Blue Collar Scientist

The Anchorage Daily News reports that Richard Wagner, the 46 years old youth pastor at Kenai Bible Church in Kenai, Alaska, has been arrested on charges that he molested a young boy.

Wagner has worked as a volunteer at the nondenominational Kenai Bible Church for about two or three years, teaching Sunday school to the children, said Vance Wonser, the church’s pastor. Church officials learned of the allegations Thursday night, he said.

He was charged with Second Degree Sexual Assault of a Minor. Reports are that at least two children spent the night unsupervised at his house, and that one of them accused him of molestation.

“As soon as we were made aware of the allegations, we immediately removed him from contact with the youth,” [Pastor Vance] Wonser said. “The one allegation that was made was not anything that occurred at the church … it was on his own time and away from the church.”

It is interesting that the church pastor, when responding to these allegations (whether true or not), takes pains to emphasize that if this was done, it was done on his own time, and not on church grounds. I’m puzzled what I’m supposed to think of this. What I’m actually thinking is almost certainly not what the pastor would want: that ethics and morals are the things you do when you are alone and nobody else can see, that a church’s moral teaching should be taken beyond the doors of the church, and that the pastor’s remarks seem to presuppose that this church has failed at that enterprise. The veritable storm of sanctimonious claims that religion provides morality seems, from this perspective, to be yet another a load of baloney.