Southern Baptists: A sexual abuse cover-up
The nation’s largest Protestant denomination has been rocked by a “bombshell” report exposing a massive sexual abuse scandal, said Robert Downen and John Tedesco in the Houston Chronicle. The report documents how leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention, which has some 47,000 member churches across the U.S., shunted aside hundreds of allegations of sexual abuse of women, teens, and children by clergy and other church personnel. Evangelical leaders “routinely silenced and disparaged” victims and “ignored calls for policies to stop predators.” Victims were met at times with “outright hostility,” says the report. To avoid liability, church leaders claimed SBC’s decentralized structure didn’t allow for tracking accused abusers—while secretly keeping a 205-page list of hundreds of ministers and church workers accused of sexual abuse.
For the nation’s 14 million Southern Baptists, the report is “an apocalypse,” said Russell Moore in Christianity Today. As a former SBC official, I knew our church had a sexual abuse problem. But it “uncovers a reality far more evil and systemic than I imagined.” Parishioners trying to “stop their child from being sexually violated by a minister” were ignored. A former SBC president allegedly sexually assaulted a woman—then pressured her into silence by saying disclosure would harm the church. One woman, abused by her pastor at 16, likened her several attempts to report the crime to dismissive church leaders to “soul murder.” This “is more than a crisis” or even a crime. “It’s blasphemy.”
The “sickening” revelations have a political dimension, said former SBC minister Jonathan Merritt in Religion News Service. Baptist leaders regularly insert themselves into public debate on cultural and political issues as a “voice of conscience,” and now their credibility has been destroyed. “Transformation is the only way forward.” Any reform effort must start with acknowledging how deep the rot goes, said David French in The Atlantic. From documented abuse at Christian summer camps to the sex scandals at Liberty University, there’s ample evidence “abuse is occurring across the length and breadth of the evangelical Church.” Yet too many of my fellow evangelicals are quick to dismiss the problem. Systemic reform is crucial. For Christians, God’s judgment is no abstraction, and “we should tremble with the knowledge” that “his justice can be terrible indeed.”