All the Buried Women

Sink your teeth into this podcast about women in the Southern Baptist Convention

The Southern Baptist Convention’s sexual abuse crisis is interwoven with its misogyny.

That’s a reality that Beth Allison Barr and Savannah Locke successfully spotlight in their podcast, All the Buried Women. It tells of women “buried alive” by the Southern Baptist Convention, brings forth their voices, and illuminates the systemic forces at work.

I had the pleasure of visiting with Beth and Savannah for episode 4 of All the Buried Women, and what a conversation it was. They describe me as “an unrelenting thorn” in the side of Southern Baptist leadership, and “one who will not go away.”

I take that as a supreme compliment, and I’m proud to have been a part of the podcast. But even though this episode highlights my story of childhood sexual abuse inflicted by a pastor, it’s about way more than just me. Beth and Savannah also weave in insights and data from David Pooler, Rob Downen, Meredith Stone, Barry Hankins, Rosalie Beck, and others.

I hope you’ll have a listen – to this episode and the rest – because in bringing history to bear, they manage to explain so much.

Here are just some excerpts.

Barr: “A consistent pattern in the SBC’s defense strategy for sexual abuse allegations: distancing itself from direct accountability by emphasizing its lack of authority over individual churches.”

Locke: “This hands-off stance was… conveniently inconsistent.”

Barr: “Clergy sexual abuse inflicts unfathomable damage on the lives of its victims. Yet all too often survivors like Christa are forced to carry the weight of this trauma, while their abusers prosper without consequence.”

Barr: Pooler’s research reveals that “clergy sexual abuse survivors experience PTSD at rates higher than those of sexual assault survivors and even of individuals who were deployed during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan… There are several potential reasons… Institutional betrayal makes clergy sexual abuse traumatic at higher rates.”

Locke: “Only 9% of survivors said their churches were helpful when they reported clergy sexual abuse… meaning 91% were NOT supported by their churches.”

Locke: “These statistics align with Christa’s story… She was silenced, told to keep the abuse a secret and even forced to apologize…while the institution shielded him from accountability as he continued to be employed at different SBC churches. This is the institutional betrayal that compounds the traumatic effect of clergy sexual abuse.”

David Pooler: “This kind of abuse isn’t just a one-time thing… What we’re really actually talking about is complex-PTSD… It’s an injury that disrupts a person’s sense of safety… even their identity… How you make sense of life is shattered.”

Barr: “Doesn’t everyone in the SBC agree that sexual abuse is wrong? … In theory, yes, but in practice, the SBC has failed to address clergy sexual abuse with the seriousness it demands. No meaningful reforms have been made… and there’s no external accountability forcing change.”

David Pooler: “Where’s the incentive? Where do churches step up and do the right thing? I don’t know… It’s the wild west.”

Locke: “The relentless pattern of these men being welcomed back into the fold, no matter their actions, while their victims are cast out, labeled as Jezebels and temptresses.”

Barr: “When her own daughter reached the same age she had been during the abuse, Christa saw with heartbreaking clarity just how young and vulnerable she truly was and how her experience was not an affair, but abuse.”

Me: “I was pretty much overwhelmed…with the level of hate and vitriol that was sent my way, much of it from some of the highest leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention.”

Me: [about one of my visits to the SBC Executive Committee] “There I am before them, trying to get them to do something, telling them about the childhood rapes that I experienced by a pastor. By that time, I had heard from many, many, many other Southern Baptist abuse survivors – I knew that this was widespread – I’m talking about something terribly painful. One man literally gets up and turns around and sits backward in his chair…so as to put his back to me. Another man in the room just loudly chortled out loud as I’m talking. And of course these things are bad enough but I think what really struck me at the time was that no one else in that room – these are all men who are some of the highest leaders in the largest non-Catholic faith group in the country – not a one of them spoke up.”

Locke: “When Christa says she was berated by members of the SBC for speaking out, she’s not exaggerating. For example, Augie Boto, who was general counsel and vice-president of the Executive Committee, said the focus on sexual abuse in the SBC was a “satanic scheme.” He named Christa Brown as one of the architects of this scheme.

Barr: “One reform she advocated for was a database which would list all credibly accused or convicted pastors and leaders within the SBC… The SBC refused to do this because… get ready for it… it would infringe upon local church autonomy. But Christa said this would allow autonomous churches to make better informed decisions… Because the SBC wouldn’t do it, Christa started her own public database for churches to reference, complete with links to articles outlining the abuses each leader allegedly committed… As far as she knew, nobody else was doing this work, certainly not the SBC. They had told her it was simply not possible. But years later, she would learn the truth. The SBC had been building a database all along, a list of over 700 names spanning 205 pages documenting credibly accused or convicted abusers who were pastors or church personnel. But unlike Christa’s database, the SBC kept its list private.”

Me: [asked about my impression of the Guidepost report] “It’s a scathing report… It confirmed and validated everything I had been saying for years, that for decades, their priority – singular priority – was protecting the institution against potential liability risks, even if that meant leaving reported clergy child molesters in the pulpit… And it documents numerous instances of how horribly they treated survivors who made efforts to report their perpetrators. My name appears some 70 times in this document precisely because they treated me so terribly.”

Me: “People think… how can people know about this terrible thing and not do something? How can a multi-billion-dollar institution – the size of a mid-tier Fortune 500 company – they’ve got the resources – they could if they wanted to – how can they not choose to effectively address this when it is put in black and white in front of them? But this is where we’re at. That is exactly what happened. They have not addressed it.”

Me: “If there’s anything I have seen over the course of these 20 years that they have gotten better at, it is public relations. They’ve gotten better at public relations – they really truly have. They can pitch the notion of progress in the face of backward steps. But they’ve gotten good at that.”

Me: “They aren’t moving forward with addressing. What they’re doing is still trying to squash it all.”

Rob Downen: “If you think about all of the steps that a case would have to go through to land on our radar, and we were still able to find 400 with a team of three that only spent a few months looking. I get very frustrated when I hear people talk about trying to compare the SBC numbers based on what we were able to find and compare them to the Catholic Church, because once you understand…the 400 number should be almost paralyzingly terrifying, because if we were able to find that many, think about how many aren’t there… It is a full-blown crisis, and anybody who is trying to argue otherwise has no idea what they’re talking about, or does know what they’re talking about and has a vested interest….”

Rosalie Beck: “It’s all about image. It’s got nothing to do with truth.”

Me: “The idea that this is all overblown or that anybody gets anything out of this – most survivors just want to get on with their lives, and yet this thing hovers. This is not a matter of hating the Church or wanting to harm the Church. But for me this has always been about people. How can we help people, ordinary, individual people? And if the Church is continuing to harm people, which it is, then yeah, that’s a Church I think needs to be called to account – and I’m using Church in the broader sense there… I think people want to believe these are just isolated cases, but it is not. These are not just a few bad apples. This is a whole huge barrel that enables and facilitates the rot. And this kind of widespread abuse and coverups – this does not happen without the active complicity of many thousands of others.”

Listen to the whole of the podcast here. There’s so much more!

Check out Beth Allison Barr’s new book, Becoming the Pastor’s Wife !

And for still more on the ruses and maneuvers of the Southern Baptist Convention, check out my book, Baptistland: A Memoir of Abuse, Betrayal, and Transformation.