The Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee is now involved in more than a dozen lawsuits relating to allegations of sexual misconduct and abuse. That’s in addition to the investigation by the Department of Justice.
Hallelujah. I wish it were 100. But this is progress.
For decades, SBC officials routinely claimed that the denomination’s decentralized structure protected the national body against lawsuits involving clergy sex abuse. Augie Boto, former legal counsel for the executive committee, bragged that, thanks to SBC polity, the SBC had “not ever had a judgment rendered against it throughout its entire existence.”
It’s no wonder so many SBC officials are so resistant to sexual abuse reforms. They’re accustomed to acting with impunity, and they don’t want to do anything that might alter that status quo.
Of course, most clergy sex abuse cases never result in a lawsuit—often for no reason other than that they’re barred by short statutes of limitation—and in the past, the few that did make it to a lawsuit typically named the local church as a defendant but not the Southern Baptist Convention. This is what’s changing.
In cases currently pending, sexual abuse survivors are suing the SBC itself and thereby challenging the SBC’s longstanding contention that it has no control over local churches—the argument the SBC has historically stood behind as a wall to immunize denominational dollars against liability concerns.
Arkansas case
Just last week, in Arkansas, clergy sex abuse survivors filed a lawsuit naming not only the First Baptist Church of Benton but also the Southern Baptist Convention, SBC Executive Committee, Arkansas Baptist State Convention, and Central Baptist Association. It’s a dreadful case involving allegations that scores of boys were sexually victimized over the course of twenty years, and questions still need answers about who knew what and when did they know it.
The SBC and its Executive Committee were also named defendants in the recently settled sexual abuse lawsuit involving Paul Pressler. In addition to uncovering a 40-year pattern of alleged abuses by Pressler, the case produced “a lot of evidence of the truthfulness” of the allegations about Pressler’s abuse and evidence that many in SBC life had known. Despite that, for over six years of litigation, the SBC pursued scorched earth defense tactics of “delay, filing a multitude of motions, and blaming the victim.”
This is the good that lawsuits can do. They not only bring a measure of justice for wounded individuals, but they also bring forth evidence and information that might otherwise stay hidden.
Continue reading on Baptist News Global where the whole of this column was originally published on February 5, 2024.
The audacity of that Augie brag, and the entire SBC response in the article you linked, is jaw-dropping. I'm so angry that even now they insist they love and protect those in their care, that they deserve authority and trust, when their consistent response to harm and abuse is 'sorry, we can't help you,' silencing, rejecting, attacking any who speak up.
Yes, drag it all into the light. They've gotten away with it because they've made sure they were the only ones who could speak, situated themselves as the sole determiners of "truth" and what was right and wrong, iron-fisted control over the narrative, maintaining a system that made sure no one could question them or hold them accountable. May justice come.