Southern Baptist leaders silenced sex abuse victims to avoid liability

Top leaders in the Southern Baptist Convention systematically silenced and disparaged members who accused its clergy of sexual abuse and actively worked against policies to stop predatory behavior, according to a bombshell report released Sunday.

A third-party investigation found that a small group within the SBC’s 86-member executive committee routinely quashed reports of sexual assault to protect its hundreds of millions of dollars in annual donations from potential lawsuits.

The near-300 page report was the product of a seven-month investigation by Guidepost Solutions, a independent firm that conducted 330 interviews and reviewed internal SBC abuse reports dating back to 2000.

The report pinned the blame on a small group of SBC leaders who kept the sex abuse crisis within the church from 47,000 member churches and the rest of the executive board.

It also uncovered a secret database of 703 sex offenders, most of whom are connected to the SBC and few who still work at churches in the SBC and other denominations.

Leaders and clergy in the church used guilt that a report of sex abuse going public would hurt the church or the threat of withholding funding to keep victims quiet.

“In sectors of today’s SBC, women wearing leggings is a social media crisis; dealing with rape in the church is a distraction,” Russell Moore, former president of the SBC’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, wrote at Christianity Today.

Widespread sexual abuse became a critical issues for members after the release of An Abuse of Faith, a 2019 investigative report that found that hundreds of SBC church leaders and volunteers had been convicted of sex crimes – and left behind over 700 victims, nearly all of them children. Inaction by the executive committee created a rift between it and member churches.

The 15,000 delegates at the SBC’s national annual in June voted for a third-party investigation into the organization’s treatment of sex abusers. After a wave of resignations, the SBC executive committee voted in October to waive attorney-client privilege and release internal documents to investigators.