The leader of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), which is the largest Protestant denomination in the US, published a 205-page list this week where it listed the names of hundreds of ministers and other church workers “credibly accused” of sexual abuse.
A report released last week revealed the top national members of the SBC’s executive committee suppressed claims of sexual abuse and stymied proposals for reform for the past two decades.
The report collected all the complaints of women and children against male pastors, church employees and officials starting from the year 2000 to the present. The report was prepared by a third-party investigator Guidepost Solutions.
There was also reluctance among the SBC leadership to launch full-fledged investigations. Southern Baptist pastors and members said that D. August Boto, the committee’s former vice president and general counsel, sat on that list, keeping it a secret for more than a decade.
August Boto in an email even called the advocates for reform ‘satanists’ and said that they were doing their bit to keep the faithful away from ‘evangelism’.
Boto attacked the work of Christa Brown, a survivor and advocate Rachael Denhollander, saying that their participation meant that the ‘devil was temporarily successful’.
The list if found earlier could have prevented people accused of sexual abuse from accessing positions of power. Along with Boto, Ronnie Floyd, an ex-president of the SBC who resigned as the head of the executive committee in October, also prevented creation of a task force to investigate the executive committee.
For example, a youth minister at Garland Baptist Church in Texas persuaded a 13-year-old girl in his youth group to have sex with him 20 times inside the church as well as the youth minister’s home. He has been sentenced to 22 years in prison in 2015 after he pleaded guilty to the charges.
“Our prayer is that the survivors of these heinous acts find hope and healing, and that churches will utilize this list proactively to protect and care for the most vulnerable among us,” Rolland Slade, chair of the SBC Executive Committee (EC) and Willie McLaurin, the EC’s interim president and CEO said in a statement.
The Southern Baptists will convene for an annual meeting in June in Anaheim, California and the timing of the release indicates that the religious group is coming to terms with allegations of sexual abuse levelled at its top religious leaders and church members.
The group has at least 14 million members and more than 47,000 churches in all 50 states.
The current list shows that at least nine people were connected to work in a ministry setting in some capacity while two others were connected with a Southern Baptist church.
(with inputs from Axios and The New York Times)
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