Carlee Russell has officially disappeared - from the payroll of her
Alabama job.
DeSanctimonious wants to distract everybody from the right wing pedophile
scandals.
Rightwing Christians are raping children everywhere yet only rightists
protect them.
Southern Baptists Refused to Act on Abuse, Despite Secret List of Pastors
Investigation: SBC Executive Committee staff saw advocates' cries for help
as a distraction from evangelism and a legal liability, stonewalling their
reports and resisting calls for reform.
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.
"Behind the curtain, the lawyers were advising to say nothing and do
nothing, even when the callers were identifying predators still in SBC
pulpits," according to a massive third-party investigative report released
Sunday.
The investigation centers responsibility on members of the EC staff and
their attorneys and says the hundreds of elected EC trustees were largely
kept in the dark. EC general counsel Augie Boto and longtime attorney Jim
Guenther advised the past three EC presidents-Ronnie Floyd, Frank Page,
and Morris Chapman-that taking action on abuse would pose a risk to SBC
liability and polity, leading the presidents to challenge proposed abuse
reforms.
As renewed calls for action emerged with the #ChurchToo and #SBCToo
movements, Boto referred to advocacy for abuse survivors as "a satanic
scheme to completely distract us from evangelism."
Survivors, in turn, described the soul-crushing effects of not only their
abuse, but the stonewalling, insulting responses from leaders at the EC
for 15-plus years.
Christa Brown, a longtime advocate who experienced sexual abuse by her
pastor at 16, said her "countless encounters with Baptist leaders" who
shunned and disbelieved her "left a legacy of hate" and communicated "you
are a creature void of any value-you don't matter." As a result, she said,
instead of her faith providing solace, her faith has become
"neurologically networked with a nightmare." She referred to it as "soul
murder."
Another victim, Debbie Vasquez, was repeatedly sexually assaulted by an
SBC pastor starting at the age of 14. When one assault led to her
pregnancy, she was forced to apologize in front of the church but
forbidden to mention the father. The pastor went on to serve at another
Southern Baptist church, and when Vasquez reached out to the EC, her
entreaties were ignored and evaded for years until a Houston Chronicle
investigation three years ago.
Over the past 20 years, meanwhile, a string of SBC presidents failed to
appropriately respond to abuse in their own churches and seminaries. In
several instances, leaders sided with individuals and churches that had
been credibly accused of abuse or cover-up. One former president-pastor
Johnny Hunt-sexually assaulted another pastor's wife in 2010,
investigators found. This Is the Southern Baptist Apocalypse
Public Theology
This Is the Southern Baptist Apocalypse
The abuse investigation has uncovered more evil than even I imagined.
Russell Moore
At the annual meeting in Anaheim, California, next month, one year after
they voted to launch the investigation, thousands of Southern Baptists
will decide if they are ready to make the dramatic and costly changes the
report recommends for the sake of survivors and church safety.
"Amid my grief, anger, and disappointment over the grave sin and failures
this report lays bare, I earnestly believe that Southern Baptists must
resolve to change our culture and implement desperately needed reforms,"
said SBC president Ed Litton in a statement to CT. "The time is now. We
have so much to lament, but genuine grief requires a godly response."
Guidepost Solutions, the third-party investigative firm, wants the
13.7-million-member denomination to create an online database of abusers,
offer compensation for survivors, sharply limit non-disclosure agreements,
and establish a new entity dedicated to responding to abuse. The
directives in the 288-page report will sound familiar to survivors and
advocates, who have been calling for those measures all along.
"How many kids and congregants could have been spared horrific harm if
only the Executive Committee had taken action back in 2006 when I first
wrote to them, urging specific concrete steps? And how many survivors
could have been spared the re-traumatizing hell of trying to report clergy
sex abuse into a system that consistently turns its back?" asked Brown in
a 2021 letter. "The SBC Executive Committee's longstanding resistance to
abuse reforms has now yielded a whole new crop of clergy sex abuse victims
and of survivors re-traumatized in their efforts to report."
As they anticipated the release of the report, current interim EC
president Willie McLaurin and EC chairman Rolland Slade quoted
Ecclesiastes: "God will bring every act to judgment, including every
hidden thing, whether good or evil" (12:14, CSB).
The current leaders urged Southern Baptists to be receptive to the bad
news.
