Southern Baptist Leaders Covered Up Sex Abuse

The sad reality is that institutional religion always puts the institution and protecting its money and power/control over members ahead of the religious principles that are claimed to be espoused and the wellbeing - and very lives - of individual church members.  We saw this reality in stark detail as the world wide  sex abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church exploded in 2002 (it continues even today) with coverups extending all the way to the Vatican and the far from saintly Pope John Paul II.  Now, with luck, a similar bomb shell will wrack the Southern Baptist Convention ("SBC") in the wake of letters from a former high leader in the SBC that were leaked to the media.  Many have long known many SBC churches had sexual abuse problems, but the leadership always looked the other way and claimed that the denomination's lack of a feudal hierarchy system like the Catholic Church made it impossible to track instances of abuse and/or to hold sexual predators in pulpits accountable. The author of the letters - Russell Moore - exposes the lies.  Moore recently left SBC leadership over frustration with the denominations sex abuse coverups, the denomination's racism, and its blind allegiance to Donald Trump, a thoroughly morally bankrupt individual.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the revelations.  Here are highlights:

New allegations about the mishandling of sex abuse claims at the highest levels of the Southern Baptist Convention were made public in a recent letter between two high-profile leaders that was obtained Friday by The Washington Post.

While such allegations have been made by several women in the past, the letter includes new details from internal conversations, alleging that some institutional leaders bullied a sexual abuse victim, who was called a “whore,” and described in detail how many leaders resisted sexual abuse reforms.

In a dramatic turn of events this week, two letters written by Russell Moore, who recently left his position as head of the SBC’s policy arm, the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, have been made public. The new allegations are contained in a May 31 letter Moore sent to the current president of the SBC, J.D. Greear, that appeared on Friday on the site the Baptist Blogger, which has published other internal documents and recordings from Southern Baptist leaders in the past.

“You and I both heard, in closed door meetings, sexual abuse survivors spoken of in terms of ‘Potiphar’s wife’ and other spurious biblical analogies,” Moore wrote to Greear. “The conversations in these closed door meetings were far worse than anything Southern Baptists knew — or the outside world could report.”

In the ancient biblical story, Potiphar’s wife tries to seduce Joseph and falsely accuses him of having assaulted her.

On his last day as a Southern Baptist professional, Moore, who has served as one of the highest-profile leaders in the convention, decided to reveal specific names of key individual leaders involved in what he described as intimidation tactics.

Moore’s letter took direct aim at several members of the SBC’s Executive Committee, the group based in Nashville that runs the business of the convention and handles its finances. He described the “spiritual and psychological abuse of sexual abuse survivors by the Executive Committee itself,” as well as “a pattern of attempted intimidation of those who speak on such matters.”

Three employees who work in SBC institutions, who said they needed to remain anonymous to keep their current jobs, corroborated several of the factual details of the letter. Details in the letter were also confirmed by a former employee, an abuse survivor and a prominent abuse advocate.

Moore describes enormous rifts behind the scenes over the issue of how to handle sex abuse within SBC institutions. He wrote in his letter that during the last few years, he tried to smile and pretend everything was all right through his experiences.

“What [people involved] want is for us to remain silent and to live in psychological terror, to protect them by covering up what they do in darkness, while asking our constituencies to come in and to stay in the SBC,” Moore wrote.

In the letter, he refers to a “disastrous move” by some leaders to “exonerate” churches with credible allegations of negligence and mistreatment of sexual abuse survivors. “You and I were critical of such moves, believing that they jeopardized not only the gospel witness of the SBC, but also the lives of vulnerable children and others in Southern Baptist churches.”

Moore also spoke of a sexual abuse survivor whose words, he alleges, were altered by the Executive Committee staff to make it seem as though her abuse was a consensual affair. The Washington Post generally does not name victims of sexual assault without their consent, but the woman, Jennifer Lyell, a former vice president at the SBC’s Lifeway Christian Resources and once the highest-paid female executive at the SBC, said in a text message that she agreed to be identified.

Lyell, who says she has lost her job, her reputation and her health, confirmed Moore’s account of “bullying and intimidation” by the Executive Committee.

Moore’s account of Lyell’s experience was confirmed by Rachael Denhollander, a former USA gymnast who outed team doctor Larry Nassar’s serial sexual assault and has since been a prominent advocate for church abuse survivors and has helped bring attention to Lyell’s case.

“It shows the level of corruption and vile behavior that comes from the leaders in the SBC, the ones who really have the power,” said Denhollander, whose husband is a PhD student at the flagship SBC seminary Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Earlier this week, a 2020 letter by Moore first published by Religion News Service detailed Moore’s descriptions of racism within the convention and intimidating behavior among members of the Executive Committee. He described threats he says he has received from white nationalists and white supremacists.

In his letter, Moore calls Trump spiritual adviser Paula White, who led that advisory group, “a heretic and a huckster not representative of evangelical Christianity.”

The last annual meeting of the convention, held in 2019, put the spotlight on sex abuse, and survivors like Mary DeMuth were put onstage. In a blog post this week, however, DeMuth wrote that she has felt used, “like I was part of a reactionary PR machine responding to the very real trauma of sexual abuse and cover up in our midst.”

The SBC suffered historic membership losses last year.  With luck, this moral bankruptcy of the leadership and the filth they spew at victims of abuse coming into the open may well accelerate membership losses.  The hypocrisy of these modern day Pharisees is stunning.