Blasphemy of the Southern Baptists

While the Catholic Church has spent much of the last three decades wrestling with painful revelations of priestly sexual abuse and the bishops’ callous disregard for people in their care, many American Protestant denominations self-righteously wagged fingers at the Catholic hierarchy for tolerating pedophile priests.

“How can you help your brother remove the speck from his eye when you stagger along with a log in your own eyes?” Jesus asked. The Southern Baptist Convention, should have taken these words to heart.

A recent report, the result of a third-party investigation by Guidepost Solutions, details the stonewalling, the lying and the gaslighting of victims by the SBC’s leaders. The report indicts the denomination’s Executive Committee based on its own internal documents.

Among the worst findings: Many preachers and youth workers implicated as sexual exploiters remain employed. Since its churches are independent, the SBC has no mechanism to remove abusers.

The leadership used that argument to do nothing.

The story gets worse. The executive committee claimed it could not keep records of sexabusing pastors. The report revealed it did have one, which included 700 cases, which the committee kept secret.

Former Southern Baptist leader Russell Moore summed up the scandal: While reading the report, he wonders “how many children were raped, how many people were assaulted, how many screams were silenced, while we boasted that no one could reach the world for Jesus like we could? That’s more than a crisis. It’s even more than just a crime. It’s blasphemy. And anyone who cares about heaven ought to be mad as hell.”