"This is a time and season to search out our shortcomings, a time to
embrace the findings of the report," they wrote last week, "a time to
rebuild the trust of Southern Baptists and a time to heal by meeting the
challenges required with the necessary changes expected." Largest
investigation in SBC history
The report represents a $2 million undertaking, involving 330 interviews
and five terabytes of documents collected over eight months. The EC also
committed another $2 million toward legal costs around the
investigation-making it a total investment of $4 million, funded by
churches and conventions giving to the Cooperative Program.
Advocate Rachael Denhollander, who advised the SBC task force that
coordinated the investigation, tweeted that "the level of transparency is
. unparalleled." It's the largest investigation in SBC history; it's
already changed the makeup of the EC and stands to determine the
trajectory of the 177-year-old denomination.
The Guidepost inquiry included privileged legal communications on abuse
over the past 20 years, a provision that led EC president Ronnie Floyd to
resign in October and the law firm of Guenther, Jordan & Price to withdraw
their services after 60 years. Southern Baptists Agree to Open Up to Abuse
Investigation News
Southern Baptists Agree to Open Up to Abuse Investigation
Executive Committee decision comes after weeks of heated debate and
division. Kate Shellnutt
According to the report, the law firm actively advised the EC against
taking responsibility for abuse. Guenther worked alongside Boto, an
attorney who was involved in the EC from the 1990s to 2019, serving as a
trustee, vice president, general counsel, and interim president. He was an
ally of Paige Patterson during the Conservative Resurgence. (Last year,
Boto was barred from holding any positions with Southern Baptist entities
as a result of a legal settlement involving financial moves after
Patterson was fired from an SBC seminary over mishandling a rape
allegation.)
Boto and Guenther turned every discussion of abuse to a discussion of
protecting the EC from legal liability, making that the highest priority,
the report said.
"When abuse allegations were brought to the EC, including allegations that
convicted sex offenders were still in ministry, EC leaders generally did
not discuss this information outside of their inner circle, often did not
respond to the survivor, and took no action to address these allegations
so as to prevent ongoing abuse or such abuse in the future," the report
said. "Almost always the internal focus was on protecting the SBC from
legal liability and not on caring for survivors or creating any plan to
prevent sexual abuse within SBC churches."
The Southern Baptist Convention proudly says it's a group of autonomous
churches. They join together for mission work, fellowship, and training,
but the convention has no hierarchy. It doesn't ordain or appoint pastors,
nor does it hold authority over the 47,000 churches that have chosen to
affirm its faith statements and give to its Cooperative Program.
That lack of oversight means that when something goes wrong at an SBC
church or entity, the EC can claim it's not to blame; the churches are
independent. The legal counsel argued that the more denominational leaders
directed churches to deal with abuse, the more it would assume liability
for mistakes and mishandling.
Back in 2000, the report said, Patterson saw abuse prevention training as
a way to defend against lawsuits, telling a pastor that churches that
could document "some effort to educate those who worked among children as
to how to watch for and respond to dangers" wouldn't have litigation
against them move forward.
As president at Southeastern and Southwestern seminaries, Patterson
discouraged two women who shared rape allegations from reporting them. He
was fired from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in 2018 over his
response and has been sued, along with the seminary, by the female student
from Southwestern.
Patterson's associate Paul Pressler, an attorney and leader during the
Conservative Resurgence, also faces litigation over claims that he used
his power to abuse young boys, and the SBC itself is named in the suit.
(Neither Patterson nor Pressler, a former executive VP of the SBC and
former EC member, agreed to be interviewed for the investigation, though
Patterson's lawyers submitted a two-page document.)
Patterson and fellow former SBC president Jerry Vines have come under
scrutiny for their previous support of Darrell Gilyard, a pastor with a
string of sexual misconduct allegations dating back to the '90s. The
report quotes an EC member who in an email said 44 women came to the two
SBC leaders about Gilyard, "and in almost every instance, they were
reportedly shamed for it and left feeling like they were not believed.
From all published accounts, it seems Gilyard moved from church to church
and left ruined lives in his wake."
EC attorneys Guenther and Boto discussed the idea of a database of abusers
as early as 2004, in response to Brown. The subject came up again in 2007,
after a motion at the annual meeting. The EC staff did not move forward
with the idea at the time. Guenther wrote in an email that he worried
"about a duty to warn a court might think was owed by the SBC."
