Southern Baptist Convention Releases Guidepost Report on Decades of Abuse Cover-Up Attempts

The Southern Baptist Convention is still responding to a third-party report released on a Sunday by Guidepost Solutions. The nearly 400-page report details how a handful of SBC officials over two decades disparaged abuse survivors, ignored warnings about a growing abuse crisis, and opposed prevention policies that they believed could protect children but could also expose the denomination to lawsuits. The report corroborates what survivors have said for years: that denominational officials ignored or downplayed decades of documentation showing predators were targeting SBC churches.

Many of the executive committee members named in the report have retired or resigned since last year. Those departures came amid contentious debates over whether to give Guidepost full access to legally protected documents, a level of access that SBC churches demanded when they commissioned the inquiry. Southern Baptist leaders were expected to respond to the report on Tuesday.

The report follows years of efforts to address abuse in the SBC, the nation’s second-largest faith group. In 2019, the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News published Abuse of Faith, a series of investigations into abuse in the convention’s roughly 47,000 churches. The investigation found that roughly 400 SBC church leaders had been criminally charged with sex crimes since 2000, and that many of those abuses occurred after 2008, when SBC leaders declined to consider several modest reforms suggested by survivors and experts.

The convention faced a series of scandals involving three prominent figures. Frank Page, head of the SBC’s executive committee, resigned after it was uncovered that he had an affair with a member of his church. Paul Pressler, a former Texas Appeals Court judge and co-leader of the SBC’s 20-year conflict over biblical truth, was accused of decades of rapes by a former youth group member who sued. Three other men later alleged similar misconduct in court affidavits. The Chronicle also revealed a 2004 lawsuit settlement for assault in which Pressler agreed to pay $450,000.

Criticism also centered on Paige Patterson, a two-time SBC president. Criticism began after sermons resurfaced in which Patterson described counseling a woman whose husband had beaten her, and said her husband’s attendance at church afterward was a sign of restoration in his view. In another sermon, Patterson referred to a 16-year-old churchgoer as “built,” language he later justified as biblical. As outcries grew, two women said he had concealed or mishandled their rape reports while he was president of various SBC seminaries. Ahead of the SBC’s annual meeting in June 2018, the trustees of the school’s Fort Worth seminary removed Patterson as its president.

At its annual meeting, Southern Baptists took their first steps toward reform in response to the Chronicle’s reporting. They advanced a constitutional amendment on abuse and empowered a committee to receive abuse reports and make voluntary “inquiries” into how churches had handled abuse. Such congregations could then be referred to the executive committee, which would decide whether a church should be removed from the SBC.

The Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the convention’s public policy arm, hosted a three-day “Caring Well Conference” focused solely on abuse. At the conference, abuse advocate, attorney and survivor Rachael Denhollander pointed to a Baptist Press report, the denomination’s news service, that had described a high-ranking SBC employee’s rape report as a consensual affair. That woman faced a wave of online harassment and repeatedly asked SBC leaders to correct the error, which they did not do, prompting Denhollander to raise the issue publicly. Baptist Press quickly issued a statement and clarification, but the speech angered some members of the executive committee, the convention’s highest governing body.

At an executive committee meeting, some members allegedly sought to censure then-SBC President J.D. Greear for comments he had made to the Chronicle, in which he advised churches to “exercise caution” before hosting Patterson. Meanwhile, other members allegedly launched an investigation into the work of then-SBC leader Russell Moore, which Moore later said was tantamount to a mafia-style shakedown.

Source: Read the original report