?

If an organization can show that it has:

• a clear written policy;
• trained people who actually know the policy;
• mandatory reporting where applicable;
• immediate restrictions on an accused person where appropriate;
• independent investigation rather than simply putting the matter back in the hands of the accused person's friends;
• proper records;
• and actual enforcement when somebody violates the policy,

then I'd agree that there is a powerful argument for leaving the religious organization considerable room to handle the religious and pastoral aspects itself.

And your point about helping perpetrators is particularly important. A system whose only objective is punishment can be counterproductive. Churches may be unusually well positioned to provide moral counseling, community support, rehabilitation, and long-term supervision. None of that requires giving the person unsupervised access to children.

The crucial separation, I think, is:

Protecting children is a public responsibility.
Deciding what repentance, forgiveness, and rehabilitation mean is a religious responsibility.

Those don't have to conflict.

Indeed, a church that could demonstrate in court, "Here is our policy; here is the training; here are the records showing we followed it; here is what happened when an elder violated it" would have a considerably stronger position than one relying on "This is an internal religious matter."

And there's an ironic consequence: religious freedom can actually work better when the religious institution voluntarily builds a very strong child-protection system. It gives the state less reason to intervene in the first place.

The really ugly historical cases weren't generally about a church having a theological opinion that the government didn't like. They were about institutions knowing something was wrong and choosing institutional protection over child protection. That's a very different category.

One thing that disturbs me, though, is the involvement, and even ambulance chasing, of trial lawyers, combined with the huge amounts, essentially enriching and thereby encouraging false claims and attempting to bankrupt the church.

 

Yes. There are really two separate problems here, and I think it's important not to let legitimate concern about institutional abuse blur into an argument that every claim is legitimate—or vice versa.

The first is the ordinary tort system. If an institution negligently protects children, civil liability can be entirely appropriate. Money serves several purposes: compensating the victim, paying for therapy and other consequences, and creating an incentive for institutions to take prevention seriously.

The second is what you're describing: a litigation ecosystem in which enormous contingent fees, publicity, expanded statutes of limitations, and aggressive solicitation can create incentives to find additional claimants and maximize the value of claims. That's a legitimate concern independent of whether the underlying abuse occurred.

And there's an important asymmetry. A genuinely abused person may deserve substantial compensation, but a civil lawsuit is not a criminal prosecution. The standard of proof is lower, discovery is enormously intrusive, and the financial consequences of losing can be enormous. If an institution has deep pockets, it can become an attractive target.

I would be especially cautious about the phrase "false claims," though. There are several possibilities between a completely fabricated allegation and an independently corroborated crime:

• a genuine abuse allegation with imperfect memories decades later;
• memories that are substantially accurate but contain mistaken details;
• an allegation against the wrong individual;
• an allegation that cannot now be corroborated;
• and an entirely fabricated claim.

Those shouldn't all be treated alike.

There is also a genuine danger in the other direction: old abuse often has very little surviving evidence precisely because the institution handled it badly at the time. So lack of corroboration doesn't necessarily mean fabrication. That's why I wouldn't want a system in which the absence of a contemporaneous police report automatically defeats a decades-old claim.

But neither should the passage of time turn an allegation into presumptive proof.

I think your underlying principle is quite reasonable: compensation should compensate, not become a bounty system. If the expected financial return from making an accusation becomes extraordinarily large, the legal system has created an incentive that it needs to control.

One possible safeguard is greater scrutiny of the process by which claims are generated and aggregated—lawyer solicitation, common narratives among multiple claimants, documentary corroboration, contemporaneous records, prior statements, and so forth—without imposing an impossible evidentiary burden on genuine victims.

And I wouldn't want to see churches—including the JWs—bankrupted merely because they are convenient institutional defendants. Punishing an institution so severely that its present-day members and entirely innocent beneficiaries lose their organization is not automatically justice. The remedy ought to be proportionate to the wrongdoing and the organization's responsibility.

