Last year, pastors belonging to the Southern Baptist Convention, which has nearly fourteen million members and is the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, decided that the problem of sexual abuse within its ranks had to be addressed. Following investigative reporting in the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News, which identified more than seven hundred victims during the past two decades, the S.B.C. contracted a third-party firm to investigate alleged misconduct. This month, the final report was released. It found widespread sexual abuse across the S.B.C., including an internal list of seven hundred and three alleged perpetrators, and a leadership more interested in shaming survivors and preventing legal liability than stopping the abuse. “The whole thing should be seen for what it is,” one high-ranking S.B.C. official, referring to victims’ allegations, wrote in an e-mail uncovered in the report. “[It is] a satanic scheme to completely distract us from evangelism.” (On Tuesday, the S.B.C. said that it would release a list of accused pastors and others affiliated with the Church.)
I recently spoke by phone with Kate Shellnutt, a senior news editor at Christianity Today who has been covering the S.B.C. and the sexual-abuse crisis within it. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why S.B.C. leaders were so unwilling to act, how the organization’s structure exacerbated the crisis, and how the organization views survivors of sexual abuse.
What is your biggest takeaway from this report?
For people within the S.B.C., the takeaway isn’t going to be the same. If you’re a Southern Baptist, you’ve known about the abuse crisis and how the denomination has struggled with responding adequately to abuse for at least three to four years. This has been on your radar. A lot of the reasoning that had been given over the years for why the denomination was slow to respond, or wasn’t responding in a robust enough way, was because the S.B.C. is an independent association of churches. The new information here is that that explanation was really being used as an excuse more than anything. The idea was “Hey, the S.B.C. can’t impose oversight because of how it’s structured. It can’t make a database.” And yet it was doing that very thing. I think this is going to cause people at the annual meeting to think about their response differently and to be willing to no longer take the idea of autonomy and independence of churches as an excuse for not being quick to act.
What did people know within the S.B.C.? Was this an open secret?
I would say it’s less of an open secret and more that the things in the report have dribbled out incrementally. There were some things that were already revealed and known by Southern Baptists, and this [report] puts those all together in a way that shows a more systemic issue, but I think you could have drawn those lines together on your own if you were paying attention. Back in 2018, we saw a number of survivors come forward in the #ChurchToo movement that followed the #MeToo movement. And a number of the accounts of their experiences with leaders within the S.B.C. continue to come up in this new report. We’re now seeing behind the scenes of some individual cases that were playing out four years ago in the media, in the New York Times, and what people were saying about them behind closed doors. And then, of course, the real landmark would’ve been the following year, in 2019, when the Houston Chronicle investigation came out showing these hundreds of victims and hundreds of abusers.
Each year, the convention made moves to respond in some way, whether it was apologizing, reiterating, or strengthening its position against abuse, even if it was a weak mechanism. It’s not that everyone knew it was a problem and didn’t do anything but that they’ve been doing little steps over the past few years. Looking at this report all together, you see how inadequate the little steps were, and how much deeper and more wrenching the problem is.
And it’s not just that there was negligence or a lack of response but that there was an active resistance to the response and a demonization of the victims who were coming forward and trying to help. A lot of the victims that I’ve spoken with over this time are not people who have been knocking at the S.B.C. door because they want money from it or want to make their stories famous. They really don’t want the men who abused them to be in positions to continue to abuse children and other women. So they’re doing it out of this obligation and responsibility to protect against further harm. And, even with that approach, they’re being accused of trying to take down the S.B.C.
The Catholic Church, which faced its own abuse crisis, is incredibly centralized, and you see S.B.C. leaders saying throughout this report, essentially, that, because the S.B.C. isn’t structured, there’s really no way for them to act. Can you talk a little bit about the structure and how it both provided an excuse and did not allow for leaders to act?
The S.B.C. is the largest Protestant denomination in the country. And there are currently around forty-seven thousand churches that affiliate with it. The S.B.C. has a statement of faith that it believes in called the Baptist Faith and Message. So if a church wants to affiliate it’s expected to agree with that, and the statement would have the S.B.C.’s beliefs on theology and God, as well as things like the senior pastor, which is a role reserved for men. And then the church has to give to the S.B.C. through what it calls the Cooperative Program. A certain per cent of the church’s offerings gets paid to the Cooperative Program, which funds the Executive Committee [E.C.], the body that was being investigated. It does day-to-day work for the S.B.C. outside of its annual meeting.
