SBC Sexual Abuse Coverup

The Southern Baptist Convention's sexual abuse crisis is the most comprehensive documented institutional failure in the history of American evangelical Christianity — and its cover-up is directly connected to the same power structures that drove the SBC Resurgence. Timeline of the documented crisis: February 10, 2019: The Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News published a joint investigation — 'Abuse of Faith' — documenting at least 700 victims of 380 Southern Baptist church leaders and volunteers over two decades. Reporters Robert Downen, Lise Olsen, and John Tedesco documented that many accused pastors had been allowed to move to new churches after abuse allegations, that victims had been pressured to keep silent, and that the SBC's congregational polity (which gives each church independence) had been used as a rationale for institutional non-accountability. SBC response: The SBC leadership initially defended itself on polity grounds — claiming that because the SBC has no authority over local churches, it could not be held responsible for pastoral abuse. This defense was demolished by subsequent reporting. May 2022: Guidepost Solutions, an independent investigative firm commissioned after a vote of SBC messengers, released a 288-page report documenting: - Two senior Executive Committee staff, including general counsel Augie Boto, had kept a private list of accused ministers for more than a decade without acting to remove them from positions of power - Survivors and advocates who brought allegations to the Executive Committee were met 'with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility from some within the EC' - According to the AP's summary, leaders 'stonewalled and denigrated survivors' over almost two decades 'while seeking to protect their own reputations' The Resurgence connection: Critics, including Kristin Kobes Du Mez, argue that the Resurgence's emphasis on male authority and institutional loyalty made abuse harder to expose; the Guidepost report itself focused on the Executive Committee's legal strategy and its treatment of survivors. Paige Patterson, one of the two architects of the Resurgence, was removed as president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in 2018 after reports that he had counseled women to stay in abusive marriages, had mishandled a rape allegation, and had made inappropriate comments about a teenage girl's appearance. Russell Moore, who as ERLC president had pushed for abuse accountability and been sidelined for it, published letters in 2021 documenting that SBC Executive Committee members had threatened him and attempted to block his reforms. His departure from the ERLC in 2021 was directly connected to this conflict.

Themes this entry appears in

• Patriarchy
• Christian Nationalism
• Gender & Patriarchy

Connections to SBC Sexual Abuse Coverup

• Purity Culture influenced (2019) — Purity culture's theological framework — female bodies as repositories of male honor, sexual violation as the victim's spiritual failure, shame as the primary response to sexual transgression — helped, critics argue, to make abuse coverup possible within SBC institutions. When abuse occurred, the framework placed the burden of shame on victims, made disclosure feel like personal sin, and incentivized institutional silence over accountability. Linda Kay Klein and other survivors describe purity culture's shame as a reason victims stayed silent. The theology that said a woman's sexual purity was her most valuable possession made her the responsible party when that purity was violated — regardless of how.
• Russell Moore responded to (2021) — Russell Moore's internal fight against the SBC Executive Committee's handling of sexual abuse predated his public break with the SBC by years. He had been pushing the Executive Committee to respond seriously to documented clergy abuse cases, arguing that the SBC's congregationalist polity did not make institutional accountability impossible — it just made it inconvenient. The Executive Committee resisted. When Moore's letters were leaked to the Religion News Service in May 2021, they documented not just the abuse mismanagement but the intimidation of survivors and the retaliation against those who raised concerns — including Moore himself. The letters were a direct catalyst for the Guidepost Solutions investigation commissioned that year. The 2022 Guidepost report corroborated key parts of Moore's account of Executive Committee resistance to abuse reforms. (Former Executive Committee chair Mike Stone sued Moore for defamation over the letters and withdrew the suit in December 2021.)
• SBC Conservative Resurgence influenced (2019) — Critics argue that the Resurgence's emphasis on male authority, complementarian gender hierarchy, and institutional reputation helped create the conditions under which clergy sexual abuse went unaddressed. The Guidepost Solutions (2022) report found that survivors were met with 'resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility' from some within the Executive Committee; critics see in that the same power dynamics the Resurgence installed: authority concentrated in male leaders, accountability external to the institution treated as attack, dissent treated as theological rebellion.
• Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary influenced (2019) — The abuse reckoning that eventually produced the Guidepost Solutions investigation had many origins, but the Patterson case at Southwestern was among the most catalytic. When trustees disclosed that Southwestern's president had written of meeting a student who reported a rape alone to 'break her down,' and that a 2003 rape report at Southeastern had never been taken to police, it demonstrated the institutional consequences of the resurgence's patriarchal theology at the seminary level. Patterson's firing in May 2018 and the public attention to the case preceded and helped precipitate the Houston Chronicle investigation (February 2019) that documented the broader SBC abuse pattern.

Sources

• Southern Baptist leaders release previously secret list of accused sexual abusers — Associated Press (2022)
• Report: Top Southern Baptists stonewalled sex abuse victims — Associated Press (2022)
• Abuse of Faith — Houston Chronicle / San Antonio Express-News (2019)
• Guidepost Solutions Report on the Executive Committee of the SBC — Guidepost Solutions (2022)
• Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation — Kristin Kobes Du Mez (2020), pp. 290–310