And yet, with the help of spokesman and vice president Roger "Sing" Oldham
and an unnamed EC staff member, they did keep a list. At Boto's request,
the report said, the staffer collected news clippings and tracked abusive
pastors in a table with name, year, state, and denomination. The first
version, in 2007, included 66 people arrested or sued over abuse. By 2022,
the list grew to include 703, with 409 believed to belong to
SBC-affiliated churches.
A watershed 2019 Houston Chronicle series, which spurred new attention
around abuse response and prevention, uncovered 380 SBC-affiliated pastors
accused of sexual abuse.
Even as the secret list of abusive ministers grew, however, the EC leaders
focused their criticism on survivors and advocates. They complained the
survivors didn't understand the polity of the SBC and were out to get the
denomination. Patterson called the advocacy group SNAP (Survivors Network
of those Abused by Priests) "just as reprehensible as sex criminals." An
EC member said Brown, who ran StopBaptistPredators.org, where she featured
survivor stories and posted public reports on abusive ministers, was a
"person of no integrity."
Boto saw the Devil at work in their efforts. In an email obtained by
Guidepost, he wrote:
This whole thing should be seen for what it is. It is a satanic scheme
to completely distract us from evangelism. It is not the gospel. It is
not even a part of the gospel. It is a misdirection play. Yes, Christa
Brown and Rachael Denhollander have succumbed to an availability
heuristic because of their victimizations. They have gone to the SBC
looking for sexual abuse, and of course, they found it. Their outcries
have certainly caused an availability cascade. . But they are not to
blame. This is the devil being temporarily successful.
According to an unnamed EC staff member, "in nearly every instance in the
past when victims have come to those in power in the SBC, they have been
shunned, shamed, and vilified. At the EC, we have inherited a culture of
rejecting those who question power or who accuse leaders."
Key Southern Baptist leaders didn't just disbelieve and insult survivors,
though. In some cases, they aligned themselves with convicted or confessed
perpetrators and helped them personally.
The report includes several examples:
Mike Stone, the former chair of the EC and a candidate in the 2021
race for SBC president, helped craft an apology for a pastor friend of
his after the pastor was found to have been exchanging explicit text
messages with a member of his congregation in 2019. Stone stated that
he has "never and would never knowingly support a church retaining a
pastor in sexual misconduct" and that he hadn't heard about the
allegations against the pastor until asked about them during the
Guidepost investigation. Augie Boto testified as a character witness
for Nashville gymnastics coach Marc Schiefelbein who had been
convicted in 2003 of molesting a 10-year-old girl. Jack Graham, SBC
president from 2002 to 2004, didn't report a music minister who was
fired in 1989 after Prestonwood Baptist Church learned he molested a
child. The minister went on to another church and was convicted for
his crimes at Prestonwood more than 20 years later. The church
"categorically denies the way the report characterizes the incident 33
years ago," current executive pastor Mike Buster said in a statement.
"Prestonwood has never protected or supported abusers, in 1989 or
since." Steve Gaines, SBC president from 2016 to 2018, knew that a
minister on staff at his church, Bellevue Baptist, had previously
abused a child but didn't disclose it until it came up on a blog.
The investigative report also found instances where EC leaders themselves
crossed moral lines:
Frank Page, the president of the EC, resigned suddenly in March 2018.
An official statement said the resignation was due to a "morally
inappropriate relationship." The EC did not investigate whether it was
consensual, nor did they look into "if his conduct carried over into
the workplace." Johnny Hunt, SBC president from 2008 to 2010, groped
and kissed the wife of a younger pastor a month after his presidential
term ended and told the couple to keep it secret.
Hunt's sexual assault had not been previously reported. The woman and her
husband, an SBC pastor, came forward during the investigation to share
with Guidepost what happened. Hunt, former pastor of First Baptist Church
Woodstock in Georgia, had been a senior VP at the SBC's North American
Mission Board before resigning May 13. Southeastern Baptist Theological
Seminary has a chair position named in his honor.
By the couple's account, they are 24 years younger than Hunt, who offered
to assist them with their ministry. At one point he arranged a place for
the woman to stay during a visit to Panama City Beach, where Hunt was
spending his sabbatical. He then entered the condo unit where the woman
was alone and sexually assaulted her, pulling down her clothes, pinning
her on the couch, groping her, and kissing her.
