The Republic of Ireland was a reactionary paradise prior to the revelations about abuses in the Catholic Church: economically backward; intellectually isolated; and dominated socially and politically by the Church. Today, largely as a result of the Church’s loss of prestige, the ROI is a “normal” secular country. Could the recent revelations about the Southern Baptists have a similar result in American red states?
No, for two related reasons. First, the SBs are nowhere nearly as entwined in the secular political system in any American state, regardless of how red, as the Catholic Church was in the ROI. There are plenty of other options for religious consumers in America, so the SBs don’t have that kind of political clout. Second, the SBs are far more decentralized than the Catholic Church. Any abuses in the Catholic system ultimately implicated people at the top of the hierarchy; with the SBs, it will be easy for most of the believers to treat the abusers as a few bad apples for which they have no responsibility.