AUGUSTA (GA)
Baptist News Global [Jacksonville FL]
February 7, 2025
By Christa Brown, David Clohessy, Dave Pittman and Chellee Taylor
Dear Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee:
Please stop with all the talk-talk-talk about abuse reform.
All the promises. All the posturing. All the platitudes.
Just stop.
Until you have at least 1,000 names of clergy sex abusers in a database — including those credibly accused — please stop telling us what you’re allegedly going to do.
We’ve heard it all too many times already. So, either do it, or stop talking about it.
The latest talk already rings hollow
Your president and CEO Jeff Iorg recently announced the hiring of an abuse response coordinator, Jeff Dalrymple, to head the new Sexual Abuse Prevention and Response Department, which will operate under the Executive Committee’s domain. He also said several sexual abuse prevention and response initiatives will be announced at the Executive Committee’s upcoming meeting on Feb. 17-18.
That’s why we’re writing this now — in anticipation of still more hollow words.
Iorg said this new department will work “to expand our sexual abuse prevention and response efforts incrementally and as needed.”
Given the Executive Committee’s long documented history of stonewalling survivors and turning a blind eye to abusers, talk of incrementalism seems as yet another form of complicity. While we wait for a tiny incremental step to materialize, more kids and congregants will be sexually violated by abusive pastors and betrayed by church officials who turn their backs.
“This is the human cost of an institutional pace of change so glacial as to resemble inertia.”
This is the human cost of an institutional pace of change so glacial as to resemble inertia.
And Dalrymple’s immediate turn to talking about “legal and stewardship considerations” lands as little more than new words for describing what the Executive Committee already has been doing for far too long: prioritizing the protection of the institution over the protection of people and safeguarding denominational dollars rather than safeguarding kids and congregants.
We’ve heard it all before.
A history of ‘nonevents’
The creation of this latest “department” comes after the Sexual Abuse Task Force in 2021-22 (SATF), the Abuse Reform Implementation Task Force in 2022-24 (ARITF) and the proposal for the Abuse Response Commission in 2024 (ARC).
And even before these entities with acronyms, there was the Sexual Abuse Presidential Study Group in 2019 and the Executive Committee Bylaws Workgroup in 2007-08.
Although all these groups were tasked with efforts related to sexual abuse reform, none of them managed to significantly move the needle on actual reforms to make kids and congregants safer, or to tangibly care for clergy sex abuse survivors.
But each time some new something-or-other was announced, we watched as you milked it for self-serving public relations purposes.
“As gauged by actual reforms, the task forces were ‘almost non-events.’”
Meanwhile, as gauged by actual reforms, the task forces were “almost nonevents.” Given this history, we have no reason to expect that your new “department” will be anything other than another “nonevent.”
A history of refusing to reckon
Again and again, we’ve seen how your narrative of “progress” is a flimsy façade, with little to no substance behind it.
It’s been nearly three years since the Guidepost report, six years since the Abuse of Faith series, and 18 years since the ABC 20/20 exposé, all of which documented a serious, systemic abuse and cover-up problem within the Southern Baptist Convention.
Yet, after all this, you’re still talking about taking an “initial” step.
Time and again, you’ve had the opportunity to earnestly reckon with the problem, but you don’t.
In 2022, the chair of the Sexual Abuse Task Force described the proposed database as “the bare minimum of what can be called reform.” Yet, you haven’t managed to do even this.
The purported “launch” of a database was hyped as “historic” — apparently for institutional PR — when in reality it was an empty shell of a website with no data at all, not a single name of any abusive pastor.
Then there’s your troubling “hotline,” for which the word itself seems an artifice since the “hotline” doesn’t trigger urgent action.
As survivors, we’ve watched your “Caring Well” performances while sitting in an institutional theater of callous indifference.
We’ve seen behind your curtains, and we know that, when the props and pawns are gone, there is only a brick wall that echoes the emptiness of your purported concern for clergy sex abuse.
Accountability is illusion and institutional reform is a hall of mirrors.
We’ve written lists of things you could do, and yet you don’t. For example, what became of your commitment to do “exhaustive research and analysis” on the redacted entries on your previously secret list of abusive clergy that was released in May 2022? You publicly stated your anticipation that “some of the redacted entries will be fully released in the future.” That was three years ago. When exactly will they be released?
“That was three years ago. When exactly will they be released?”
Now, your own elected Executive Committee chair, Philip Robertson, has publicly denied the existence of a systemic abuse problem in the SBC, and has even attempted to discredit the massive documentation of the Abuse of Faith series and to minimize the Guidepost report. Worst of all, the rest of you stay silent and don’t denounce this denialism. This thwarts any possibility of believing that you are earnestly attempting to address the problem.
Your credibility is kaput
Not only have you done near-nothing but you’ve engaged with apparent duplicity. Even as you were publicly talking the talk of abuse reform, behind-the-scenes, you went out of your way to fight against child sex abuse survivors with the filing of an anti-survivor amicus brief in a case to which you weren’t even a party.
When it came to light that former SBC President Bart Barber had authorized that hostile brief on behalf of the whole of the 13-million-member SBC, some of you said you were blind-sided. You claimed you were “furious” and “livid” about it. Yet, your posturing was performative; ultimately, you did nothing.
And who could forget the horror of what was revealed in your own documents produced in the Paul Pressler case? Internal correspondence showed your knowledge that there was “a lot of evidence” that Pressler had sexually abused Duane Rollins “for many years.” Despite that, your own documents also disclosed your scorched-earth tactics of delaying and blaming the victim.
After all this, and more, why in the world would we as survivors place any trust in anything you might say on this subject? Your credibility is kaput.
“Your deeds contradict your words.”
Your deeds contradict your words. They don’t match up with your public showmanship and, to the contrary, they expose a reality of grotesque uncaring.
Your hollow words are hurtful
Rather than trailing out hollow promises and platitudes, it would be kinder if you would just speak the truth and stop pretending. That’s why many of us felt gratitude for the honesty of a former task force member who wrote, “Nothing will change.”
Truth is infinitely better than phony hype about “progress,” public relations showmanship and performative faux-caring.
In the absence of actual care for clergy sex abuse survivors, concern for vulnerable congregants and the naming of credibly accused pastors, the rosy institutional narrative of “progress” lands as still more gaslighting and cruelty. It reminds us again and again of how much more you care about public perception than you do about real people raped and molested by pastors.
In other words, your incessantly hollow words inflict still more harm. That’s why we’re asking you to stop with the talk-talk-talk.
As GRACE founder and sexual abuse attorney Boz Tchividjian said: “Church leaders who speak empathetic words and make empty promises without substantive and self-sacrificing actions are exploiting and re-victimizing the abuse survivors who still have hope that the church will do ‘the right thing.’”
None of us expect you will actually heed what we say here. But know this: As survivors, we will hew to the truth and we will have no part of your efforts to legitimize an immoral institutional status quo.
Christa Brown, David Clohessy, Dave Pittman and Chellee Taylor are all survivors of clergy sexual abuse and are active in advocating for reforms in the SBC and other religious groups. Brown is the author of the book, Baptistland; Clohessy is the longtime former director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP); Pittman is the director of Together We Heal; and Taylor is a speaker on adult clergy sex abuse.