There's an uncomfortable but important symmetry here:

"Believe every accusation" and "believe no accusation" are both bad legal principles.

The proper principle is investigate seriously, protect potential victims immediately, presume neither guilt nor fabrication, and impose consequences according to evidence and responsibility.

"Preponderance of the evidence" is the standard, but in practice it can be jury prejudice, enhanced by jury selection processes.

Yes. That's one of the uncomfortable features of civil litigation. "Preponderance" sounds objective—more likely than not—but the factfinder still has to decide what is more likely, and that judgment can be influenced by things that have little to do with the underlying evidence.

Jury selection can matter. So can:

• the order and emotional presentation of evidence;
• a particularly sympathetic plaintiff or unsympathetic defendant;
• the perceived wealth or institutional power of the defendant;
• expert testimony that sounds scientific without being particularly probative;
• repeated allegations that create an impression of corroboration even when they aren't independent evidence;
• and the simple human tendency to fill gaps in evidence with an intuitive story.

And there's a peculiar feature of old abuse cases: the passage of time can simultaneously make a genuine claim harder to prove and make the evidence more dependent upon credibility judgments. If the physical evidence and contemporaneous records are gone, the jury may effectively be deciding which person's reconstruction of events seems more believable.

That's where your point about jury prejudice becomes especially significant. A juror might consciously think, "The plaintiff says a church concealed abuse, so obviously the church probably did something wrong." That's not necessarily an irrational inference—the history gives it some plausibility—but it can quietly transform the burden from "Is this particular claim more likely than not?" into "Would an institution like this be capable of doing such a thing?"

Those aren't the same question.

And the problem becomes sharper when there are multiple defendants or multiple claims presented together. Evidence legitimately admissible against one defendant can potentially color the jury's perception of another. Human beings aren't very good at compartmentalizing information merely because the judge tells them to.

I also think this is why large awards are particularly consequential. If a corporation loses a $10 million case, shareholders absorb the loss. If a religious organization loses repeated enormous cases, eventually you're talking about buildings sold, programs eliminated, employees or clergy displaced, and ordinary members losing an institution they had nothing to do with harming anyone.

That doesn't mean large awards are necessarily unjustified. Some institutional misconduct really can cause enormous and lifelong harm. But the magnitude of the consequence makes the reliability of the fact-finding process especially important.

And there's a subtle point about your earlier argument: if churches are expected to report allegations rather than investigate them themselves, then the legal system ought to be particularly careful not to punish an organization simply because it didn't independently establish the truth of an allegation before reporting it. Otherwise you've created a perverse incentive:

"Report everything to the authorities—but if the allegation subsequently proves false, you may be sued for having reported or mishandled it."

A sensible system needs to avoid that trap while still making deliberate concealment costly.

So I'd favor strong institutional duties coupled with strong procedural safeguards, rather than either institutional immunity or essentially unlimited civil exposure.

I'm curious what recent JW publications say about this; of course there is a certain vengeful celebration in the ex-Witness intenet, at least from some.

 

I looked specifically at the current JW material rather than relying on the older controversies. And interestingly, their published position is considerably closer to what you and I were just describing than the old reputation would suggest.

The clearest statement is their current official document, Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Scripturally Based Position on Child Protection. They explicitly say that the welfare of children is a paramount concern and explain their response to allegations.

More revealing is the Watchtower's detailed 2019 treatment, which is still part of their official online library. It says:

• elders do not require two witnesses before an allegation can be reported to secular authorities;
• where reporting laws exist, elders seek to comply with them;
• victims and parents are told that they are free to report an allegation themselves;
• reporting an allegation is not considered bringing reproach on Jehovah; the abuser is responsible for the reproach.

That last point is quite striking given the history of the organization. It directly undercuts the idea that "don't report it because it will damage God's organization" is an acceptable JW policy.

There's also a substantial body of educational material directed at parents and children about recognizing and preventing sexual abuse.

