San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
SBC meets again under cloud of scandal
Southern Baptists set to convene amid new allegations
When 16,000 Southern Baptists convene in Nashville on Tuesday, they will again do so under a cloud of sex abuse scandals, including allegations that top leaders sought to silence abuse survivors.
A series of leaked letters and audio recordings in June shed light on internal deliberations over abuse and have prompted calls for investigations into its top leaders.
It’s familiar territory for the nation’s second-largest faith group: The SBC’s 2018 meeting came amid allegations of sexual misconduct or mishandling of abuse claims by longtime denominational leaders such as Paige Patterson and former Texas Appeals Court Judge Paul Pressler.
And when the Southern Baptist Convention last gathered, in 2019, it was on the heels of a San Antonio Express-News and Houston Chronicle investigation, Abuse of Faith, that found hundreds of children had been abused by SBC church leaders and volunteers.
Tension and infighting among SBC leaders have only increased since then. And now, even top officials acknowledge that the denomination is at a crossroads ahead of an annual meeting that will also include a presidential election and votes on a variety of sex abuse reforms.
“It’s a pivotal meeting,” said Rolland Slade, chairman of the SBC’s executive committee. “We will either come out headed towards revival, and will have repentance and people laying down their swords, or we’ll continue to kick the can down the road.”
Slade has been one of the more outspoken SBC leaders on abuse in the wake of Hearst Newspapers’ February 2019 report that found more than 400 SBC church leaders and volunteers had been convicted or credibly accused of sexual abuse or misconduct over the past two decades.
They left behind more than 700 victims, nearly all children.
In response, SBC church delegates empowered a committee to make “inquiries” into churches that have been accused of mishandling or concealing sexual abuse, and they advanced an amendment to their constitution that would allow them to remove churches that have mishandled abuses or knowingly employed predators.
The SBC’s public-policy arm, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, also overhauled the theme of its annual three-day conference to deal solely with abuse
issues. The ERLC has also been developing and pushing curriculum on how to “care well” for the abused.
Survivors and advocates have been critical of the SBC’s response and have called for more sweeping reforms.
Some of those proposals may face a vote at this week’s meeting. Any church delegate can make motions or recommendations at the meeting, making it impossible to predict what may happen.
Multiple pastors say they’ll push for stronger abuse reforms, including for the SBC to undergo a three-year, third-party audit of abuse and responses to it.
The idea has long been requested by survivors and advocates who say that SBC churches are neither equipped nor unbiased enough to investigate themselves. The SBC’s executive committee shot down a similar proposal in 2008, saying it could not compel any of the SBC’s 47,000 autonomous and self-governing churches to cooperate with inquiries.
Todd Benkert, the Indiana pastor who is proposing the idea, believes that “local church autonomy” is not in conflict with his proposal. He said many SBC pastors’ eyes were opened by sheer number of cases, but that the findings were likely just the tip of the iceberg.
“If the SBC is going to be able to enact meaningful change, it’s critical to have better information to inform those changes,” he said. “This resolution is intended to provide a more clear picture of what is taking place in the SBC.”
Benkert’s motion is one of a few aimed at informing SBC church members about abuse and potential mishandling of it.
Phillip Bethancourt, the ERLC’s former vice president and one of the denomination’s leaders on abuse reforms, recently leaked audio from a series of meetings with other officials.
In one recording, Executive Committee President Ronnie Floyd worried that allowing survivors to be critical of leadership could threaten the SBC’s longevity.
“I am not concerned about anything survivors can say,” Floyd said on the recordings. “OK. I am not worried about that. I’m thinking the base. I just want to preserve the base.”
Floyd accused Bethancourt of mischaracterizing their conversations. He said the executive committee remains committed to stopping abuse and is retaining a third-party firm to investigate the slew of accusations levied against current and former committee members.
A 2019 email sent by longtime SBC leader Augie Boto also was leaked online. In the correspondence, Boto — who was instrumental to the SBC’s 2008 decision not to implement abuse reforms — questioned the motives of prominent abuse survivors and advocates, as well as the seriousness of the issue.
“This whole thing should be seen for what it is,” wrote Boto, who retired in 2019. “It is a satanic scheme to completely distract us from evangelism.” He could not be reached for comment.
It was just the latest leaked letter. In a 2020 letter, outgoing SBC leader Russell Moore outlined what he said were numerous attempts by members of the SBC’s executive committee to retaliate against him for his work with abuse survivors.
Moore objected to an investigation that had been launched into him and his entity, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, by other SBC leaders in early 2020. The investigation was framed as an inquiry into Moore’s work and its effects on donations.
Moore alleged it was meant to intimidate him, one of many “tactics that have been used to create a culture where countless children have been torn to shreds, where women have been raped and then ‘broken down.’ ”
One of the people behind that 2020 investigation was Mike Stone, who at the time chaired the SBC’s executive committee. Stone is a frontrunner to be elected SBC president when the group meets. Stone could not be reached for comment but denied Moore’s accusations in a video message.
Stone and other executive members are aligned with and supported by the Conservative Baptist Network, which was formed last year to combat what members say is a drift toward liberalism within the SBC. Earlier this month, disgraced ex-SBC leader Paige Patterson told Baptist Press that he helped with the creation of the CBN, which had long been suspected by denominational insiders.
In 2018, Patterson was removed as head of a Fort Worth seminary for saying he wanted to meet with a woman who said she was raped at gunpoint so that he could “break her down.”
Though his stature and power has been diminished, Patterson remains a folk hero in the eyes of many for his role in the socalled “battle for the Bible,” the period during the 1980s when the SBC went to war with itself over literal interpretation of scripture.
Some executive committee members sought to censure President J.D. Greear for saying in an interview that churches should consider Patterson’s history before hosting him.
David Pittman is among the many abuse survivors who say it’s hard to believe much has changed in the SBC when Patterson is still being embraced. Nor is he confident that this year’s meeting will produce substantive change.
“Maybe one day they’ll act,” Pittman said. “Maybe not. At least when they stand in front of God, they’ll no longer be able to say they didn’t know.”