There’s an old saying in the real estate business about properties that get hot and then sell quickly: “Location, location, location.”
That’s precisely where we are right now with the sexual-abuse scandal that looms over the core institutions of the giant, complex, sprawling Southern Baptist Convention.
Where is the story heating up right now? Where is the story going in the future? The answer to both of those questions is: “Location, location, location.” This is true with current events (and events yet to come) and it’s also true with the must-read coverage of this big story. We focused on both sides of that equation during this week’s GetReligion podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in).
First, let’s talk about the journalism behind this story, which has been building for several years now (see this Bobby Ross, Jr., “Plug-In” update for a starter). Everything begins in Texas and Tennessee and reporters there who are doing the heavy lifting — in Nashville and Houston, to be specific. You can see this, ironically, in this Washington Post story: “How two Texas newspapers broke open the Southern Baptist sex scandal.” Here is the overture:
Houston Chronicle city hall reporter Robert Downen was on the night shift one evening in 2018, just a few months into the job, when something caught his attention.
Scrolling through an online federal court docket, he spotted a lawsuit that accused Paul Pressler, a prominent former judge and leader of the Southern Baptist Convention, of sexual assault. While the case had been previously reported, newly filed documents painted an even more damning picture, including the revelation that Pressler had previously agreed to pay his accuser $450,000. Downen, then 25, probed more deeply and discovered other survivors of church abuse, who made it clear to him, he recalled, that “if you think this problem is confined to one leader, we have quite a bit to show you.”
Downen’s ever-growing spreadsheet of cases soon inspired a larger reporting effort to quantify the scope of sex abuse within the massive Protestant denomination. Journalists at the Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News teamed up to create a database of cases involving nearly 300 church leaders and more than 700 victims for their landmark 2019 “Abuse of Faith” series.
A wave of outrage in response to the series rocked the Southern Baptist Convention, prompting its Executive Committee to hire an outside firm to investigate.
Sexual-abuse accusations against Pressler had been rumbling for decades behind closed doors and in locked-tight legal proceedings. I first heard about them in the early 1980s, through a well-placed contact at CBS News, when I first hit the religion beat at The Charlotte News. There was smoke, but no one could get to the fire. The fact that this SBC giant’s accusers were young males only added to the tension.
If you know SBC life — I grew up as a Texas Baptist preacher’s kid and my whole family has Baylor University ties — then you may know this old saying: Texas is the wallet on which the SBC sits. In terms of finances, statistics and big-church power, you cannot ignore Texas.
So it makes total sense that this story broke in Texas. You have to follow Downen on Twitter and the Houston Chronicle team’s work in order to plug into that stream.
As you will hear in the podcast, the structure of the SBC is radically different than other major Protestant bodies in America life. Thus, to cover this story, reporters have to get inside this multilayer structure — local, regional and national — and learn to speak its language.
For example, consider this passage in the Chronicle story about the release of the independent Guidepost report about SBC sexual abuse: “Southern Baptist probe: Here's what the bombshell report revealed.”
The historic, nearly 400-page report details how a small, insular and influential group of leaders “singularly focused on avoiding liability for the SBC to the exclusion of other considerations” to prevent abuse. The report was published by Guidepost Solutions, an independent firm that conducted 330 interviews and reviewed two decades of internal SBC files in the seven-month investigation.
“Survivors and others who reported abuse were ignored, disbelieved, or met with the constant refrain that the SBC could take no action due to its (structure) — even if it meant that convicted molesters continued in ministry with no notice or warning to their current church or congregation,” Guidepost’s report concluded.
Guidepost investigated the SBC’s 86-member executive committee, the convention’s highest governing entity. The firm’s investigators had unprecedented access to the SBC’s leadership and reviewed thousands of internal documents — including previously confidential communications between SBC lawyers.
There is a crucial tension between two phrases in that language — “a small, insular and influential group of leaders” and then “the SBC’s 86-member executive committee, the convention’s highest governing entity.”
Actually, the ultimate governing body in the SBC is the national convention, which meets for business once a year with “messengers” coming from autonomous congregations all over the nation. The next convention is just ahead — June 14-15 in Anaheim, Calif.
The executive committee is charged with carrying out the wishes and business of the national convention when it is not in session. In this case, the efforts to hide the abuse took place in that “small, insular and influential” group of EC members.
This leads to three big questions:
* What actions has the SBC convention taken that are linked to efforts to hide years of abuse? In this case, silence is not an action. When members of the EC tried to steer the investigation away from a business session at the SBC convention itself, a “messenger” took action and changed history. On that angle, note this must-read Religion News Service report by Bob Smietana, another “location, location, location” reporter who has lots of reporting experience in Nashville. He also spent several years working for a research think tank linked to the SBC. Another RNS byline to note on SBC issues: veteran reporter and editor Adelle Banks.
* What actions did the entire executive committee take to hide abuse or to decline action on matters related to these issues (especially efforts to protect abusers and silence victims)?
* Finale: How did members of this “small, insular and influential” group inside the executive committee manage to do their alleged dirty work (including staff research for a secret list of abusers) without the permission of the 86-member committee as a whole?