If you do those two things, that’s enough to make you a Southern Baptist. You don’t have to call your church Southern Baptist, you don’t have to have a certain training—that’s it. And that’s what allows you to send what it calls messengers or delegates to the annual meeting, to the convention where decisions are made. That’s all you need to be able to participate.
That differs from other denominations that have a top-down structure, not just in the Catholic Church but also in other Protestant denominations that might have a regional or national body that oversees you and maybe deals with discipline issues. The Southern Baptists don’t have any of that. And so the S.B.C.’s excuse when it comes to abuse has been that because all of these churches operate independently—they ordain their own pastors, they select their own leadership, they name their own churches—it doesn’t have any authority to tell a church what to do on abuse. If a pastor was accused of being abusive, the S.B.C. can’t tell the church to fire him or put him on probation. Up until now, the S.B.C. said that the most it could say was, “You are no longer in friendly coöperation with the S.B.C.” That’s something it’s done for churches that take a different stance on homosexuality. So if you’re performing same-sex marriages within a church, or if you have gay pastors, which would be two things that violate its beliefs, the S.B.C. would say that you can’t call yourself Southern Baptist or participate in Southern Baptist life anymore. So now it has added abuse explicitly as a category in a committee to review churches that are suspected of being in violation.
What could and should have been done earlier?
The biggest thing is that if you’re keeping a list of pastors who have been credibly accused of abuse, especially ones with criminal charges, you need to make it public so that other churches can consult that list when doing background checks and know not to hire them. I think that’s the biggest thing that churches have wanted. But they also want to see quicker action for pastors who’ve been credibly accused of abuse to be barred from S.B.C. pulpits. A church has been expelled from the S.B.C. for abuse in just three instances. It’s such a small number.
How exclusively male is the leadership?
I would say heavily. All of the leaders who are being accused at the top here are men. All senior pastors at S.B.C. churches are men. There are women who are involved in leadership and some of the mission organizations and some of the seminaries. But, if you’re looking at the top, you are most likely to see men.
We’ve seen lots of institutions, both religious and secular, engage in similar coverups. There is often a combination of men protecting other men, people not wanting to face up to things, or just not caring, and then there’s the more utilitarian issue of legal liability. What balance do we see here?
I think the one thing that we see most explicitly in the report as the thing that top leaders talked about and named when discussing the problem of abuse among one another is the legal liability. The idea that the more we acknowledge this in any way, even as far as calling it a crisis, the more we heap suspicion and responsibility on ourselves, and therefore open ourselves up to lawsuits. And there’s evidence that, even dating back twenty years, one former S.B.C. president and seminary president, Paige Patterson, who was known as the guy who saved the conservative heart of the S.B.C., framed training around abuse prevention as a good measure to protect churches in the courts. The idea was that if you held a one-day seminar, if anyone were to ever sue you over this, you could say you did that. Maybe this sounds normal for a business, but for a church it seems really strange to not think, Even if we had to take a hit here, even if it does assume some risk for us, it’s worth it for us to do the right thing for people who have been hurt and to take that extra step. That’s what you would want or hope to see from a Christian denomination.
One of the reasons we don’t see a proper response among some of these leaders—especially older men, but maybe also younger—is that there is a different idea in their minds, I think, of what abuse is than what a lot of people are talking about today. Teen-agers and adult women who were preyed upon by their pastors or entered sexual relationships with their pastors—there’s a common understanding now that that’s abuse, because there’s a power differential there. No one can be in the position to consent if they are underage, or if they are under someone who is their spiritual authority—that’s just an imbalance. That’s always going to be an abusive situation. But I think that there are leaders who don’t think of it that way. They think that both parties are going to assume guilt if someone had sex. Why should the pastor automatically be blamed?
Are you saying that, in part, the Church’s attitudes toward sex generally are conditioning this response, or it’s more about an evolving standard of sexual behavior that was often not as strict twenty years ago?
I think it’s a little bit of both. It might also be a generational or positional thing, where people think, Oh, we’re making all pastors out to be guilty and rushing to accuse when, really, what if it was someone else’s fault? It’s not a mind-set that I personally hold, but I see this come up in people who are not in these same #MeToo discussions, in people who are not themselves women, and sometimes in people who are older and who are less willing to categorically say, “When this happens, it is abuse.”
