When you hear people talk about sexual abuse claims and the Southern Baptist Convention, it’s not the same as talking about the Roman Catholic Church and sexual abuse.
Yes, there are clergy culprits in both religious bodies. And yes, there are religious leaders in both bodies who have covered up and ignored abuse claims and passed along offenders from congregation to congregation. But who’s responsible and who’s liable in these two largest religious bodies in the United States is very different.
Catholicism operates within a hierarchy. The pope appoints archbishops who oversee bishops who oversee priests. There is a clear line of authority from top to bottom, and clergy serving local parishes are placed there by superiors.
Not so among Baptists, who practice one of the most radical forms of autonomy of any Christian body in the United States. As my seminary professors used to drill into us, “The headquarters of the Baptist denomination is the local church.”
All Southern Baptist churches call and supervise their own pastors. No denominational official has any say in the matter. Each church has its own personnel policies. Each church bears the liability for its own decisions. There is no pope, and there are no bishops.
So how, then, has the SBC come to be ensnared in one of the largest clergy sexual abuse scandals in the nation? If each church is autonomous, how can the denomination in any way be liable?
“In one sense, the SBC has made itself liable by claiming not to be liable.”
That is the most important question to answer if you want to understand the present moment in the SBC. In one sense, the SBC has made itself liable by claiming not to be liable.
For years, abuse survivors and their advocates begged SBC officials to create a database of known clergy sexual abusers to keep them from being passed unwittingly from congregation to congregation. SBC leaders steadfastly said they could not do that because of the doctrine of autonomy.
And yet it turns out a high-level official in the SBC Executive Committee was keeping just such a list in his desk drawer. Secretly.
To abuse prevention advocates, that was evidence it was possible to do what they had been demanding. And then the Houston Chronicle published its “Abuse of Faith” series that told the story of hundreds of known clergy sexual abusers in the SBC and how easy it was for them to move from church to church unnoticed.
Paul Pressler (left) and Paige Patterson, architects of the SBC takeover, sit at Cafe duMonde in New Orleans June 9, 1990, comemmorating their meeting at the same spot 20 years earlier to conceive the plan to gain control of the nation’s largest non-Catholic denomination. (Photo by Thom Scott)
All the while, one of the greatest alleged sexual abusers in the SBC was running the show from his home in Houston. That was Paul Pressler, who died last year but lived long enough to see his name and reputation tarnished with multiple accusations of his abuse of teenage boys and young men over decades.
He was co-architect of the “conservative resurgence” that turned the SBC in a more conservative direction from 1979 to 2000. His co-pilot in that effort was another larger-than-life figure, Paige Patterson, who — it turned out — had a habit of turning a blind eye to sexual abuse and blaming women who were victims.
Throw in the national #MeToo movement, Harvey Weinstein, the Catholic Church and a slew of sleazy politicians, and you have the primordial soup that created the perfect laboratory for a reckoning in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.
There are other mileposts along the way, including several high-profile cases of clergy sexual misconduct often made worse by its mishandling by those who could have held others accountable. And then there was the 2022 Guidepost Solutions report that blew the lid off the whole thing.
Thus as voting representatives called “messengers” gather for this week’s SBC annual meeting in Dallas, there is a lot of water under the bridge. More metaphorical water than there is real water in the nearby Trinity River.
This is an issue that has dominated headlines for the past four years and will do so again this week. And it will be overshadowed by the unexpected death of one of the most public of abuse survivors, Jennifer Lyell, last Saturday. Even among Southern Baptists who deny the reality of clergy sexual abuse, it will be hard to speak ill of the dead.
The big issue on the agenda is a proposed $3 million off-the-top allocation from the SBC’s Cooperative Program unified budget to help cover legal expenses related to all the sexual abuse litigation — on top of more than $11 million already spent.
But again, if the SBC’s churches are autonomous, how can the denomination be held liable for clergy sexual abuse? Why is it spending $14 million on this?
SBC Executive Committee President Jeff Iorg addresses members June 9 at their plenary session in advance of the 2025 SBC annual meeting in Dallas. (Baptist Press photo by Sonya Singh)
Jeff Iorg, president of the SBC Executive Committee, gave a hint of this in his presentation to the Executive Committee June 9. With a new initiative from his staff, “we are implementing reasonable and purposeful solutions to help churches, entities and denominational partners address sexual abuse prevention and response across the life of Southern Baptists,” he said.
That sounds nice. But the horse already is out of the barn. And prevention is not enough to stave off the existing lawsuits.
Iorg identified two categories of what he called “litigation management.”
The first category involves allegations of direct liability for actions or inactions by the SBC, the Executive Committee, SBC officers or SBC committees. This would include cases where denominational officials had information and failed to act on it. There has yet to be a definitive test case in the courts to indicate how much liability might be attached, but several are pending.
The second category is cases that originate with local churches and may also name a local Baptist association, state Baptist convention, the SBC and the SBC Executive Committee as co-defendants. Generally, these cases are easier to fend off because of autonomy.
“In some cases, this happens because attorneys do not understand our polity,” Iorg said. “In other cases, attorneys understand our polity, but they sue us anyway in attempts to damage our reputation or drain us financially.”
It is these lawsuits that, regardless of how fruitless they may be, will continue to arise, he predicted. Such lawsuits “will likely continue indefinitely, and we will continue to manage them and respond to them as part of our role at the Executive Committee,” he said.
In the meantime, Iorg and the Executive Committee are left mopping up the flood of what has gone before, the denials and deferments. Even if they build a dam against future litigation, the house is still a mess.
Mark Wingfield serves as executive director and publisher of Baptist News Global. He is the author of five books, including Honestly: Telling the Truth About the Bible and Ourselves.
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