HOUSTON (TX)
Houston Chronicle [Houston TX]
June 21, 2026
By Haajrah Gilani
After years of advocating for those who were sexually abused by Southern Baptists, David Pittman told his wife last year that he couldn’t fight the country’s largest Protestant denomination any longer.
It was September 2025 and, months prior, the Department of Justice had 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.
Alongside Rice’s election, Southern Baptists at the Orlando meeting overwhelmingly supported enshrining a ban on female pastors, elders and overseers in the SBC constitution, which could affect at least two Houston churches if it passes in a final vote next year.
For some survivors — who were promised a database naming abusers that never came — Rice’s election solidified what they were already feeling: the SBC can’t be reformed. For many in the SBC, however, the new direction is a step towards regaining the conservative values they believe have been lost.
“Several years ago, the SBC was caught in the middle of a ‘Me Too’ cultural and political storm,” Rice said in a statement to the Houston Chronicle. While many good people sought to reform the SBC, he said others “betrayed the principle of reform” by violating legal protections that shield the innocent from false allegations. Rice did not cite any examples.
“We sincerely love and care about victims of sexual abuse, and we know that the vast majority of sexual abuse survivors have not suffered abuse from church leaders or churches, but have found help, hope and healing in the local church,” Rice said.
‘Clergy impunity’
Efforts to reform the convention span decades. In 2007, at an annual meeting in San Antonio, survivors and advocates asked the SBC to create a registry of credibly accused abusers. Convention leaders later said it couldn’t be done, saying they had no authority to tell churches to report sexual abuse to a central registry.
A 2019 investigation by the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News found that 380 Southern Baptist church leaders or volunteers had abused at least 700 people — mostly children — over the previous two decades. In the aftermath of the revelation, the SBC commissioned an independent investigation that found the organization to have routinely silenced and disparaged sexual abuse survivors.
Rice, senior pastor of Calvary Church in Clearwater, Fla., had made an unsuccessful bid for SBC president in 2022 when he dropped out over concerns about past sexual misconduct by a deacon at his church.
Rice later said he doesn’t believe there is a systemic organizational coverup of abuse. He made the comments during a podcast with the Center for Baptist Leadership, which was founded in 2024 to advocate for conservative values within the SBC.
After the Orlando meeting, another survivor named in the SBC’s apology, Christa Brown, said in a statement to the Chronicle that Rice’s election was very painful and that his election means the convention “will continue down the path of refusing to earnestly reckon with clergy sex abuse.”
“There are good people within the SBC. I know that,” she said. “But to those good people, I say this: if you are repulsed by the moral repugnance of this institutional system of clergy impunity, the only thing to do is to walk away. Stop giving the SBC your money, time, and energy. The SBC is not reforming; it’s regressing. And it’s doing ever more harm.”
‘I don’t want to fail the survivors’
When asked by the Chronicle why reforms were less of a focus in Orlando when compared to Anaheim, SBC Executive Committee Vice President for Communications Brandon Porter said the convention “has been very active in sexual abuse prevention and response since the convention met in Anaheim in 2022.”
Porter cited resources including the SBC’s abuse helpline and an initiative that recently launched to equip local Southern Baptist associations and state conventions to protect congregations from abuse.
He added that under the leadership of Jeff Dalrymple, director of the SBC’s Sex Abuse Prevention and Response Department, the convention amplified voices of experts in sexual abuse response and prevention in dozens of state and regional Baptist conventions. Dalrymple has helped create training resources, Porter said, and SBC Executive Committee President and CEO Jeff Iorg has given regular updates to messengers on this work during his report at the annual meeting.
Regarding the absence of a promised database of sexual abusers, Dalrymple said in a statement that the SBC Executive Committee “continues to strongly encourage ministry leaders to utilize existing databases of convicted offenders which is simply available through existing background service providers.”
“Until we can identify a sustainable means of expanding to additional databases, this remains one of the best means to screen out individuals with disqualifying convictions from having access to kids and the vulnerable in ministry programs,” Dalrymple added.
From 2022 to 2023, Todd Benkert served on the SBC’s Abuse Reform Implementation Task Force. When he resigned, he says it was because he could sense that, despite his efforts, no database would be established.
“I don’t want to fail the survivors,” Benkert said. “I hate that I did. I hate that this is the outcome because I was part of giving survivors hope that there was going to be a change and, ultimately, there was some movement, but no significant reform.”
That promise to help survivors is one Benkert still holds close. While he genuinely believed the SBC would make changes, he still thinks it can happen — it just can’t all fall on the backs of survivors. He currently serves as the executive director for a nonprofit, Hope’s Companion, working with churches to help them better understand trauma and abuse.
While some of the concerns about polity, cost and exposure to liability regarding proposed reforms were legitimate, Benkert says, that doesn’t mean the proposed changes were impossible.
“But I also think for some, that there wasn’t any effort to address those concerns,” he said. “The concern alone was enough to halt the momentum without actually trying to achieve the result and address those concerns at the same time.”
‘The SBC is dead to me’
Jules Woodson, a survivor named in the public apology in the Anaheim resolution, has also distanced herself from the convention.
“The SBC is dead to me,” she said. “They don’t matter. And I’ve warned people. And I have to remove myself. I sounded the alarm, but I can no longer stay in that space and consider myself safe.”
Growing up in the SBC’s conservative culture, Woodson says she subscribed to a certain type of womanhood that meant being timid, silent and waiting for “a great Christian man” to lead her.
“It makes me cry looking back, thinking that was my goal in life,” she said. “‘Cause boy, has that done me wrong. And I’m learning now, nobody is gonna save me. There’s not gonna be some prince charming coming on a horse that’s going to save me. I have to do it myself.”
But she doesn’t regret telling her story.
“I still hear from survivors who my story has impacted, and it brings me to tears, but they’re tears of joy,” she said. “I’m just so glad that I could give other people a voice, and it’s not the happy ending that we had all hoped for, but none of it was in vain.”
Pittman still works with survivors of sexual abuse through his nonprofit Together We Heal, and continues to teach at churches “that want our help.”
He doesn’t believe the convention and its political allegiances can be separated.
“The SBC and the GOP, they are the same,” he said. “And so none of this is a surprise that they never were really going to reform. It was all just dog and pony shows. It was all smoke and mirrors to appease a movement, a public movement, that never could get enough footing to actually cause change.”Bottom of Form
Haajrah Gilani
Religion Reporter
Haajrah Gilani is a religion reporter for the Houston Chronicle. Haajrah writes about the complex intersection of faith and culture in Texas. Her role is part of the Chronicle’s partnership with Report for America, an initiative of the nonprofit GroundTruth Project connecting more than 100 journalists with newsrooms across the U.S. A Philadelphia native, Gilani earned her master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University.