Today, a long-awaited independent report on the Southern Baptist Convention’s leadership and its response to accusations of sexual assault by SBC pastors and leaders was released...and, simply put, the investigators found extreme evil in Southern Baptist leadership over the past 20 years. As Christianity Today said in the opening of their lead article of this afternoon:
Armed with a secret list of more than 700 abusive pastors, Southern Baptist leaders chose to protect the denomination from lawsuits rather than protect the people in their churches from further abuse.
Survivors, advocates, and some Southern Baptists themselves spent more than 15 years calling for ways to keep sexual predators from moving quietly from one flock to another. The men who controlled the Executive Committee (EC)—which runs day-to-day operations of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC)—knew the scope of the problem. But, working closely with their lawyers, they maligned the people who wanted to do something about abuse and repeatedly rejected pleas for help and reform.
Prominent SBC figures, including presidents of the Convention and members of the SBC Executive Committee (which is responsible for the day-to-day operations of the Convention) ignored reports of sexual assault, acted to minimize them, degraded survivors who tried to make their accusations known, and protected pastors and staff at SBC churches who committed the crimes. They even maintained that database of accused persons as they were publicly stating that they could not create such a database because of the traditional autonomy of local Southern Baptist churches.
You can read the full report if you wish, but I caution you — like me, you will probably be seething with anger and rage by the time you finish reading their conclusions. The fact that the very leaders of the so-called ‘conservative resurgence’ (aka ‘conservative takeover’) of the SBC were deeply involved in the predation, lies, and deception should surprise no one.
Dr. Russell Moore, the former head of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission who was hounded out of office for both his public opposition to Donald Trump and his calls for investigation into sexual assault in the SBC, wrote an op-ed today entitled “This is the Southern Baptist Apocalypse”; speaking as a rank-and-file Southern Baptist, I think he’s absolutely right:
And yet, as I read the report, I found that I could not swipe the screen to the next page because my hands were shaking with rage. That’s because, as dark a view as I had of the SBC Executive Committee, the investigation uncovers a reality far more evil and systemic than I imagined it could be.
The conclusions of the report are so massive as to almost defy summation. It corroborates and details charges of deception, stonewalling, and intimidation of victims and those calling for reform. It includes written conversations among top Executive Committee staff and their lawyers that display the sort of inhumanity one could hardly have scripted for villains in a television crime drama. It documents callous cover-ups by some SBC leaders and credible allegations of sexually predatory behavior by some leaders themselves, including former SBC president Johnny Hunt (who was one of the only figures in SBC life who seemed to be respected across all of the typical divides).
If you take a look at SBC voices on social media, there’s a LOT of anger today, and I think the repercussions will have foundational effects upon the Convention.
My opinion is simple:
- That secret database of accused persons (700+ individuals, 400+ of whom are/were affiliated with SBC churches/organizations, as of 2022) must be fully reviewed by a third party.
- Every person subject credible accusations of sexual assault must face the appropriate charges, and the SBC must present whatever information it may possess to law enforcement.
- If credible accusations are outside the statute of limitations, the SBC must make whatever information it may possess available to the public.
- Every person found to have minimized or covered up sexual assault should be fired RIGHT NOW and held publicly accountable for their actions; if they’ve already resigned/retired (as have several of them), they still need to be held publicly accountable.
- Any SBC church that hires any of these people in any leadership role should face eviction from the relevant state Convention/Association, which would automatically evict them from the national Convention. (This is known as “withdrawal of fellowship”, but is tantamount to eviction.) If they’re going to evict congregations for hiring a women pastor, they sure as heck can evict them for sheltering sexual predators.
- A permanent, independent body must be formed to handle accusations of sexual assault and ensure that law enforcement is engaged in each case as appropriate.
The one good thing I can find in this evil mess is that we only have this report because the rank-and-file churches who participated in last year’s Annual Meeting voted to force a third-party investigation of the SBC Executive Committee on this question...and threatened to defund them completely if they didn’t formally waive attorney-client privilege for the full scope of the investigation.
(Naturally, the law firm that had served the Executive Committee for 60 years quit immediately after attorney-client privilege was waived, as did the then-president of the Executive Committee...and now we know that they repeatedly advised the EC and multiple SBC presidents to avoid doing anything that could bring legal liability to bear on the Convention. Disgusting...)
The voices demanding justice in the SBC are, after decades of activism, the loudest they’ve ever been, and I think they reached critical mass at last year’s Annual Meeting. This report justifies everything we’ve said over all those years..but there’s a LOT of work ahead of us. I grieve that so many victims have suffered so much, but I’m glad that this report is public, and I hope that we can use it to compel real change at every level.