Another former SBC president, Jack Graham, “allegedly allowed an accused abuser of young boys to be dismissed quietly in 1989 without reporting the abuse to police,” Guidepost wrote. For example, one former SBC president, Steve Gaines, “delayed reporting a staff minister’s prior sexual abuse of a child,” the report found. Not only did senior Baptist leaders ignore abuse and disparage those who reported abuse, but a shocking number were implicated in misconduct themselves, including several of the most powerful and influential men in modern Baptist history. The report states that survivors of abuse at the hands of SBC clergy, employees, and volunteers were denigrated as “opportunistic,” having a “hidden agenda of lawsuits,” wanting to “burn things to the ground,” and acting as a “professional victim.” There is no evidence that they shared this list “or took any action to ensure that the accused ministers were no longer in positions of power at SBC churches.” Eventually this list included a total of 703 abusers, “with 409 believed to be SBC affiliated at some point in time.”Įxecutive-committee leaders also “turned against” survivors and others reporting abuse. Peter Wehner: The scandal rocking the evangelical worldĮven worse, at the same time that senior leaders refused to take action, they compiled a private list of “accused ministers” in Baptist churches. My friend Russell Moore, a former president of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, called it an “ apocalypse.” The report says that “for almost two decades, survivors of abuse and other concerned Southern Baptists” contacted its executive committee “to report child molesters and other abusers who were in the pulpit or employed as church staff.”Īnd what was the reaction they received? A select group of executive-committee leaders “largely controlled” the committee’s response to abuse reports, and they “were singularly focused on avoiding liability for the SBC to the exclusion of other considerations.” According to Guidepost, this meant that survivors and others who reported abuse “were ignored, disbelieved, or met with the constant refrain that the SBC could take no action due to its policy regarding church autonomy-even if it meant that convicted molesters continued in ministry with no notice or warning to their current church or congregation.” The executive committee hired a firm called Guidepost to conduct the investigation. Last June delegates, called “messengers,” to the SBC’s annual convention responded to proliferating reports of inadequate or corrupt responses to sex-abuse allegations by voting overwhelmingly to commission an external review of their own leaders. Its 14 million members help define the culture and ethos of American evangelicalism.
It is the nation’s most powerful and influential evangelical denomination, by far. The SBC is the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, by far. eastern time, the Southern Baptist Convention released a comprehensive, independent report of its executive committee’s response to decades of sex-abuse allegations. Sign up for David’s newsletter, The Third Rail, here.