The SBC is a collection of loosely affiliated member churches, boasting just under 15 million members. It has no firm, established hierarchy; it doesn’t even have a central headquarters. In theory, individual churches can preach or believe whatever they want, but the larger “convention” can remove member churches that don’t toe certain lines. Representatives of these churches meet each year at an annual event — also called a convention. At the 2021 convention, member churches voted to conduct an internal investigation of sexual abuse within the church.
Complaints about sexual abuse and sexual assault on the part of pastors were sent to higher-ups who then kept those accusations quiet. Though the report, by Guidepost Solutions, was only commissioned to study the cover-up from the years 2000 on, it found incidents of sexual abuse and warnings of the same going back to the 1960s. In all, Guidepost found accusations leveled against people at all levels: church volunteers, staff, and leadership, including those at the top of the church’s ladder. Those accusations were made by people of different ages and genders, and they include allegations of child sexual abuse, the grooming of adolescents, and the sexual assault of adults.
These findings were not unprecedented. A major investigation by the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News, published in 2019, first brought many of the accusations against church leadership to light. The publication of that report galvanized a grassroots drive by individual Southern Baptist churches to hire a firm to conduct an investigation.
What the Guidepost report has shown is the sheer enormity of the problem, beyond the already staggering scope the Houston and San Antonio newspapers had revealed. Russell D. Moore, formerly the head of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission until he resigned both from that post and the SBC entirely in 2021, called the report the “Southern Baptist apocalypse” in a column for Christianity Today.
“It is horrifying. I expected to be the last person surprised by anything,” Moore said of the report, “and there were sections that were stunning even to me. It’s a horror, a sense of grief. It makes me contemplate the fact that I don’t even know a thimbleful of what must be being experienced by people who have survived these horrific acts of abuse in church settings. That weighs heavily.”
There’s a natural comparison point for these incidents: the scandal that ensued when the Catholic Church’s cover-up of its knowledge of priests who were child sexual abusers came to light, most prominently in a 2002 report by the Spotlight team at the Boston Globe. In this situation, too, the work of dogged newspaper journalists uncovered a scandal that the SBC was finally forced to step up and acknowledge.
The path forward to actually effecting change within the SBC is fraught with its own difficulties, however. Chief among them is the SBC’s structure — or lack thereof. Where the Catholic Church boasted a rigid hierarchy for parishioners and journalists to inveigh against in the name of justice, the SBC is loose and almost structureless. That will make reforming it very difficult indeed.
What’s more, the SBC’s theological underpinnings will make elevating the voices of those accusing pastors of abuse difficult because it privileges the voices of those pastors over those of their parishioners, especially women parishioners. In short, once a charismatic man becomes the leader of an SBC church, it can be very hard to punish him in a meaningful way.
Yet the SBC isn’t the only institution with a charismatic man problem. Those institutions litter the entirety of American evangelicalism and America itself.
Let’s start with one thing that may not be immediately obvious: The SBC publicly releasing both the Guidepost report and a list of accused abusers that it kept secret for years is an unprecedented move for the denomination. Moore sees some hope in the fact that the report exists at all.
“Before the [Texas newspapers’] report, I would have to spend a lot of time convincing congregations that this was a problem that could happen to them,” he said. “There was often this sense of screening out predators by vibe. People would often think, ‘Well, we know people [in our congregation], so we know we don’t have any problems like that.’ I noticed a big shift in that after the Houston Chronicle report. This investigation happened because grassroots Southern Baptists came to the convention last year and demanded that it happen over and against much of their leadership.”
The most obvious parallel to this scandal is the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandal. However, where these two scandals differ lies in how differently the Catholic Church and the SBC are structured.
The effectiveness of the Catholic Church’s response to its scandal is highly debatable, but the church’s hierarchical structure (priests report to bishops report to cardinals report to the pope) meant that parishioners and the media had several pressure points they could push against in the process of trying to understand what had happened. Abuse survivors could also sue individual dioceses to receive financial restitution.
The SBC lacks a similar hierarchy. It doesn’t see itself as a formal denomination but, rather, a loose association of churches that believe similarly. This structure gives individual churches under its banner lots of leeway to handle matters on their own. If your church’s pastor is misbehaving, it’s not always clear whom to report him to, especially if you don’t believe anyone in the church’s membership will do anything. But it’s not as though the SBC was unaware of the abuse problems within its ranks, despite its lack of traditional hierarchy.
“When it comes to addressing sexual abuse, up until now, they have claimed that because of their church policy, they don’t have the authority to track abusers and hold local churches accountable,” said Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a professor of history at Calvin University and the author of Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. “But in the report we found that they had, in fact, been tracking abusers in their churches and had been maintaining a private database for their own protection. They had not in any way reached out and tried to prosecute those abusers to keep people safe.”
In addition, while lawsuits can be brought against individual churches or clergy members, the lack of anything like a diocese within the SBC means that any lawsuits will necessarily target either the smallest units of the organization or the organization as a whole. There isn’t really a good middle ground. The convention does have an executive committee, which possesses a fair amount of power to set the stage for what is considered acceptable within the SBC, but very little fills the gap between that executive committee and individual churches.
“It’s not just an SBC thing,” Joshua Pease, a pastor who has also worked as a journalist covering sexual abuse in the evangelical church, said. “There are multiple different denominations that have very loose affiliations or very loose organizational structures. And then there are nondenominational churches that genuinely have zero denominational structure to them, where it literally is just one church, all on its own.”
The SBC report is a decided anomaly, simply because the SBC does have a hierarchical structure, no matter how loose or decentralized. If the pastor of a nondenominational church is sexually abusing congregants, the only authority a victim might be able to turn to is law enforcement.
Via a process called “defellowship,” the SBC member churches can remove other churches from the convention entirely. That allows the SBC to maintain some degree of theological consistency across a vast, mostly decentralized organization, which in some cases is important to the church’s mission, according to Moore. As he explains, an SBC church that suddenly started preaching polytheism would no longer be practicing Christianity as any denomination understands it. But defellowship is also used to legislate issues of who gets power and recognition within the church, and who does not.
Yet the problems within the SBC aren’t just the problems of the SBC. They’re problems within evangelical churches more broadly — and within America.
Changing that culture will be difficult for many reasons. Moore suggests that the most lasting changes may have to be grassroots ones. He points to a shift within individual churches in the last few decades that has now spread across almost the entirety of the SBC. In the past, there was little oversight of the process by which parents left their children at church nurseries during services. Over time, individual churches put in place safeguards that led to making sure children were never left alone with a single nursery worker and the introduction of a system in which only people who are authorized can see the child or leave the nursery with them. That reform was introduced at a handful of churches; that it has now spread so widely through the SBC suggests one possible way for micro changes to become macro ones.
What’s more, the church can certainly make broader, more systemic changes and could adopt the recommendations within the Guidepost report. Those would all be major, concrete steps taken to reform the SBC and its culture, and they would lead to an environment where abuse would be less likely.
But that’s not exclusively a problem of religious organizations, either. It’s a problem with every aspect of American life — from the tech industry to academia to Hollywood to your local church.
“Any institution is going to become a little bit insular, and probably the strongest leader is going to rise to the surface. There’s always going to be a tendency then for abuse,” Moore said. “How do we intentionally build cultures that counteract that? That’s something as a society we’re still figuring out, because we bought into the myth of the charismatic leader so deeply, and we’re paying such a heavy price.”
