From 2 Samuel to the Epstein List: Same Story, Different Century
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The Epstein files are dominating the news cycle, and everybody's got a take. But here's ours: this story isn't new. Not even close. In fact, if you crack open your Bible to 2 Samuel, you'll find a version of it that's been sitting there for thousands of years, and the church has been preaching around it ever since.
This week on the podcast, we didn't set out to recap the Epstein case. There are plenty of people doing that. What we wanted to talk about is the pattern. The ancient, persistent, maddeningly consistent pattern of powerful men exploiting the vulnerable and getting away with it. And how the church, rather than being a check on that power, has often been complicit in protecting it.
The David Problem
If you grew up in church, you know the David highlight reel. Giant-slayer. Psalm-writer. Man after God's own heart. What you probably didn't get from the pulpit, at least not with the same enthusiasm, is the rest of the story.
David sees Bathsheba bathing on the roof, which is where you'd bathe because that's where the rainwater collected. He sends for her. The text says he "lay with her." Whether that constitutes rape has been debated by scholars for centuries, but here's what isn't debatable: he was the king, and she didn't have the option to say no. That's a power dynamic, full stop.
When she gets pregnant, David tries to cover it up by bringing her husband Uriah home from war, hoping he'll sleep with her and no one will do the math. But Uriah (a non-Israelite soldier, by the way) is more honorable than the king. He refuses to go home to his wife while his fellow soldiers are in the field. So David has him placed on the front line and orders the troops to pull back, leaving Uriah to die.
Adultery. Murder. Cover-up. If you go back to Leviticus and Deuteronomy and look at the laws that were supposed to be in effect during David's time, both of those offenses carried the death penalty. But David is the king. And it turns out it's good to be the king.
The prophet Nathan confronts him. David repents. God says the sword will not depart from his house. And what follows is a cascade of generational violence, including, in the very next chapter, one of David's sons raping his half-sister Tamar.
The Part Nobody Preaches
Here's what makes us want to flip a table: when David finds out about Tamar's assault, the text says he was "very angry." And then he does absolutely nothing. No justice. No protection. No accountability. Tamar is silenced. Her rapist is protected. Sound familiar?
As Benjamin Cremer (@brcremer) pointed out in a viral Instagram series, the church learned somewhere along the way to preach David's repentance louder than his abuse. We built an entire theology around the idea that David was an "imperfect vessel" used by God, and in doing so, we created a framework where powerful men get to be flawed and forgiven while women and children become collateral damage.
That framework didn't stay in the Old Testament. It showed up in 2016 when evangelical leaders heard the Access Hollywood tape and said, "God uses flawed men — just look at King David." It showed up when a civil jury found a former president liable for sexual abuse and support from white evangelicals didn't budge. It shows up every time a church covers for a pastor and tells a woman she must have misunderstood, or that she should forgive, or that she should go back to her husband.
The Story in Judges Nobody Wants to Read
And then there's Judges 19, which might be the most disturbing passage in the entire Bible. A man traveling through a town is offered hospitality. When the men of the town come demanding the guest be sent out to them, the host offers his virgin daughter and the traveler's concubine instead. The concubine is pushed outside, brutalized all night, and found dead at the doorstep in the morning.
Neither woman has a voice in the story. Neither is asked. Neither is protected.
This Isn't Ancient History
The Epstein files might feel shocking because names are attached and documents are public. (Let's face it, though, are any of us really shocked?) But the dynamics at play, powerful men being shielded, victims being silenced, institutions closing ranks, are the same ones that have been documented in the Catholic Church's abuse scandal, in the Southern Baptist Convention's 205-page DOJ report detailing 700 cases of abuse, in the story of John MacArthur's church telling a woman to return to her abusive husband who turned out to be a child molester.
About four percent of Catholic clergy were accused of sexual abuse of minors between 1950 and 2002. Roughly one in fourteen Protestant ministers have been accused over a similar timeframe. And a high percentage of survivors report that their abuse was covered up or minimized by church authorities rather than reported externally, especially in Protestant churches that lack the centralized structure to hold anyone accountable.
The pattern is consistent: men in power abuse that power, the institution protects itself, and the vulnerable pay the price.
So What Do We Do?
Once we laid all of this out, the question became: okay, now what?
A few things we propose:
Separate forgiveness from leadership. Forgiveness is a spiritual matter. But forgiveness does not mean someone gets to keep their position of authority. Repenting doesn't erase consequences, even the Bible makes that clear with David.
Mandatory external reporting. Teachers are mandatory reporters. Anyone working with kids in most professional settings is a mandatory reporter. There is no reason the church should be exempt from that standard, and there should be stiff consequences for not reporting and covering it up.
Normalize talking about power dynamics. We need to be having conversations with our kids, in our churches, in our communities about what spiritual authority abuse and grooming look like before it escalates to physical or sexual abuse.
Protect whistleblowers. The women who came forward within the SBC were met with victim-blaming from within the denomination. That cannot be the cost of telling the truth.
Believe women. Trauma affects memory. Survivors may not have every detail perfectly ordered. That doesn't mean they're lying. It means they survived something terrible and are brave enough to talk about it.
Stop idolizing leaders. Pastors are people. When we put them on pedestals, we create the conditions for abuse of power. And when those leaders start treating themselves like they're untouchable with security details and unapproachable personas, that's when the rot sets in.
The Light in All of This
It's hard to find the bright spot in an episode like this. At risk of sounding like the classic Sunday School answer, though, there is. Jesus.
Jesus protected the vulnerable. He publicly rebuked religious leaders. He reserved his harshest language not for sinners but for those who abused their spiritual authority. He didn't stone the woman caught in adultery, he challenged the men holding the rocks. He spoke to women, elevated women, appeared first to women after the resurrection.
Jesus is the king of kings. And the way he treated the powerless is how it was always supposed to be. The church just forgot — or chose not to remember.
As Benjamin Cremer said, "If our Christianity causes us to protect the powerful and ignore the powerless, we're following someone other than Jesus. And the world is watching. The wounded are watching. The next generation is watching.
And so is God."