“Faced with millions of dollars in unbudgeted legal expenses related to sexual abuse investigations, defenses and settlements, the Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee will sell its downtown Nashville office building, which is valued at more than $30 million.”
That’s the big news from the Executive Committee’s meeting this week.
Boohoo. Cry me a river.
The announcement was made by Executive Committee chairperson Philip Robertson, the guy who recently tried to discredit the Abuse of Faith series and who said the idea of a systemic SBC sexual abuse problem was “not true.”
I’m wondering how much money they’ll have to spend before they finally see clergy sex abuse as a serious problem.
$12.1 million on abuse-related expenses but near-nothing on actual reforms
The meeting brought forth some interesting bits about the Executive Committee’s expenditures related to sexual abuse.
Over the past three years, the SBC Executive Committee has spent $12.1 million on expenses related to sexual abuse.
I’ve seen a lot of people complaining about that number—and sometimes along the lines of “When will those survivors ever be satisfied?” But here’s what is important to realize: That money didn’t go toward caring for Southern Baptist clergy abuse survivors and nor did it go toward making kids safer with names on a database.
Instead, the money went mainly toward institutional self-protection—toward paying the Executive Committee’s own attorneys.
Meanwhile, with task force after task force, the Executive Committee left sexual abuse reform “efforts” to unresourced volunteers, with the result that there was no meaningful progress on abuse reform. As one commentator said, the task forces were “almost non-events.”
The contrast between what they care about and don’t care about could not be more clear. And really… it was from the get-go.
As Bob Smietana said: “It seems clear that if the folks in charge of reforms have no $$, no staff, and no clout, nothing gets done.”
The volunteer task forces were set up to fail. Functionally—and perhaps inadvertently—their members served as little more than pawns for propping up the institutional image, placating the SBC base, and trailing survivors along.
And about that sexual abuse hotline…
Included within that $12.1 million was $861,217 that the Executive Committee spent for its sexual abuse “tipline”—i.e., the hotline that was never hot.
The hotline has ALWAYS been problematic—a fact that has grown only more obvious with the passage of time. It’s been in existence for nearly two and a half years, and yet it has resulted in not a single name of any predatory pastor being added to any database. Not one.
The hotline has been a theater piece, presenting an illusion of accountability and care, but without the reality. Again, it’s an illusion that has served the institutional ends of image-management, but has done near-nothing for survivors.
And it has been a very expensive illusion.
The “no insurance” excuse refuted
Remember all those sky-is-falling wails about how the Executive Committee wouldn’t be able to get insurance? As though this were a good reason for its inaction on abuse?
Though many SBC folks bought into that phony excuse, we now see the reality, and it’s just as I had predicted. The cost of their annual premiums went up—by $11,579.00—but of course, they still have insurance.
The creation of a new “department”
In addition to all the news about expenses, the Executive Committee announced that it was creating “a department within the Executive Committee” to assist SBC churches with sexual abuse prevention and response.
So, for dealing with sexual abuse, the SBC has had a work group, a study group, two separate task forces, a commission, and now… “a department within the Executive Committee.”
With every bureaucratic incarnation, they touted their caring, their “bold steps,” their “historic” moments. And nothing happened.
It has been a decades-long smorgasbord of flimsy promises and phony excuses.
So I’m skeptical. The “department” will likely provide a nice salary for someone—maybe for some SBC honcho’s crony or son-in-law—but I hold zero expectation that the “department” will do anything meaningful to actually advance reforms.
Executive Committee president Jeff Iorg described the new “department” as a “beginning point of a workable solution” for abuse reform.
“A beginning point.”
Two and a half years after the Guidepost investigatory report, over five-and-a-half years after the Abuse of Faith series, and seventeen years after the ABC 20/20 exposé, and the SBC now claims it is arriving at “a beginning point” to address clergy sex abuse.
More than two years after thousands of SBC delegates approved the creation of a database of credibly accused abusive clergy, the SBC still has no functional database—not a single name—but oh gee whiz, it now proclaims “a beginning point.”
Decades of mistreating survivors and mishandling abuse have created a damned reservoir of SBC wrongs that need righting, and the damn is finally beginning to show cracks.
Many roadblocks, including statutes of limitation, will still impede the pursuit of justice for many SBC survivors. Nevertheless, the cracks are showing, and my prediction is this:
The water will flow and flood. The SBC will continue to face massive litigation costs.
My new book, Baptistland, is now available!