Better the Devil You Know: The Effect of Sexual Misconduct Disclosure on Future Pastoral Employment

Evidence of sexual misconduct has been notably visible within large religious organizations like the Roman Catholic Church, but observational data highlight patterns of lenience towards perpetrators in other faith settings as well. Many leaders who violate their parishioners are recidivists, serially committing sexual crimes across multiple congregations. What remains unclear, however, is whether pastoral search committees are knowingly hiring leaders with histories of sexual misconduct. For many sexually violent spiritual leaders, their actions persist simply because they are rehired back into positions of religious leadership. It is largely assumed that these patterns persist because evidence of past misconduct is obfuscated during an organization’s hiring process. To be sure, hiring decision makers are not always made aware of a candidate’s past offenses. But, as evidenced by these and other investigations, they often are.

What happens in these latter instances? Once a hiring body is made aware of a candidate’s history of sexual impropriety, how do institutional actors react to, contend with, and assess the risks associated with such disclosures? And if a pastoral candidate voluntarily reveals a history of past sexual misconduct, how does his disclosure impact the employment opportunities made available to him?(1) These questions demand the application of rigorous sociological methods to religious contexts, exploring issues of profound moral concern.

Through an audit study, I experimentally test whether candidates for church leadership positions face hindrances in the initial hiring process if they disclose a history of sexual misconduct in their application.(2) I concentrate my inquiry on the largest religious community in the United States: The Protestant Christian Church. Focusing on this religious institution, one that boasts thousands of denominations, ministries, and programs worldwide, reveals how one of the largest value-driven organizations navigates the consequential issue of sexual misconduct. Procedurally, this audit entails sending resumes and cover letters to 1,558 open lead pastor jobs in Protestant Christian churches over the period of one year (September 2023-September 2024). The experimental stimuli, which are embedded in the applicant’s cover letter, takes the form of a testimonial where the candidate alludes to having committed some transgression before becoming a Christian and dedicating himself to helping others find redemption too. The actual experimental manipulation consists of substantively altering the applicant's acknowledgement of misconduct within his materials. The resulting study therefore features a between-subjects design with one factor (applicant self-disclosure) and three levels (sexual misconduct, alcohol misuse, and a control condition that omits the testimonial component and therefore includes no disclosure of any type).(3)

Preliminary results indicate that applicants who disclose sexual misconduct are almost twice as likely to receive callbacks compared to applicants who do not. Of applicants who acknowledge past sexual misconduct, 64 percent receive a callback; callback rates are lower for those in the control condition (no admission of past transgressions; .33) and those who disclose a history of alcohol misuse (.22). The difference in outcomes is significant between sexual misconduct and the other two conditions at p<.01 and p<.001, respectively. Additionally, I received replies from some target churches that seem to support the presence of this “sexual misconduct preference.” Consider this church that requested a Zoom interview and praised the applicant’s willingness to share his testimony, saying, “I greatly value your transparency regarding your previous shortcomings and understand the pain they must have caused everyone involved. It's wonderful to see this as part of your redemptive journey.”

By leveraging a long-tested experimental method in an organizational setting where it has not yet been utilized, this study sheds new light on how institutional gatekeepers procedurally confront, conceal, or, as my findings suggest, actually reward revelations of sexual misconduct among pastoral hopefuls.

(1) The use of masculine language here is intentional. Several religious communities do not allow women to hold pastoral leadership roles. To reach as wide a distribution as possible without biasing my results, I prepared and submitted materials featuring a male candidate only.

(2) Strictly speaking, audit studies are field experiments that are conducted in person. Correspondence studies are nearly identical to audit studies except for they are deployed, as their name suggests, through correspondence (usually email or some other form of distributed communication). See Gaddis 2018; Pedulla 2018.

(3) I chose to introduce a second treatment condition (alcohol misuse) to disentangle the effect of a disclosure paragraph from that of a sexual misconduct disclosure specifically. Doing so illuminates whether the observed effect of sexual misconduct acknowledgement is indeed a result of disclosing sexual misconduct specifically or the effect of simply having a testimonial confession present in one’s application. Given my focus on sexual misconduct, the hypotheses in this study only reference the relevant sexual misconduct treatment arm and refrain from making claims about the substantive nature of the self-disclosed misconduct.