Five words highlight the depths of Southern Baptist Convention leaders’ depravity.
Guidepost Solutions released the report of its independent investigation into the SBC Executive Committee’s “response to sexual abuse allegations” Sunday, May 22. Among other examples, the 288-page document tells what happened when Jennifer Lyell, a respected senior executive with Lifeway Christian Resources, the SBC’s publishing house, told her story of abuse.
In March 2019, Lyell offered to write about the sexual abuse she received at the hands of a former professor at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Her offer was to write for Baptist Press, the SBC’s public relations arm housed at the Executive Committee.
Marv Knox
A year earlier, Lyell told Southern Seminary President Al Mohler that a professor at the school, David Sills, started to abuse her while she was a student there and maintained the abuse through threats and coercion. Mohler fired Sills, but a seminary statement about Sills’ departure did not report why. She also told her Lifeway colleagues about her abuse, and they supported her.
At the urging of Mohler and LifeWay leaders, she reached out to Baptist Press, offering to write a first-person account of sexual abuse in the SBC. She chose that timing because Sills had been appointed a missionary with a non-SBC missions agency and would be in position to abuse other women. She said she wished to report then so that a record of Sills’ abuse would be recorded online and available to churches and groups that might consider working with him.
“Those exchanges reveal concern for managing the response of Southern Baptists ahead of faithfulness to telling the truth about what happened.”
The Guidepost Solutions report describes the transformation of Lyell’s proposed first-person account of abuse into a press release posted by Baptist Press. It provides correspondence between Baptist Press employees, their supervisors at the Executive Committee and the agency’s attorneys. Those exchanges reveal concern for managing the response of Southern Baptists ahead of faithfulness to telling the truth about what happened. And after the initial release, when others publicly referenced Lyell’s story, ongoing correspondence illustrates indifference to Lyell and to other sexual abuse victims.
The report shows how five words — the substitution of three words for two — inflicted grievous harm on Lyell. It provides a metaphor for the SBC leaders’ attitude toward sexual abuse within the convention.
Baptist Press declined to publish Lyell’s own account of her experience of sexual abuse. Initially, the first sentence of a draft of an article about Sills’ actions said she was “sexually abused.” Ultimately, however, the article published by BP said she was involved in a “morally inappropriate relationship” with Sills.
The shift of those five words in BP’s editing — dictated by senior staff and attorneys — misrepresented a survivor of sexual abuse as a participant in a consensual affair.
Never mind that others familiar with the situation, including Mohler, corroborated the abuse. In fact, the Guidepost report notes repeatedly that BP staff had been informed the sexual relationship was nonconsensual, “involved violence and threats of violence” and also involved coercion.
“We did not see any evidence that was presented to BP that indicated that the interactions between Ms. Lyell and Professor Sills was anything but sexual abuse. … No one from BP ever raised the issue of consent with Ms. Lyell,” the report says. “In none of the emails do BP personnel question whether Ms. Lyell had in fact been abused.”
“Baptist Press drastically changed her history.”
Twenty minutes before BP posted its article, a staff member phoned Lyell to tell her “the lawyers had them pull all uses of the words ‘abuse’ and ‘nonconsensual,’” the Guidepost report says.
In the moments and months that followed, “Baptist Press drastically changed her history,” the report adds. It cites social media posts claiming she participated in an “illicit affair,” calling her a sinner, demanding her resignation from Lifeway, and citing an Old Testament passage calling for her to be stoned, “So you shall purge the evil from your midst.”
At the 2019 SBC annual meeting, “she suffered in-person attacks, including being physically threatened and called a ‘whore,’” the report says.
By the fall, because of BP’s knowing mischaracterization of her abuse, which caused even other abuse survivors to conclude she willingly participated in an affair, “Ms. Lyell was forced into resigning her position at LifeWay,” the report documents. “Ms. Lyell experienced significant physical and emotional harm that required medical treatment.”
Seven months after BP published its damnably inaccurate article, but too late to save her reputation and job, BP posted an apology. And this February — almost three years after the article went online — Executive Committee trustees issued a formal public apology to Lyell and approved a financial settlement, as the Guidepost report describes it, “in lieu of filing a defamation and libel lawsuit in an attempt to compensate her for some of her experiences.”
So, all the journalistic spinning and legal tail-covering failed. We know Baptist Press bowed to pressure and willingly presented a sexual abuse victim as a “whore.” We know lawyers devised schemes that set aside truth in pursuit of risk management. We know convention executives allowed this innocent person to be tormented in a vain attempt to protect appearances.
“Lyell is but one illustration of the SBC’s callous response to victims of clergy sexual abuse.”
Lyell is but one illustration of the SBC’s callous response to victims of clergy sexual abuse. The Guidepost report details many others. And given the SBC’s emphasis on deferring to local congregations’ authority over moral responsibility, untold thousands more victims continue to suffer in solitude.
Still, Lyell’s is a cautionary tale of multiple failures. It’s the story of a person victimized twice — first by a malevolent perpetrator, but then publicly by callous bureaucrats more concerned with “protecting the base,” as former Executive Committee President Ronnie Floyd called it, than seeking justice.
But not only did the Executive Committee and Baptist Press fail to protect Jennifer Lyell, they also failed to protect the convention.
If they had behaved honorably — or, as they love to proclaim, “biblically” — they could have offered mercy to Lyell and God knows how many victims. And in so doing, they could have had a chance to repair the SBC’s image, at least providing credible evidence it possesses a shred of compassion for victims of predators. But, of course, that was not their priority, and so they failed.
One more thing: If you catch a gleam in the eyes of long-time SBC observers, it’s because they’ve seen this day coming.
“While Martin and Shackleford became the juggernaut’s first victims, Jennifer Lyell became one of the most maligned-yet-famous.”
Thirty-two years ago this summer, the Executive Committee planted the seeds of this particular bitter harvest. Previously, even though Baptist Press functioned within the Executive Committee, its staff operated with editorial freedom. The convention expected them to report — and gave them authority to report — factually and accurately about events and developments within the convention.
In June of that summer, backers of the SBC’s “conservative resurgence” gained a majority of the Executive Committee’s board members. The next month, they fired BP’s editors, Dan Martin and Al Shackleford, for continuing to exercise their responsibility to live up to BP’s legacy for truth-telling. The board re-made BP into an in-house public relations agency, responsible for casting the convention in the best light.
Friends of free journalism created Associated Baptist Press — predecessor to Baptist News Global — to take up the mantle. But within the SBC, accountability for truth-telling dried up, enabling BP to focus on spinning the news rather than reporting it.
While Martin and Shackleford became the juggernaut’s first victims, Jennifer Lyell became one of the most maligned-yet-famous.
Marv Knox, a longtime journalist, is retired and lives in Durham, N.C. He worked at Baptist Press alongside Martin and Shackleford until June 1990, when he became editor of the Western Recorder in Kentucky. He always thinks of them with honor and gratitude on July 17, the date of their firing, and the day he believes the SBC sealed its doom.
Related articles:
Guidepost report documents pattern of ignoring, denying and deflecting on sexual abuse claims in SBC
SBC Executive Committee publicly apologizes to sexual abuse survivor