I’ve written a lot about the child-abuse coverup by the hierarchy of the Catholic church, but not because I believe Roman Catholicism is the only religion guilty of these crimes. Far from it! Any religion that preaches the virtues of submission and obedience is inherently vulnerable to abuses of this kind. When religious leaders are believed to possess special wisdom or special favor from God, it’s only too easy for them to abuse that power to violate those who trust them.

It’s happened at a Zen Buddhist center in Los Angeles. It’s happened in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community of Williamsburg. And now it may be happening again, as alleged in an extremely important lawsuit filed against Sovereign Grace Ministries, a major network of white American evangelical churches.

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Once again, the internet has played a role in breaking down religious walls of silence and bringing the truth to light. Since 2007, blogs like SGM Survivors have been leveling accusations of widespread sexual abuse in SGM churches. Most of these stories follow a drearily familiar pattern: the victims are almost always lowly and powerless, usually children, and their abusers are church members in good standing. When abuse victims complain, their pastors discourage them from contacting the police, hush the matter up to prevent “embarrassment,” and in too many cases, dismiss the victim as a troublemaker who’s inventing stories or who brought it on themselves.

But SGM-affiliated churches have their own unique teachings that make things even worse. Like some other evangelical denominations, they put great emphasis on obedience, partitioning families and communities into strict hierarchies of submission. This means that when a person lower in the hierarchy makes an allegation against someone higher up, it’s essentially a violation of that imposed order, and you can imagine whose side the church leaders almost inevitably take: