The Southern Baptist Convention is our largest protestant denomination. It is home to some of our largest churches and some of our most prominent church pastors. Ironically, the news the denomination is making these days is due to a sexual abuse scandal that it can no longer keep a secret.
The sexual abuse was revealed by the team work of journalists at the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News, which resulted in a database of cases involving nearly 300 church leaders and more than 700 victims for their 2019 “Abuse of Faith” series.
Their series resulted in a wave of outrage that rocked the Southern Baptist Convention. In 2021, thousands of delegates at the annual SBC meeting in Birmingham, Alabama, overwhelmingly voted in favor of having a task force oversee a third-party investigation to further investigate.
The result was Sunday’s release of an explosive, nearly 300-page report. It found that church leaders had covered up numerous sexual abuse cases and belittled, even vilified the victims.
According to the findings, at least 218 of those credibly accused had been convicted or had pleaded guilty to sex crimes over two decades. Some of them, according to the findings, remained in their positions at the church or returned after serving prison time!
The List of Alleged Sexual Abusers Released
On Thursday, Southern Baptist leaders released a list of alleged church-related sexual abuse offenders that denomination heads had kept secret for more than a decade.
Personally, I am not impressed with the release of the list. What I find so troubling about this chain of events is that apparently Southern Baptist leaders had no intention of owning up to this disgrace. Their hands were forced because of the investigative work of a team of journalists.
A number of the woman who had accused church leaders of sexual abuse talked about the trauma they experienced as a result of their abuse. But when they reported the abuse to leaders of the denomination, they were more interested in protecting the reputation of the denomination than they were in doing the right thing.
The SBC wants to distinguish itself from the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandal by saying that, unlike the Catholic Church, SBC’s churches are independent from one another. They claimed they could not create a list of accused abusers because the various churches making up the denomination were autonomous.
But that is a total cop out. How ridiculous is that argument. The very thing Southern Baptist leaders claimed they could not do in the past to address the problem is what they actually did on Thursday when they released the list of alleged church-related sexual abusers.
Copyright © 2022 by Frank King. All rights reserved.