A recently released report found widespread sexual abuse across the Southern Baptist Church, including an internal list of 703 alleged perpetrators. A journalist who has been covering the S.B.C. discusses the crisis.
, which identified more than seven hundred victims during the past two decades, the S.B.C. contracted a third-party firm to investigate alleged misconduct. This month, the final report was released. It found widespread sexual abuse across the S.B.C., including an internal list of seven hundred and three alleged perpetrators, and a leadership more interested in shaming survivors and preventing legal liability than stopping the abuse.
If you do those two things, that’s enough to make you a Southern Baptist. You don’t have to call your church Southern Baptist, you don’t have to have a certain training—that’s it. And that’s what allows you to send what it calls messengers or delegates to the annual meeting, to the convention where decisions are made. That’s all you need to be able to participate.
I think the one thing that we see most explicitly in the report as the thing that top leaders talked about and named when discussing the problem of abuse among one another is the legal liability. The idea that the more we acknowledge this in any way, even as far as calling it a crisis, the more we heap suspicion and responsibility on ourselves, and therefore open ourselves up to lawsuits. And there’s evidence that, even dating back twenty years, one former S.B.C.
I think it’s a little bit of both.
That said, a lot of these women have rightly questioned their faith in soul-shattering ways. And a lot of them don’t see a future where the S.B.C. could make everything right. There are also a number of women who continue to persevere and work within churches. There are Southern Baptist women, who were abused by Southern Baptist pastors, who continue to go to Southern Baptist churches. But some of the most outspoken voices are ones who no longer identify as Christian at all.
Over the last few years, as the #ChurchToo movement has taken off and we’ve seen some prominent leaders taken down with their own abuse scandals, it has not been just in the conservative traditions. It’s the progressive Christian traditions, too. It’s not confined to one arm of the Church. Christians sometimes say that the Church is made up of people, and people are sinful, so this is going to take place. But I think that goes too easy.
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