BAPTISM IN A COFFIN
Can pardon be freely given for the worst offense?
Ralph C. Wood
January 1, 1993
A former student of mine, now the pastor of a rural Baptist congregation, recently invited me to lecture at his church. After finishing my duties on a Saturday morning, I was preparing to make a quick exit for my two-hour drive home when my pastor-friend halted me with a hesitant question: Would I accompany him to the local minimum-security prison for a baptism?
The prisoner's family and home-town preacher would probably not attend, and so the cloud of witnesses celebrating the new birth of this convert would be small indeed. My presence might, in fact, double the congregation. Thinking of all the yard work I could do that Saturday afternoon, I was tempted to decline, but in the end I agreed.
Over lunch I learned the newly professed Christian was no ordinary prisoner. He was incarcerated not for stealing cars or selling dope but for the crime our society is perhaps least prepared to pardon. In a drunken stupor this man had molested his ten-year-old daughter. He had thus committed a triple violation-of the girl's sexual integrity, her filial trust, her moral innocence.
No wonder that child molesters are the most despised of all criminals and that their fellow inmates call them "short eyes." Convicts understand, as many of us do not, that no clearly considered human motive-however sinister-could prompt such an act: it must spring from a blindness made all the more terrible for being self-inflicted.
Real repentance?
My suspicions were instant and numerous. Was this a convenient jail-house conversion that might lead to a quicker parole, a sentimental turning to God because there was nowhere else to turn, a desperate search for pastoral acceptance when societal rejection was sure to come?
The pastor told me something that caused me ...
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