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

Evidence of sexual violence has been notably visible within large religious organizations like the Catholic Church, but observational data highlight patterns of lenience towards perpetrators in other faith settings as well. Many spiritual leaders who violate their parishioners are recidivists, serially committing sexual crimes in multiple congregations. What remains unclear, however, is whether pastoral search committees are knowingly hiring spiritual leaders with histories of sexual misconduct. A field experiment run from Sept 2023-Sept 2024 explored whether an applicant’s acknowledgement of past professional misconduct affected opportunities for pastoral employment. Applicants to pastoral jobs who disclosed sexual misconduct were almost twice as likely to receive callbacks than those who did not. This study successfully applies a long-tested sociological experimental method to a setting where it has not yet been utilized, thus contributing novel causal evidence concerning a phenomenon that is just as socially important as it is empirically understudied.