After the July 2010 incident, the couple met with Hunt at his church. He
warned that if they said anything it would "negatively impact the over
40,000 churches Dr. Hunt represented" and referred them to counselor Roy
Blankenship of HopeQuest Ministry Group. Blankenship confirmed something
happened between the wife and Hunt and told investigators Hunt should have
been the one to stop it, but "it takes two to tango."
In an interview with Guidepost, Hunt denied assaulting the woman and said
he never even entered her condo. The Guidepost investigators found three
additional witnesses to corroborate parts of the woman and her husband's
account. They did not find Hunt's statements credible.
Hunt has previously been associated with apologist Ravi Zacharias and was
a special guest at the 2009 grand opening of the spa where Zacharias
abused massage therapists. Last year, Hunt decried Zacharias's abuse,
describing it as "sin . against so many innocent women." Messengers
supported reforms
Following the #MeToo movement, SBC survivors drew major attention from the
news media.
In 2018, Jules Woodson, who was sexually assaulted by her youth pastor,
told The New York Times what it was like to see a church applaud him after
he vaguely confessed to "a sexual incident." That same year, Megan Lively
told The Washington Post how Paige Patterson had told her not to report
her rape to police. In 2019, the Chronicle investigation profiled more
survivors.
As a result, Southern Baptists spoke out and took action. The messengers
at the annual meetings adopted resolutions affirming women's dignity and
condemning abuse. They voted to amend their bylaws to explicitly name
abuse as grounds for dismissal from the SBC. They tasked a committee with
making recommendations if a church was in violation. SBC President: We
Failed to Heed Victims' Voices News
SBC President: We Failed to Heed Victims' Voices
At the recent Caring Well conference, J. D. Greear said the denomination
mistakenly saw abuse claims as "attacks from adversaries instead of
warnings from friends." Abby Perry in Grapevine, Texas
In 2018, they also elected a president who made responding to abuse a
central part of his agenda. Under J. D. Greear, the SBC introduced
training around preventing and responding to abuse, the Caring Well
Initiative, and held conferences to hear from survivors, experts, and
pastors.
But according to the Guidepost report, almost all of these efforts were
met with criticism and resistance by certain EC leaders, who said that
prioritizing the issue of abuse could lead to lawsuits.
Sometimes, the divide was clear from the outside: Greear as SBC president
referenced abuse 81 times during his address at the annual meeting, while
Floyd as EC president didn't mention it as a priority in his Vision 2025
plan.
Behind the scenes, the Guidepost report shows, the EC legal counsel
advised people to downplay the issue. They pressured the Ethics &
Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) not to refer to sexual abuse in the
SBC as a crisis and avoid "inflammatory language" like saying the
denomination had failed survivors. EC members tried to censor criticism of
the SBC's handling of abuse and decried any efforts to allow survivors and
abuse experts to speak at SBC events.
"Guys, this is really not good at all," Floyd wrote in one email obtained
by investigators. "We cannot have SBC entities placing people on platforms
calling out the matters about how the SBC and some of its leaders and
former leaders [sic]. All the work on unity is getting challenged."
These intra-SBC clashes and threats became public a year ago in leaked
letters and recordings capturing communication from former ERLC leaders
Russell Moore (now a theologian in residence for CT) and Philip
Bethancourt. The documents were a wakeup call to pastors, suggesting
efforts by EC leaders to intimidate survivors and resist reform. They
spurred demands for an investigation into the EC.
"We were shocked," Grant Gaines, a Tennessee pastor who made the motion to
investigate the EC, told CT last year. "We shouldn't have been. These
survivors, their stories are out there." Southern Baptists Take Sides
Ahead of Nashville Meeting News
Southern Baptists Take Sides Ahead of Nashville Meeting
A recent call to investigate the Executive Committee over abuse responses
is the latest issue up for debate. Opposing factions in the SBC both say
its future is at stake. Kate Shellnutt
One story that has played out in the public eye is Jennifer Lyell's. She
was abused by a seminary professor, but a March 2019 article in Baptist
Press, which is run by the EC, characterized her abuse as an affair. At
the time of publication, Lyell was a Lifeway executive and the
highest-ranking woman in the SBC. The validity of her account was backed
by Southern Seminary president Al Mohler.
