I’ve blogged a lot over the years about the Southern Baptist Conference’s (SBC) long history of ignoring and covering up sexual abuse, harassment and assault by members of the church hierarchy (here, here, here and here, for instance). The Houston Chronicle’s blockbuster investigation some seven years back found 700 credible victims and 400 culprits over the previous 10 years. Given that the SBC also covered up that Paul Pressler — one of the men who shifted the SBC into a Republican Party arm in the early 1980s — assaulted underage boys, I suspect there have been many more victims in the decades in-between (and Pressler unsurprisingly never stopped). As Karen Swallow Prior says, this man, with his warped view of power, gender and morality, shaped the SBC as it is today. Perhaps it’s not surprising they’re such a mess.
As attorney and abuse survivor Rachael Denhollander said back in 2022, the SBC did right in commissioning a third party review of its practices and failures. That’s more than the Catholic Church has ever managed, or many other churches (for example). However, she said, they were also 10 years behind most organizations in their understand of sexual abuse and best practices for dealing with it. In the four years since, things have not improved; plans for a better reporting system and a database of accused church leaders have come to nothing.
Electing Willy Rice, a conservative who thinks SBC is too woke and “the SBC’s sexual abuse crisis was more hoax than reality” presumably means the effort is dead for the foreseeable future. Rape apologist and Trumper William Wolfe is a loyal ally. And once again the convention passed the Mohler Amendment against women becoming pastors — they can manage to take action on that, but not on preventing abuse. And they hate that SBC women have opinions on this.
The standard defense Wolfe, and some conservatives I’ve known is that the SBC is no worse than any secular organization. And no question, lots of secular organizations have horrible track records on this. Um … so what? There’s a systemic pattern of rape and harassment in the SBC, plus refusal to deal with the problem. That is objectively wrong, immoral and unacceptable. “Other people are just as bad” is not an excuse, any more than “I haven’t raped as many people as Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein” excuses rape (though many bad judges have decided first-time rapists shouldn’t be punished). Particularly in the case of an organization that claims its policies are based on a higher morality which is why they should get their way.
The SBC does not, however, can talk about its moral superiority all it wants. Its actions give it the lie. I believe religious groomers, because they can invoke God as their authority (as discussed in the documentary Shiny Happy People), are the worst kind. And in the case of the SBC, their theology is the fruit of a poisonous tree and no good fruit can come of it.
As someone put it on Facebook, the SBC can forgive a man for being an abuser. They can’t forgive a woman for being female.
