Southern Baptist Leaders Covered Up Sex Abuse and Kept Secret Database

Children have long been victims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests, nuns, and even church officials.

In addition to Canada, France, and Portugal, US churches were also involved in such scandals.

An investigation published by an independent committee at the Southern Baptist Convention Complex in the United States of America, the largest Protestant religious institution, revealed that senior clergymen covered up accusations of sexual assaults.

Victims and employees of the institution claimed they were forced to be silent, and that they were harassed all the time.

The 288-page new report shocked the religious and Protestant community which is made up of 13 million people in the United States and 40 million worldwide.

The investigation stated that a number of victims and employees of Southern Baptist reported incidents of child sexual assault in churches and religious institutions, but their complaints were met with procrastination.

 

‘Resistance and Stonewalling’

A new investigation has recently revealed that leaders of the largest Protestant denomination, Southern Baptists, covered up and ignored sexual abuse allegations against top clergy in the US.

The victims repeatedly shared allegations with the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC).

However, all were met with “resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility,” according to the report released on Sunday, May 29, 2022, by Guidepost Solutions, an independent firm contracted by the SBC.

According to the investigation, only a few senior leaders of the Southern Baptist Executive Committee dealt with the allegations of abuse but they were "individually focused on avoiding assigning responsibility to the religious community as a whole.”

The executive committee that controlled the denomination’s response to any allegations, “were singularly focused on avoiding liability,” the report said.

“In service of this goal, survivors and others who reported abuse were ignored, disbelieved, or met with the constant refrain that the SBC could take no action due to its policy regarding church autonomy—even if it meant that convicted molesters continued in ministry with no notice or warning to their current church or congregation,” it added.

 

Decades of Sexual Abuse

Those who were abused varied in age, and there were children too, according to the report

When interviewed, survivors “spoke of trauma from the initial abuse, but also told us of the debilitating effects that come from the response of the churches and institutions like the SBC that did not believe them, ignored them, mistreated them, and failed to help them,” the report said.

Those survivors were often ignored and minimized; they were even “very vilified” by top clergy.

Meanwhile, lawsuits against the church were denigrated as “opportunistic,” according to the report.

The scandal echoed that of the Roman Catholic Church, which has been rocked by several allegations of sexual abuse, revealed by a 2002 report by the Boston Globe newspaper documenting a decades-long campaign of coverups.

The US Catholic Church has since paid around $3.2bn to settle clergy abuse cases.

Guidepost Solutions said in the report that staffers on the executive committee of the SBC have a list of Baptist ministers accused of abuse.

However, there is no indication they took any action to isolate the accused ministers.

 

‘A Beginning, Not an End’

The alleged abuses and institutional inaction have come to light since 2019 when the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News conducted an investigation documenting hundreds of cases, including several in which the alleged perpetrators remained in ministry.

The former head of the SBC’s public policy wing, Russell Moore, described the findings as “an apocalypse.”

He left the denomination after accusing the leadership of blocking efforts to address the sex abuse crisis.

“As dark a view as I had of the SBC Executive Committee, the investigation uncovers a reality far more evil and systemic than I imagined it could be,” Moore wrote in Christianity Today.

Christa Brown was one of the survivors of these abuses, she said she was sexually abused as a teen by the youth and education minister at her SBC church, according to the report that “fundamentally confirms what Southern Baptist clergy sex abuse survivors have been saying for decades.”

Brown told the Associated Press news agency: “I view this investigative report as a beginning, not an end. The work will continue.”

“But no one should ever forget the human cost of what it has taken to even get the SBC to approach this starting line of beginning to deal with clergy sex abuse,” she added.

In a statement on Sunday, SBC President Ed Litton said he is “grieved to my core” for the victims, calling on Southern Baptists to lament and change the denomination’s culture for reforms.

“I pray Southern Baptists will begin preparing today to take deliberate action to address these failures and chart a new course when we meet together in Anaheim,” Litton said.

Jennifer Lyell was also one of those survivors; she was once the highest-paid female executive at the SBC and her story of sexual abuse at a Southern Baptist seminary is now detailed in a recent report, according to The Washington Post.

“I knew it was rotten, but it’s astonishing and infuriating,” she said.

“This is a denomination that is through and through about power. It is misappropriated power. It does not in any way reflect the Jesus I see in the scriptures. I am so gutted.”

 

Over and Over

The abuse was not only in the US, European churches have also been a commonplace to sexually abuse people, especially children.

Last year, the Independent Commission of Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse in French Catholic Churches, issued a report revealing 330,000 cases of sexual violence occurred in the country’s churches between 1950 and 2020.

In 2018, an investigation was conducted after the Vatican's request, about the possibility of sexual abuse in the German Catholic Church.

More than 3,600 children were sexually assaulted or abused by Catholic priests between 1948 and 2014.

Although priest accusations of sexual abuse against children began in the 1950s, the issue was first given important media attention in the 1980s.

In fact, in the 1990s, these allegations started to come to light with stories emerging in Argentina, Australia, and many other European countries.

In 1995, the Archbishop of Vienna was fired amid sexual abuse allegations, in Austria.

Taking the example of the US, the Boston Globe newspaper reported that there was widespread abuse and many pedophile priests “were moved around by Church leaders instead of being held accountable.” This prompted people to courageously expose these violations across the US and around the world.

A Church-commissioned report in 2004 said that “more than 4,000 US Roman Catholic priests had faced sexual abuse allegations in the last 50 years, in cases involving more than 10,000 children, mostly boys.”