One of the S.B.C. leaders spoke about the accusations as being a part of a “satanic scheme.” How prevalent was that view, and do you think it was sincere or just an excuse for not wanting to acknowledge what was going on?
It’s hard to know. But my take on that, even though it’s such a powerful piece of language, is not that the speaker, the leader who said that, thought that these women are themselves evil and satanic but that he thinks the enemy, the Devil, is using this issue to distract from other things. So he sees the victims as pawns in a bigger plan, not as being evil themselves.
Who are they pawns of?
It’s that the Devil is using this issue to distract us. So they’re not the ones acting evilly. But this issue is cropping up because another force wants the denomination to stop doing the good work of starting churches, and sharing the gospel, and saving, and baptizing people, and all of that.
That said, a lot of these women have rightly questioned their faith in soul-shattering ways. And a lot of them don’t see a future where the S.B.C. could make everything right. There are also a number of women who continue to persevere and work within churches. There are Southern Baptist women, who were abused by Southern Baptist pastors, who continue to go to Southern Baptist churches. But some of the most outspoken voices are ones who no longer identify as Christian at all. From the top, some leaders said, “Hey, look, they don’t even care about the Church anymore. Why should we heed their recommendations?” But for a lot of pastors on the local level, trying to minister to these women, there is a great sympathy for what they’ve been through and a desire for them to find the meaning that they found in faith before.
How have people in Protestant churches broadly looked at the Catholic Church scandal? Was there a sense that something like that would never happen for them?
Al Mohler, a prominent S.B.C. leader who’s the head of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, in Louisville, wrote a piece that we ran in Christianity Today back in 2018, when some of this really started making big headlines. He said, “We thought this was a Roman Catholic problem. The unbiblical requirement of priestly celibacy and the organized conspiracy of silence within the hierarchy helped to explain the cesspool of child sex abuse that has robbed the Roman Catholic Church of so much of its moral authority.” And he basically goes on to say that he was wrong and that the judgment of God has come down on the S.B.C. That was back in 2018. So maybe not to a person, but I think a lot of people agreed that the idea of the autonomy of the S.B.C. made it impossible for a Catholic Church-level coverup to take place. In a cruel twist, it is the autonomy that was used as an excuse not to act when the S.B.C. knew something, to avoid a solution within its own polity and structure.
Over the last few years, as the #ChurchToo movement has taken off and we’ve seen some prominent leaders taken down with their own abuse scandals, it has not been just in the conservative traditions. It’s the progressive Christian traditions, too. It’s not confined to one arm of the Church. Christians sometimes say that the Church is made up of people, and people are sinful, so this is going to take place. But I think that goes too easy. We as Christians should be the ones who are the most careful about designing structures that prevent this from happening and respond adequately when it does.
The current leadership has accepted this report, but how much hope is there that they will take these issues more seriously?
I’m really curious about what’s going to happen at the annual meeting next month in Anaheim. There is a possibility that this gets presented, and the leadership says that, under their current structure, what shall we do? Can we actually adopt all of the recommendations that were given to us by the third-party investigative firm? Can we afford them? Do we have the resources to make all of this happen, and to do it soon? They’re pretty dramatic and bold changes.
And, in terms of leadership, then and now: yes, there have been changes at the top, but the other thing this report showed is that there were a lot of people over the years who were in conflict with the E.C. and who wanted to take steps and take action, but, because of the role of the E.C., they were intimidated. The E.C. administers funding for other entities, and also just holds a great degree of social power within the denomination. It was hard to be out of step with it. In instances where people did speak out to criticize what Southern Baptists had done—what the E.C. had done in particular—to state in really clear terms how bad the problem was, we now know that behind closed doors they were criticized and told to stop.
There are a lot of people who are, like, “Finally, I can say and do what I’ve wanted all along without these people coming after me anymore,” and even some of the people within the E.C.—we see staff members who are saying, “Hey, I saw higher-ups doing all of this, and I thought it was wrong, but it took an investigation to expose it.” This investigation found exactly what it was structured to find. So the people who proposed it and approved it at this meeting last year knew what they were going for.
