What Southern Baptists must do to fight clergy sex abuse

By Christa Brown
HoustChronicle
June 8, 2019

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/outlook/article/What-Southern-Baptists-must-do-to-fight-clergy-13961274.php

This collection of mug shots includes a portion of the 220 people who, since 1998, worked or volunteered in Southern Baptist churches and were convicted of or pleaded guilty to sex crimes.

The “Abuse of Faith” series documented at least 700 people who reported having being sexually abused by Southern Baptist clergy and church leaders. Nearly all of them were children at the time they were abused.

Since the Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News first published the series in February, more than 350 others have contacted the investigative reporters with additional stories of abuse and cover-ups among Southern Baptists.

These stories stand as a collective testament to a chilling reality. For decades, Southern Baptist pastors have been sexually abusing kids, and all the while, other Southern Baptist leaders have known and turned a blind eye. This has been the status quo in the Southern Baptist Convention.

But now, the dam is broken, and there is hope in that.

As the pent-up waters of long-silenced voices continue to rise, the Southern Baptist Convention must choose a higher ground.

The old way was always unholy - shaming and blaming victims while denying and minimizing the problem. Now the old way is also institutionally untenable.

With decades of entrenched patterns to confront, the SBC will not meet this challenge with any feeble half measures. Nor will it meet this challenge with resolutions, platitudes, image-polishing press statements, or pious preaching.

Rather, this massive institutional enabling of horror must be addressed on an equally massive institutional scale.

If the SBC truly wants to care for clergy abuse victims and prevent new victims, it must create new, proactive institutional structures.

The way forward lies in the creation of an independently administered database of Southern Baptist clergy sex abusers - those who have been criminally convicted, those who have admitted to abusive conduct, and those who have been credibly accused.

The creation of such an independently administered database could fulfill four critical needs in this faith group:

• It would provide survivors with a safe place — an independent office — where they could report abusive clergy with a reasonable expectation of being objectively and compassionately heard;

• For abuse reports that cannot be criminally prosecuted, which is most, it would furnish the institutional structure to assure that they are consistently and fairly assessed by people with the expertise to do so responsibly;

• It would equip local churches with a transparent resource for obtaining reliable information about clergy so that credibly accused abusers would be prevented from church-hopping; and

• It would provide the SBC with a solid basis for imposing consequences, such as by severing affiliation with any churches that continued to harbor pastors determined to have been credibly accused of abuse.

For years, SBC officials have rejected this common-sense safeguard of a database by proclaiming the Baptist belief in local church autonomy. But this has always been a misuse of polity, and worse, it is an excuse that perverts faith itself into a complicit partner for institutional cover-ups.

The creation of an independently administered database would not intrude on the autonomy of local churches but would instead provide a resource by which local churches could exercise their autonomy more responsibly.

The SBC must end its child-endangering recalcitrance and join other major faith groups that long ago instituted denominational systems for record-keeping on abusive clergy. Even the American Baptist Churches, which also profess local church autonomy, have a system for assessing reports about ministerial abuse and for keeping a database on those records.

Will it cost a lot of money for the SBC to develop an independently administered database and to staff it appropriately? Yes.

But what better use of offering plate dollars than the safeguarding of children?

Will the implementation of such a database entail some legal risks for the SBC that will need to be managed? Yes.

But the alternative is to leave on the shoulders of children a greatly increased risk of being sexually violated by purported “men of God.”

It is a depraved sort of reasoning that would choose institutional protection over the protection of children against predatory pastors who twist faith itself into a weapon for sexual abuse.

It is the sort of reasoning that the Southern Baptist Convention must rise above if it is to hold any possibility of moral credibility.