Those hellish SBC sexual-abuse stories? They may be coming to a zip code near you — GetReligion
* What actions did the entire executive committee take to hide abuse or to decline action on matters related to these issues (especially efforts to protect abusers and silence victims)?
* Finale: How did members of this “small, insular and influential” group inside the executive committee manage to do their alleged dirty work (including staff research for a secret list of abusers) without the permission of the 86-member committee as a whole?
Hold that thought, I will return to it.
As you would expect, another essential news source on this story is the Nashville Tennessean, especially the byline of Liam Adams, a new religion-beat writer who is gaining experience at a breakneck pace. His work also appears — paywalls are everywhere — in USA Today and other Gannett newspapers.
Here is a crucial bite of a major Tennessean report:
The report publicly details, for the first time, a credible allegation of sexual assault against former SBC President Johnny Hunt a month after his term ended in 2010 and how high-ranking staff maintained a list with hundreds of names of ministers accused of sexual misconduct, but did nothing with it.
Meanwhile, leaders spoke poorly about abuse survivors behind their backs and downplayed the extent of the crisis. The SBC’s law firm repeatedly advised leaders not to take action when they were approached with concerns about abuse or reform, the report concluded.
“Almost always the internal focus was on protecting the SBC from legal liability and not on caring for survivors or creating any plan to prevent sexual abuse within SBC churches,” Guidepost said in its report.
In the report, Guidepost makes 17 recommendations, including urging the SBC to establish an offender database, formally apologize to survivors and clarify standards for churches and clergy.
Guidepost’s team interviewed 330 people and reviewed five terabytes of data to investigate the SBC Executive Committee and its handling of abuse claims, treatment of victims, and resistance to reform between January 2000 to June 2021.
Several phrases in that chunk of reporting need unpacking, as we look to the future of this story.
What does “protecting the SBC from legal liability” actually mean, when it’s clear that the focus of the investigation — as this point — is the executive committee, not actions of the national convention? At this point, please scan up in this post and take another look at my three questions about the convention and the EC.
When victims sue for damages they target individuals and institutions with budgets, trusts, property and insurance. That’s the bottom line.
If you followed the decades of legal warfare surrounding the sexual abuse scandals in Catholicism, you know that it isn’t possible to sue “the Catholic Church.” Instead, victims had to sue INSTITUTIONS responsible for ordaining clergy (and hiring other staff), as well as hiring and firing them. In Catholic polity this leads straight to leaders at the diocesan level.
The problem in the SBC story is that there is no such thing as a diocese. The convention’s 47,000 autonomous congregations hire and fire their own clergy and, while there are seminaries, ordinations also take place at the congregational level.
Thus, victims can sue local congregations, many of which (most, actually) do not have lots of money in trusts and buildings. Here’s a story: How many SBC congregations now have insurance policies to cover accusations of this kind?
Repeat: Who owns the property? Local congregations. Who ordains, hires and fires clergy? Local congregations. What are their legal ties to “the SBC”? As a rule, the ties that bind are voluntary (see the “Cooperative Program” that funnels funds to SBC institutions).
What happens next?
Once again: Location, location, location. The SBC does have a network of INSTITUTIONS that have trusts, properties and, I would bet, insurance policies. What kind? Start with seminaries, mission boards and affiliated projects in publishing, etc. The national convention elects trustees for these institutions and, there is that COOPERATIVE program angle again, funnels money to them.
Reporters and readers: Where are these institutions located? Are victims making accusations against people who work in these institutions? Yes, we already know of some cases of this kind. There will be more.
Let’s end by going back to the national level (since there are no local dioceses).
For years, years, members of the executive committee have argued that it would violate Baptist polity and doctrine to establish a national institution or program to track abusers, since that would interfere with the work of local congregations in ordaining, hiring and firing clergy (and others). Also, this would make the national convention — or more likely, the EC — liable for mistakes in this system and, perhaps, even the actions of some abusers who slipped through this legal net.
Lo and behold, the Guidepost probe found that some executive committee members and staff had created precisely this kind of database, apparently (court debates ahead) for the sake of hiding abusers and/or opposing the claims of victims. Legal floodgates opened?
