Southern Baptist Executive Committee Publishes Previously Secret List of More Than 700 Accused Sexual Abusers

The Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee published a previously secret database of 205 pages late on a Thursday night. According to one report from wunc.org, the database includes more than 700 entries from cases that largely span 2000 to 2019. A Voice of America report describes it as containing more than 700 case entries that occurred mostly between those years.

The list became widely known on the following Sunday, when the independent firm Guidepost Solutions included it in its report on how the Executive Committee handled sexual abuse allegations. Guidepost’s report followed a seven-month investigation. It found that the Executive Committee stonewalled numerous survivors and prioritized protecting the convention from liability. Both reports attribute these findings to Guidepost.

The Executive Committee’s leaders, Rolland Slade and Willie McLaurin, said publishing the list was an initial but important step toward addressing sexual abuse and implementing reform. Both reports also say that D. August Boto, the committee’s former vice president and general counsel, and Roger Oldham, a former SBC spokesman, kept their own private list of abusive ministers. The reports differ on wording here. The Voice of America report refers to abusive priests, while wunc.org refers to ministers. Both reports say Boto and Oldham left their posts in 2019. wunc.org says they retired, and the Voice of America report says they withdrew.

According to both reports, the Executive Committee did not add entries to the published list. Its attorneys did redact several entries, along with the names and identifying information of survivors and of others unrelated to the accused. wunc.org says the published entries include those that reference an admission, confession, guilty plea, conviction, judgment, sentencing, or inclusion on a sex offender registry. The Voice of America report lists admission, confession, conviction, trial, sentence and sex offender references, though its text is incomplete at that point, so the full criteria cannot be confirmed from that source.

Protecting survivors’ identities in the redactions reflects the vulnerable people at the center of these cases (Proverbs 31:8-9). The sources do not say what further reforms, if any, the convention will adopt.