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.