Sometimes the News Is Sinfully Good Copy

Blessed are the holy men who falter, for they shall provide exceedingly good copy.

If there were such a thing as the Beatitudes of Journalism, that would be in there somewhere.

Oh, it’s probably wicked to poke fun at preachers, but what the heck? It’s a slow news day. But before you accuse me of being the devil’s henchman, let’s stipulate that thousands of preachers across America do wonderful things week in and week out. My oldest friend just happens to be one.

However, when a local church is reeling because a senior pastor, now defrocked, had an affair spanning 18 years with his brother’s wife -- his brother who’s a preacher at the same church -- well, some transgressions are of such biblical proportions they just can’t be ignored.

Not even Jayson Blair could make up a tale like that. Praise God and pass the admonition.

The good folks at Crossroads Community Church in Westminster no doubt wish they could hide all this stuff, but that’s a little tough when one of the ministers -- the one who had the affair -- decides to take other congregants to court.

The offending pastor, Daniel Kruse, is suing a newly formed group of church board members, arguing it was formed illegally. In the meantime, he’s named his son as acting senior pastor to counter the new board naming Jim Kruse -- Daniel’s brother and the new acting pastor’s uncle -- to be senior pastor.

You can only stand in awe of the brazenness of Pastor Daniel, as the parishioners call him. After betraying his wife -- and, for good measure, his brother -- he still has enough gall to name his son to succeed him and to accuse other church members of misdeeds.

H.L. Mencken, a curmudgeonly newspaper columnist of yesteryear, had that sort of thing in mind when he noted, “The trouble with communism is the communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is Christians.”

Unlike most any other profession, you have to take a minister’s word that he’s not a fraud. Theoretically, anyone can memorize the Scriptures, graduate from seminary and deliver a nice talk on Sunday mornings. How can you measure the commitment?

Conversely, if your electrician is a fraud, your lights won’t work. If your doctor, gardener or car mechanic doesn’t know his stuff, it becomes obvious.

With men of the cloth, it’s all trust. It’s not just that they can quote Corinthians, it’s that we trust that they are better people than we are. I’ve sometimes wondered how many preachers make it through an entire career living up to that standard.

The answer is unknowable, but apparently other Americans ask the same question.

A Gallup Poll last year found that 45% of the respondents had either a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in their religious institutions. That confidence level -- believed driven downward by sex-abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church -- was at a 20-year low, according to Gallup. Another 50% had “some” or “very little” confidence in their religious institutions, the poll found.

So, yeah, we can get a few perverse chuckles from the shenanigans in Westminster and cluck our tongues when contemplating all the sermons delivered over the years by Pastor Daniel about doing God’s bidding.

But after the laughs die down, issues remain.

Holy men of all stripes had best get their acts together.

In an effort to leave you laughing, I’ll give Mencken the last word in our midweek sermon. Religion was a favorite topic; he would have loved the Westminster flap. “Say what you will about the Ten Commandments,” he wrote nearly a century ago, “you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only 10 of them.”

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821, at dana.parsons@latimes.com or at The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626.