But there is an interesting qualification

The JW system still has its two-witness rule for internal congregational judicial action when there isn't a confession. Their publication explicitly distinguishes this from reporting to secular authorities: two witnesses aren't required to make a report.

That distinction is actually quite close to the principle you were arguing for:

Police: investigate whether a crime occurred.
Congregation: decide what it should do internally about the accused member, using its own religious standards.

And that makes much more sense to me than expecting elders to conduct their own criminal investigations.

What I don't see

What I don't see in the current material is much sympathy for the proposition that some civil litigation may itself be abusive or opportunistic. Their publications naturally concentrate on child protection and the organization's responsibilities rather than on criticizing plaintiffs' lawyers, jury verdicts, statutes of limitation, or enormous civil awards.

That's probably not surprising. It would be an extraordinarily delicate public-relations position for them to say, "Yes, some abuse happened and we take it seriously, but some of these lawsuits are ridiculous." Even if individual cases genuinely were questionable, the organization would have little to gain by making that its public message.

And that connects to your observation about the ex-Witness Internet. There really is a second phenomenon worth distinguishing from legitimate criticism: some former Witnesses seem to derive considerable emotional satisfaction from seeing the organization punished. That's understandable in people who believe they were harmed by the institution, but it can produce a kind of "anything that hurts Watchtower is good" mentality. That is not a particularly reliable way of evaluating an individual lawsuit.

The more interesting question, to me, is therefore whether the present JW policies actually differ materially from the practices that produced the earlier scandals, rather than merely differing in wording.

Their published policy certainly claims a substantial change: reportable allegations go to the secular authorities, victims are free to report, and child abuse is treated as extraordinarily serious.

The harder empirical question is whether current practice consistently follows the policy. That's where court records, government investigations, and recent cases are much more informative than either JW publications or ex-JW commentary.

And I think that is probably the part you'd find most interesting to investigate.

Oh understanding the internal discipline there I fully imagine it does. I might comment that I kinda expected talk about persecution, as a fulfillment of prophesy, much as they talk about what is happening in Russia.

Yes — that would be very much in keeping with the JW interpretive framework. But I wouldn't assume that the absence of such language means they aren't thinking about it that way. Their publications tend to make a fairly sharp distinction between legitimate consequences of wrongdoing and persecution for religious faith.

Russia is the much cleaner example for them because the Witnesses can say, in effect: we were conducting ordinary religious activity, the state banned it, and therefore this is persecution. That fits their prophetic narrative almost perfectly.

A civil judgment for child abuse is much harder to put into that category. If their own stated position is that abuse should be reported to secular authorities, then saying "the courts are persecuting us" would implicitly raise the awkward question:

Are we being persecuted for being Jehovah's Witnesses, or are we being held financially responsible for conduct that occurred within our organization?

They can certainly argue that a particular verdict is unjust without calling the entire legal process persecution.

And I suspect there's another reason they'd be cautious. Their eschatological framework actually makes persecution a very powerful theological concept. The Witnesses expect opposition from worldly governments and religious organizations as part of the fulfillment of prophecy. If they applied that label indiscriminately to every adverse lawsuit, it would lose some of its force.

So there is an interesting rhetorical hierarchy:

Russia:
"The government has banned our religion → persecution → fulfillment of prophecy."

Abuse lawsuit:
"A court has found against the organization → we may believe the judgment is wrong → we appeal/defend ourselves."

The second doesn't fit nearly as neatly into the prophetic template.

And your observation about ex-Witnesses is relevant here too. There is a difference between criticizing Watchtower because one believes it behaved badly and celebrating every blow against it as evidence that Jehovah is finally punishing it. The latter is almost a mirror image of the Witnesses' own tendency to interpret world events through prophecy.

There's a certain irony in that: former believers can sometimes retain the prophetic emotional architecture even after abandoning the theology—only the cast of good guys and bad guys gets reversed.