Hold that thought, I will return to it.
As you would expect, another essential news source on this story is the Nashville Tennessean, especially the byline of Liam Adams, a new religion-beat writer who is gaining experience at a breakneck pace. His work also appears — paywalls are everywhere — in USA Today and other Gannett newspapers.
Here is a crucial bite of a major Tennessean report:
The report publicly details, for the first time, a credible allegation of sexual assault against former SBC President Johnny Hunt a month after his term ended in 2010 and how high-ranking staff maintained a list with hundreds of names of ministers accused of sexual misconduct, but did nothing with it.
Meanwhile, leaders spoke poorly about abuse survivors behind their backs and downplayed the extent of the crisis. The SBC's law firm repeatedly advised leaders not to take action when they were approached with concerns about abuse or reform, the report concluded.
"Almost always the internal focus was on protecting the SBC from legal liability and not on caring for survivors or creating any plan to prevent sexual abuse within SBC churches," Guidepost said in its report.
In the report, Guidepost makes 17 recommendations, including urging the SBC to establish an offender database, formally apologize to survivors and clarify standards for churches and clergy.
Guidepost’s team interviewed 330 people and reviewed five terabytes of data to investigate the SBC Executive Committee and its handling of abuse claims, treatment of victims, and resistance to reform between January 2000 to June 2021.
Several phrases in that chunk of reporting need unpacking, as we look to the future of this story.
What does “protecting the SBC from legal liability” actually mean, when it’s clear that the focus of the investigation — as this point — is the executive committee, not actions of the national convention? At this point, please scan up in this post and take another look at my three questions about the convention and the EC.
When victims sue for damages they target individuals and institutions with budgets, trusts, property and insurance. That’s the bottom line.
If you followed the decades of legal warfare surrounding the sexual abuse scandals in Catholicism, you know that it isn’t possible to sue “the Catholic Church.” Instead, victims had to sue INSTITUTIONS responsible for ordaining clergy (and hiring other staff), as well as hiring and firing them. In Catholic polity this leads straight to leaders at the diocesan level.
The problem in the SBC story is that there is no such thing as a diocese. The convention’s 47,000 autonomous congregations hire and fire their own clergy and, while there are seminaries, ordinations also take place at the congregational level.
Thus, victims can sue local congregations, many of which (most, actually) do not have lots of money in trusts and buildings. Here’s a story: How many SBC congregations now have insurance policies to cover accusations of this kind?
Repeat: Who owns the property? Local congregations. Who ordains, hires and fires clergy? Local congregations. What are their legal ties to “the SBC”? As a rule, the ties that bind are voluntary (see the “Cooperative Program” that funnels funds to SBC institutions).
What happens next?
Once again: Location, location, location. The SBC does have a network of INSTITUTIONS that have trusts, properties and, I would bet, insurance policies. What kind? Start with seminaries, mission boards and affiliated projects in publishing, etc. The national convention elects trustees for these institutions and, there is that COOPERATIVE program angle again, funnels money to them.
Reporters and readers: Where are these institutions located? Are victims making accusations against people who work in these institutions? Yes, we already know of some cases of this kind. There will be more.
Let’s end by going back to the national level (since there are no local dioceses).
For years, years, members of the executive committee have argued that it would violate Baptist polity and doctrine to establish a national institution or program to track abusers, since that would interfere with the work of local congregations in ordaining, hiring and firing clergy (and others). Also, this would make the national convention — or more likely, the EC — liable for mistakes in this system and, perhaps, even the actions of some abusers who slipped through this legal net.
Lo and behold, the Guidepost probe found that some executive committee members and staff had created precisely this kind of database, apparently (court debates ahead) for the sake of hiding abusers and/or opposing the claims of victims. Legal floodgates opened?
Final questions: But what IS the executive committee, precisely? What properties does it own and what trusts are controlled by the EC, as opposed to trusts linked to other institutions? Has the EC, in recent years, taken out insurance (check the budget) to protect itself from lawsuits linked to abuse claims?
Can victims sue the executive committee as an institution if it never, as a whole, actually voted to take or prevent actions on these matters? If lawsuits of this kind are attempted, what resources are legally tied to the EC and, thus, can be targeted for financial settlements?
Will victims, in the end, have to sue INDIVIDUAL members of the executive committee — remember that “small, insular and influential group of leaders” — responsible for some of these alleged activities? What if these power players are no longer SERVING ON the executive committee?
Ponder this: What if the SBC “messengers” at the upcoming convention (or a future convention) vote to throw out the entire executive committee and start over, keeping the members who backed reform and cutting all the others loose? Who can victims sue then?
This 2022 convention will also feature fierce debates and elections — contests between very different kinds of Baptist conservatives — to determine who will or will not be taking actions on these issues in the future.
The SBC abuse story is decades old, but only now breaking into the open. We will be reading updates for years to come.
Remember: Location, location, location. And look for the local and regional reporters who are close to the SBC institutions and are learning to navigate the maze that is SBC polity.
Enjoy the podcast and, please, pass it along to others.
FIRST IMAGE: Uncredited illustration, from a real-estate news website.