Once roiled by sexual abuse issue, Southern Baptist leadership now downplays its extent

Four years ago, the Southern Baptist Convention received a landmark report asserting that top leaders in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination had long minimized reports of sexual abuse by clergy, intimidated survivors and stonewalled reforms.

The convention’s 2022 annual meeting passed a resolution apologizing to abuse survivors, several of them by name. It authorized reforms that included the creation of a database of credibly accused church workers.

It appeared to mark a reckoning within the SBC in tandem with the wider #MeToo and #ChurchToo movements — and a recognition that clergy sex abuse extended far beyond the much-publicized scandal in the Catholic Church.

But prominent survivors and advocates have largely given up trying to bring about change in the SBC after witnessing what they view as increasingly faltering efforts toward reform.

And now a counternarrative has reached the highest levels of convention leadership. Prominent Southern Baptists are promoting the view that although sexual abuse has occurred in the SBC, it never rose to a “crisis” level.

SBC president says issue of sexual abuse has been ‘weaponized’ and politicized

The SBC’s newly elected president, Florida pastor Willy Rice, has portrayed the 2022 report by consultant Guidepost Solutions as a “snipe hunt.” Rice said some people with political motives “weaponized” the issue against the large, conservative denomination.

Texas megachurch pastor Jack Graham, a former SBC president, similarly denied there was ever a “systemic sexual abuse crisis” in the denomination.

“The whole thing was a reckless hoax which has cost us not only millions of dollars but immeasurable damage to our witness,” Graham recently posted on the social media site X, alluding to costly lawsuits and impact on the SBC’s reputation.

For survivors, such words are traumatizing but not surprising.

“For all those who watched us lead the reform, they also watched us get verbally attacked, maligned, bullied & in the end dropped,” survivor Tiffany Thigpen posted on X. She attended the 2022 annual meeting to advocate for reform but has avoided recent meetings.

Rice said churches should provide training on abuse prevention, report “any hint of illegal activity to the appropriate authorities” and care for victims.

The sexual-abuse reform effort “absolutely was weaponized, just like the #MeToo movement in the secular culture was weaponized,” Rice said. He drew a comparison with sexual assault allegations against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who denied them and characterized them as politically motivated.

Rice maintained that churches, like other youth-serving organizations, have learned much about the issue.

“To the degree that there have ever been times that Baptist churches or Baptist institutions did not handle abuse correctly, that has damaged our witness,” Rice acknowledged in a news conference at the conclusion of the SBC’s annual meeting earlier this month in Orlando, Florida. “We have tried very hard over the last several years to correct that.”

Rejecting the framing of sexual abuse as a crisis, once a marginal view in the SBC, is increasingly mainstream. Rice’s sole opponent for SBC president, Josh Powell, took a similar stance.

Rice was elected at an annual meeting where delegates also advanced a constitutional ban on SBC churches with women pastors, a measure requiring ratification next year.

Survivor says there’s no political agenda for those speaking out about abuse

Christa Brown — a survivor of sexual abuse by an SBC pastor and longtime advocate for reforms — said that if anyone was politicizing the abuse issue, it was people involved in SBC power struggles, not the victims.

“For clergy sex abuse survivors, there has never been anything to gain in speaking out. To the contrary, it almost always comes with a heavy personal cost,” she said via email. “There’s no political agenda.”

She added: “There is no place within the SBC where someone who was sexually abused by a pastor or church worker can safely report it and get a proper response. I’ve been working within this arena for over two decades, and this reality has not changed.”

The convention’s 2022 annual meeting authorized a database of church workers credibly accused of sexual abuse and the creation of a task force to oversee reforms. The task force was later discontinued without creating the database, due in part to liability concerns.

The issue was turned over to the denomination’s Executive Committee, which instead is referring churches to existing sex-offender databases while focusing on abuse prevention and education.

Brown said sexual abuse committed by clergy is uniquely traumatizing. Abusive faith leaders often manipulate the religious language of spiritual authority and forgiveness to manipulate the trust of a minor.

“Sexual abuse committed by clergy carries unique dynamics (and this is something that most SBC leaders just don’t seem to understand… or don’t want to understand),” she wrote.

Jules Woodson, a survivor who advocated for SBC abuse reforms at past meetings, said on X she has since needed to “step far away as it became apparent the #SBC has never been, & will never be, a safe place for me…A woman.”

2019 report ‘Abuse of Faith’ highlighted allegations of sexual abuse

SBC skeptics of the idea of a systemic abuse crisis often point to the numbers.

A 2019 report, “Abuse of Faith” by the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News, found that about 380 Southern Baptist church leaders and volunteers faced allegations of sexual abuse in the previous two decades, with more than 700 victims. The newspapers drew from publicly available records, such as arrests, lawsuits and confessions.

Skeptics said that for a denomination with more than 40,000 churches and millions of members, those numbers were lamentable but not symptoms of a widespread crisis.

But advocates note abuse often goes unreported, particularly when the perpetrator holds a position of authority and often receives protection from other church leaders.

By comparison, a landmark report on the Catholic Church, conducted by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, benefited from access to internal church documents on cases that hadn’t gone public. It found that more than 4,000 priests were accused of abuse between 1950 and 2002, about 4% of those serving then.

“Given that publicly reported cases (which are based largely on criminal convictions) are the tip of the iceberg, people should be horrified at what the size of that tip reveals about how huge the whole of the SBC’s clergy sex abuse iceberg almost certainly is,” Brown wrote.

The Guidepost report concluded that survivors repeatedly met “resistance, stonewalling and even outright hostility from some” in the denomination’s Executive Committee. Leaders of major churches failed to report abusers to police or their congregations, the report said.

Two of those named in the Guidepost report sued the SBC for defamation; their cases are pending.

Critics also have challenged the report’s characterization of cases involving women, contending these were consensual affairs that were sinful but not abusive. The women themselves described the actions as assaults or abuse in court depositions.

But advocates for survivors say there’s ample evidence of failures at high levels, even beyond Guidepost’s criticisms of the Executive Committee. They cite the 2018 firing of influential seminary president Paige Patterson over his handling of rape allegations and the multiple abuse accusations against the late Paul Pressler, once a dominant force in SBC politics.

North Carolina pastor Bruce Frank, who chaired the Sexual Abuse Task Force formed in the wake of the “Abuse of Faith” report, said survivors understandably have given up on denominational reforms.

“We made some difference. It fell short of what a lot of people who suffered through that could reasonably expect,” said Frank, pastor of Biltmore Church, based in Arden, North Carolina.

He favored a database of credibly accused pastors to help prevent predators from moving to unsuspecting congregations.

“The bottom line is, how do you protect the most people in a loosely bonded, decentralized body, in a place that heavily relies on volunteers?” he said.

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