FILED · 2000–2019 · BAPTIST · SEXUAL
The Southern Baptist Convention Abuse Crisis
A 2022 independent investigation commissioned by the Southern Baptist Convention itself established that senior denominational leaders had for two decades systematically ignored, belittled, and intimidated survivors of sexual abuse while maintaining a secret internal list of credibly accused ministers.
What happened
In February 2019, the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News published Abuse of Faith, a six-part investigative series identifying 380 Southern Baptist church leaders and volunteers credibly accused of sexual misconduct against more than 700 victims since 1998. The reporting drew on court records, news archives, and on-the-record interviews with survivors.
In June 2021, in response to sustained public pressure from survivors and from a coalition of SBC pastors, the messengers of the Southern Baptist Convention voted at their annual meeting to commission an independent third-party investigation of the SBC Executive Committee's handling of abuse allegations over the prior twenty years. The investigation was conducted by Guidepost Solutions LLC, an independent firm with no prior denominational connection.
The Guidepost Report
The 288-page Guidepost report, Report of the Independent Investigation: The Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee's Response to Sexual Abuse Allegations and an Audit of the Procedures and Actions of the Credentials Committee, was released publicly on 15 May 2022. Its principal findings:
- A small group of senior Executive Committee staff and outside counsel had, over two decades, systematically protected the institutional legal interests of the Convention at the cost of survivor welfare. Survivors and reporting pastors were variously ignored, derided, intimidated, and (in documented cases) actively retaliated against.
- The Executive Committee had maintained an internal list of pastors and church staff against whom credible sexual-abuse allegations had been made. The list was assembled, updated, and held in secrecy by Augie Boto, the EC's general counsel, despite repeated public statements by SBC leadership that no such records existed or could be assembled given the SBC's congregational polity.
- Specific named SBC leaders, including former Executive Committee president D. August "Augie" Boto and former ERLC president Russell Moore, were treated extensively in the report, in some cases as having acted against the institutional pattern and in some cases as having participated in it.
The accused-list release
On 26 May 2022, eleven days after the Guidepost report's release, the SBC Executive Committee published the previously-secret internal database — 205 pages, with more than 700 entries naming pastors, ministers, and church volunteers credibly accused of abuse between 2000 and 2019.
Aftermath
The SBC messengers at the June 2022 annual meeting voted to establish an Abuse Reform Implementation Task Force, to create a public database of credibly-accused SBC personnel, and to set up an independently administered Survivor Assistance Fund. The implementation has been institutionally contested; the public database project has missed multiple announced launch dates. The US Department of Justice opened a federal criminal investigation of the SBC in August 2022; the investigation's status has not been publicly disclosed.
Significance
The SBC case is the most consequential public-record reckoning to date in American non-Catholic sexual-abuse institutional history. The methodological move that distinguishes it from the Catholic-case template is the SBC's congregational polity — autonomous local churches under no episcopal authority — which had for two decades been cited by SBC leadership as a structural reason why a denomination-level abuse record could not exist. The Guidepost investigation established that such a record had in fact existed, internally, and had been deliberately suppressed.
Sources
- Robert Downen, Lise Olsen, and John Tedesco, Abuse of Faith, Houston Chronicle / San Antonio Express-News investigative series, February 2019.
- Guidepost Solutions LLC, Report of the Independent Investigation: The Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee's Response to Sexual Abuse Allegations and an Audit of the Procedures and Actions of the Credentials Committee, 15 May 2022.
- Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee, accused-list database, released 26 May 2022.
- US Department of Justice, federal criminal investigation announcement, August 2022 (initial Bureau-published acknowledgement; subsequent status non-public).