Lyell ended up leaving her job and suffering physical and mental distress
as a result of the backlash as well as the months-long saga to get the
story corrected and seek restitution.
In a Twitter thread after the report release, Lyell described having to
wait out the tensions between the EC, which controlled the correction to
the article about her and was on alert at the time for how other SBC
figures talked about abuse, and leaders at other entities, who stood by
her story but could have faced retaliation for speaking up.
She received an apology from the EC in February 2022 and an undisclosed
settlement. EC trustees, Guidepost said, weren't aware that she had
pursued defamation claims and had previously received a settlement in May
2020 as well.
Hannah Kate Williams also sued the EC for negligence in responding to
abuse by her father, who was employed at SBC entities, as well as for
alleged efforts to malign her as she went public with her case.
EC attorneys criticized Greear for repeating the names of 10 churches that
were reported in the Houston Chronicle investigation for employing abusive
pastors and asking an EC subcommittee to look into them. Guenther said
they were going to be sued for libel and worked to clear the churches'
names. Boto called one to apologize.
Months later, Boto opposed the creation of the credentials committee,
which would look at whether a church has violated criteria around abuse or
other issues that would make it "no longer in friendly cooperation" with
the SBC. Southern Baptists Expel Two More Churches Over Abuse
News
Southern Baptists Expel Two More Churches Over Abuse
Top leaders address divides in the denomination at the first in-person
Executive Committee meeting in a year. Kate Shellnutt
The credentials committee, which was reconfigured for this new purpose in
2019, frustrated survivors too because it was confusing and inefficient,
Guidepost said. It had no written guidelines, no training, and no
full-time staff for support.
Because of the limited scope it was authorized, based on SBC polity, it
wasn't able to address churches' missteps in the past, nor could it do
investigations to determine a pastor's guilt or innocence, just the
church's response. As a result, it took an average of nine months to hear
a decision-and some never heard back at all. Some submissions didn't make
it through the clumsy website the committee required for challenging a
church's membership.
In the past three years, the committee processed 30 submissions and
disfellowshipped just 3 churches over abuse. In each case, the offense was
obvious and egregious: The church had knowingly employed a sex offender.
The committee didn't make any public comment on the results of the other
27 submissions tallied by the recent report. The Guidepost investigators
found that five churches voluntarily resigned and another dissolved during
the credential committee's review. New entity and other recommendations
The task force that oversaw and released the EC investigation sees public
lament as a first step in responding to the investigation. They've also
asked that Southern Baptists vote to establish a new task force that can
evaluate how to implement the recommended changes in accordance with
Baptist polity.
The report offers 30 pages of recommendations for the EC and the
credentials committee, including:
Creating a permanent entity to oversee sexual abuse response and
prevention Launching an "offender information system," an online
database churches can voluntarily participate in to report
substantiated abuse or coverup Publishing a list of disfellowshipped
churches and individuals whose ordinations or degrees were revoked
Facilitating programs to assist survivors and provide compensation
from SBC giving to cover medical and psychological help Issuing an
apology to survivors and erecting a memorial, adding a Survivor Sunday
to the SBC calendar Prohibiting nondisclosure agreements, except when
requested by victims Requiring a code of conduct for entity employment
or attending a seminary Hiring a chief compliance officer or ethics
and compliance officer to EC staff
"We must resolve to give of our time and resources to not only care well
for survivors of sexual abuse, but to provide a culture of accountability,
transparency, and safety as we move forward," the task force said in a
statement released with the report.
"We acknowledge that any act of repentance requires ongoing, deliberate,
dedicated obedience and sacrifice. This is the calling of our Savior to
unite as a body in following after him."
Christa Brown, the abuse survivor and advocate, said in her submission to
Guidepost that she had not held out hope for meaningful change, but still
prayed that the report "may bring forth a small measure of justice."
"The Southern Baptist Convention has a moral obligation to protect the
lives, bodies and humanity of kids and congregants in its affiliated
churches, to provide care and validation for ALL who have been sexually
abused by Southern Baptist clergy," she wrote, "to ensure accountability
for abusers and enablers, and to create systems that will ensure these
inhumane and unconscionable travesties do not persist into future
generations."