San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
SBC exec alleges retaliation for sex abuse stance
Longtime Southern Baptist leader Russell Moore says he was recently investigated by other denominational leaders in retaliation for his work seeking to address sexual abuse.
In an internal February 2020 letter, which was obtained by Hearst Newspapers, Moore accuses some members of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee of trying to suppress those who were critical of the SBC’s response to a Houston Chronicle and San Antonio ExpressNews series that detailed hundreds of sexual abuses.
The series, Abuse of Faith, found more than 700 victims of abuse or misconduct by SBC church leaders and volunteers over the last two decades.
Moore primarily took issue with an investigation that had been launched into him and his entity, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), by other SBC leaders in early 2020. The investigation was framed as an inquiry into Moore’s work, and its effects on donations to the SBC.
Moore alleged it was a covert attempt to silence him and others, and part of a years-long trend.
“Here is the pattern,” he wrote. “Find a way to ‘investigate’ me in secret, so that Southern Baptists do not hear what goes on in those rooms.”
One of the people behind that 2020 investigation, Executive Committee Chairman Mike Stone, is a front-runner to become the SBC’s president when the denomination meets later this month.
Stone is aligned with a network of churches that has challenged what they view as a drift toward liberalism within the nation’s second-largest faith group. Stone could not be reached for comment.
Moore recently resign
as head of the ERLC for a job at Christianity Today. He was recently hired to pastor a nondenominational church in the Nashville, Tenn., area.
Moore confirmed the accuracy of the letter but declined comment. The full letter was published by Religion News Service on Wednesday.
In the letter, which was sent to the ERLC’s top trustees, Moore played down suspicions that the investigation was launched because of his criticism of then-President Donald Trump, who enjoyed high levels of support among white evangelicals.
Rather, Moore wrote, the impetus was his work with sexual abuse survivors, including at a 2019 ERLC conference on abuse during which he interviewed a well-known advocate and lawyer, Rachael Denhollander, who critirious cized current and former SBC leaders for their handling of a recent abuse case.
The response from some SBC leaders to Denhollander’s comments, Moore wrote, was tantamount to a shakedown — as if to say, “You’ve got a nice little Commission there; would be a shame if something happened to it,” he wrote.
“It was, and is, chilling — especially seeing what they had in mind to do under cover of darkness,” he wrote.
A week after the series published in February 2019, SBC President J.D. Greear called for inquiries into 10 churches identified in the report, including Houston’s massive Second Baptist Church.
Soon after, the group charged with making those inquiries cleared seven of the 10 churches, a move that angered many survivors. The group, Moore wrote, “exonerated churches, in a spur-of-themoment meeting, from seed
charges of sexual abuse cover-up.” He wrote that similar actions had been ongoing among some SBC leaders since publication of the newspapers’ series.
Among them, he wrote, was an attempt to censure Greear for advising in an interview with the Chronicle that churches be cautious of hosting disgraced leader Paige Patterson. Greear’s comments came after a church in Central Texas honored Patterson as a “defender of the faith.”
This came despite his public ouster as president of a Fort Worth seminary in 2018 for saying he wanted to meet alone with a female student who said she was raped at gunpoint so that he could “break her down.”
That church that honored Patterson eventually left the SBC after Hearst Newspapers reported its pastor had been successfully sued for sexual misconduct decades earlier.
Since his 2019 ouster, Patterson has continued to be a source of controversy in the SBC.
In August 2019, Hearst Newspapers reported on videos and letters that showed Patterson and another former SBC president, Jerry Vines, had played down or mishandled numerous sexual misconduct allegations faced by a protege at multiple churches. The protege, Darrell Gilyard, was later imprisoned for sex offenses.
And last year, Patterson’s former employer, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, and Baylor University filed a lawsuit against him and a charitable organization. In the suit, the school claimed that the organization’s board and the millions of dollars overseen by it had been hijacked in a “secret coup” orchestrated by Patterson and his allies just after his termination.
The lawsuit was eventually settled and control of the nonprofit was returned to the two schools.
Patterson has since reemerged within the SBC. Last weekend, he was hosted at Dallas’ massive First Baptist Church; and on Tuesday, he told Baptist Press that he helped with the formation of the Conservative Baptist Network, the group challenging SBC leaders such as Moore and Greear.
Patterson could not be reached for comment.