Texas

corruption in the ecclesiastical leadership of a spiritual organization - pedophelia no less - should implode any such org.

their whole thing is supposedly about good and evil and righteous justice for victims, if you read their texts.

instead it's another grift. tithes and perverts.

but one pastor, even the lead pastor, doing an evil doesn't mean the whole church is faulty.

There's a reason the saying is "one bad apple spoils the whole bunch." That kind of fraud and manipulation infects the leadership, wittingly or unwittingly, and I would not be shocked to learn that he's taught them some bad habits when it comes to outing bad leaders. I myself left another megachurch whose story was very similar to this one, and while it may not be exactly the same, it's uncanny how the stories rhyme.

...but one pastor, even the lead pastor, doing an evil doesn't mean the whole church is faulty.

You're probably right. The problem I'm running into is religion's history of causing literally every issue you can think of, up to and including war and everything that comes with it. So while that church may not be faulty, our failure to not use religion as a wall to hide atrocities behind sorta makes it automatically on the wrong side of the fence. Unless it proves otherwise, of course. Which, I think, it has failed to do so quite remarkably.

Only works on Trump. Plus, he didn't try to go on the right wing grift circuit and invoke the magic words that make the crazies forget how critical thinking works (e.g. cancelled, woke, lawfare, Jesus, false flag, globalists, deep state operatives, etc.).

Take everything with i say with a grain of salt/do some searching to get more specifics of what I say, its been years since I've really considered myself properly Catholic and a lot of what I learned is a bit rusty.

It depends on the flavor of Christianity, Catholics and some Protestant denominations that are still traditionally pretty close to Catholics, like the Anglicans, use the all black outfit with the Roman collar, that black collar with the white tab for their day to day outfits and the wear specific robes and garments when performing Mass.

I'm not sure of the details of the various flavors of Orthodox, but the bit I have seen tend to also use the various robes and other garments.

Some flavors of Protestant tend to focus on their leadership being part of the people and being in service to others (and actually do a lot of community service) tend to wear fairly plain common clothes.

And then the big Protestant mega churches that operate more like tax havens than actual ministries serving the community, tend to wear the nice suits and fly in their private jets.

On the first point I had a thought about this the other day. My grandma told me we're supposed to wear "our best" to church and someone wearing jeans would wind her up big time. Then I thought, "Uh, none of these clothes existed when Jesus was alive. If anything we should wear tunics."

Different denominations have different traditions. Christianity is not a monolith and has split many, many, many times.

My experience is that the more separated the church is from the oldest denominations, the less likely the priest or pastor is to wear "traditional" garb. The church in the picture is some flavour of southern evangelical, and so is pretty far removed from Roman Catholicism.

I grew up in a reformed Calvinist tradition and the pastors always wore suits. In later years, younger pastors would even ditch the jacket in the summer.

Situational as to the church. In my experience the less overtly church-like the house of worship, the less likely the pastor is going to dress like what we'd consider a pastor. Football stadium/theater mega church? guys lookin' like a used car salesman. Full stone with the statuary on it? Dudes fit is gonna be immaculate.

A suit seems like good attire for a showmaster and/or business man

This is way worse than pedophilia.

uh no it's literally pedophilia which drove him to sexually assault a minor.

Isn't that what pedophiles do? Any sex with someone so young is sexual assault.

You have no idea the mental gymnastics zealots can get up to.

My grandmother was a fanatical roman catholic and she swore that all the stories about priests diddling little kids were a conspiracy by the rest of the world to discredit Catholicism.