Southern Baptist sex abuse allegations: overview

Southern Baptist sex abuse allegations resurfaced in May 2022 after a new third-party investigation revealed that leadership covered up reports of assault and abuse to protect the financial interests of the organization and the personal interests of certain leaders.

Leaders at the highest levels of the Southern Baptist Convention reportedly collected reports of sexual abuse for more than 10 years. Leaders entered the names of 703 victims into a database, with 409 alleged accusers believed to have been affiliated with an SBC church at some point. 

But despite this ongoing collection of alleged incidents and abusers, some of these SBC leaders “turned against the very people trying to shine a light on sexual abuse.” The organization released its internal list of abuse allegations days after a bombshell report by an independent, third-party investigation revealed the SBC protected its financial interests over its members. 

Southern Baptist Convention initially told members no such list could be created

The 288-page investigation report was released after the SBC asked for an examination into the abuse allegations, following an award-winning investigation by the Houston Chronicle newspaper.

The list, which indicates the SBC was aware of problems with sexual abuse for years, was publicly released days after the third-party investigative team, called Guidepost Solutions, LLC, revealed “the SBC a few senior EC leaders, along with outside counsel, largely controlled the EC’s response to these reports of abuse … and were singularly focused on avoiding liability for the SBC. 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 polity regarding church autonomy – even if it meant that convicted molesters continued in ministry with no notice or warning to their current church or congregation.”

The release of the database comes 15 years after Christa Brown began sounding the alarm that Southern Baptists needed to keep such a list to prevent abusers from transferring from church to church. The Washington Post reported that Brown told SBC leaders in 2004 that a youth pastor abused her and went on to serve in other SBC churches in other states. The Guidepost report said Brown was met with hostility when she suggested the idea in 2007.

Like the Catholic Church sexual abuse investigation in the early 2000s, the SBC is accused of not notifying the police of alleged criminal behavior, allowing abusers to escape accountability under the law, and instead enabling them to groom and abuse more victims in other churches.

Southern Baptist sex abuse report

According to the Guidepost report, the mishandling of allegations was largely driven by the SBC’s legal team, particularly D. August “Augie” Boto, the general counsel for the executive committee and later an interim president, as well as outside counsel, James Guenther, James Jordan and the firm of Guenther, Jordan & Price. Their main concern, according to the report, was not protecting victims or holding abusers accountable, but rather avoiding potential liability.

The executive committee of the SBC is governed by 86 trustees who serve limited terms. Decisions were largely left to the chief executive officer and his advisers. The report said the trustees were not informed of decisions regarding sexual abuse.

In a 2019 email to some leaders, an EC staff member wrote that one pastor had been accused of sexually inappropriate conduct by 44 women. “In almost every instance, they were reportedly shamed for it and left feeling like they were not believed. From all published accounts, it seems (the pastor) moved from church to church and left ruined lives in his wake,” the email read. He was later convicted of sex crimes against minors and served prison time, returning to the pulpit after his release, according to the report.

Now that the widespread abuse is being exposed, the SBC may face substantial and severe legal liability. The Guidepost report allegedly demonstrates an effort to ignore or cover up systemic abuse. It appears the strategy to conceal information regarding sexual abuse in order to fend off liability may backfire.

While the Southern Baptist Convention has made some steps to prevent sexual abuse, critics say that these moves are far too little, too late.

Other church sex abuse claims result in multimillion dollar settlements 

The Catholic church has paid hundreds of millions of dollars in reparations; one diocese alone expects to pay $126 million.

In an article in Christianity Today, titled “This is the Southern Baptist Apocolypse” former SBC executive committee member Russell Moore wrote, “Someone asked me a few weeks ago what I expected from the third-party investigation into the handling of sexual abuse by the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee. I said I didn’t expect to be surprised at all. How could I be? I lived through years with that entity. I was the one who called for such an investigation in the first place.

“And yet, as I read the report, I found that I could not swipe the screen to the next page because my hands were shaking with rage. That’s because, 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.”

One big difference between the Catholic and SBC institutions is how the churches are governed. SBC churches share the same principles in doctrine but are run independently with autonomy from the larger organization. Pastors are not appointed; they are generally hired via a vote from each church. Still, the SBC was keeping track of abuse cases for years.

Even before the Guidepost report, a high-level SBC personality was facing a sexual abuse lawsuit. Peter Pressler, considered a “giant” in the SBC, groomed and raped a 14-year-old boy over a number of years, before trying to pay off the accuser as an adult.

Hundreds of alleged abusers connected to Southern Baptist Church

While 400 alleged abusers have been identified with connections to an SBC affiliated church, many of those include publicly known cases where the abuser was convicted of crimes. There could be hundreds if not thousands of more victims who have yet to be identified. The list contains the names of nine accused individuals who remain in ministry, two of whom reportedly are at SBC affiliated churches.

The EC is governed by 86 trustees who serve limited terms. Decisions regarding sexual abuse were “largely left to the discretion” of the executive committee president and chief executive officer as well as his closest advisors on staff, with “high-level issues” brought to the SBC president, according to the report. It said the trustees were not informed nor involved in the decision-making process.

From as early as 2007, an EC staff member maintained a list of reports of abuse, the report said; however, there was no indication that EC staff “took any action to ensure that the accused ministers were no longer in positions of power at SBC churches.”

The SBC has an estimated 14 million members in 47,000 churches. It is the largest Protestant denomination in the United States.