Southern Baptist Abuse Survivors Say They Aren’t Fighting the Convention Now

David Pittman, a longtime advocate for Southern Baptist abuse survivors, said he could no longer fight the denomination after years of advocating for those who were sexually abused by Southern Baptists. He told his wife last year that he couldn’t continue opposing the country’s largest Protestant denomination, citing the loss of friends and a sense of despair over the SBC’s direction.

The Department of Justice dropped its investigation into allegations that SBC leaders had ignored sexual abuse survivors for two decades. A Texas megachurch pastor and longtime ally of President Donald Trump, Jack Graham, declared he always knew the abuse crisis was a “hoax” and that “proponents of this disaster should be held accountable.”

Pittman was also grieving the deaths of three friends who, like him, had survived sexual abuse in churches that are part of the Southern Baptist Convention. “The Southern Baptist Convention and Trump and MAGA have all devolved into this one glob of lies and I just couldn’t go against that,” Pittman said. “Because I was just losing too much of my friends and losing too much of myself.”

Pittman wasn’t surprised when the tone of the SBC’s annual meeting in Orlando this month was noticeably different from the one in Anaheim four years ago, when leaders pledged to do more to protect church members from sexual abuse.

At the 2022 meeting, Southern Baptists publicly apologized to survivors, including Pittman, and took the first steps toward creating a public database of accused sexual offenders to help churches screen job candidates and volunteers.

This year in Orlando, sexual abuse reforms were barely mentioned at the SBC’s annual meeting. Plans for the database had previously been scrapped. A faction within the convention had raised concerns that the SBC — a powerhouse for the Christian right — has been caught in a “liberal drift.” A strong voice within that faction who believes the proposed reforms went too far, Willy Rice, was elected as the convention’s president.

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