“God is going to deal with it,” a neighbor of the pastor told a local reporter. But then, if God has been taking care of things, why did God allow a child to be sexually attacked by a Christian preacher?

The Palatka Christian attack was not an isolated incident.

The pastor of the 2/42 Community Church in Livingston County, Michigan admitted that he had been watching people through a secret camera he put in the church’s bathroom, and trafficking in child pornography. He pleaded guilty to fifteen criminal charges, including tampering with evidence, child sexually abusive activity, using a computer to commit a crime, possession of child sexually abusive material, and surveilling an unclothed person.

A few days earlier, a youth pastor at a church in Sunnyside, Washington was arrested and charged three counts of third-degree child rape and a single count of communicating with a minor for immoral purposes, after he was caught sending an electronic message to a 15 year-old, telling the minor to prepare to have sex with him.

A couple of days after that, the pastor of the Baldwin Baptist Mission Church, in Baldwin, Louisiana was caught by police in Texas while trying to escape responsibility for raping the child of one of the church’s members. “We trust God to bring healing and restoration,” said the pastor of a nearby Baptist church in reaction to the arrest. What isn’t clear is whether members of the area’s churches feel that they can trust their god to protect them from predatory preachers.

You get the picture. There’s a question that few Christian church leaders are asking, much less providing an honest answer for: Why are so many Christian preachers sexually assaulting children?