Feckless SBC Leadership: Update
“For a decade now, the Southern Baptist Convention has abided a voracious liar in its midst and done nothing publicly to silence him. That liar is Allen Jordan, who lives in Houston and is the most persistent denier of a sexual abuse crisis in the denomination.”
So begins journalist Mark Wingfield’s column today, as he then poses this question:
“Where are the SBC leaders who will call Allen Jordan to account?”
My answer is that such leaders are apparently nowhere to be found. It seems their decades-long indifference to clergy sex abuse has rendered their backbones into mere vestigial remnants.
SBC leaders have evolved into spinelessness, and spineless people are not inclined to intervene against bullies.
And make no mistake, that is exactly what Allen Jordan is: “a misguided and mean bully who needs to be publicly rebuked.”
Why? Wingfield explains:
“Because every time Allen Jordan goes on his campaign to say clergy sexual abuse survivors aren’t credible, he rips open the old wounds and causes them pain.”
And every time Southern Baptist leaders stay quiet in the face of such bullying, they render themselves complicit in the cruelty.
For me, it feels as though I am repeatedly bludgeoned while, again & again, Southern Baptist leaders leer from around their corners and watch in the darkness, but never intervene.
It’s cowardly and it’s cruel.
Jordan’s smears and bullying have been going on for years, with scores of emails and letters sent to countless people. Again and again, Southern Baptist leaders have had opportunities to speak up… and yet they don’t.
This time around, Jordan directed his smear straight to SBC Executive Committee president Jeff Iorg, and copied numerous other top SBC officials, including SBC president Clint Pressley, Executive Committee chair Philip Robertson, director of sexual abuse prevention Jeff Dalrymple, and Executive Committee member Jonathan Howe. Just look at all those “sbc.net” addresses to whom he sent that hateful missive. Then he states that he blind-copied other “EC members, Former SBC leaders and Journalists.” So, there were still more SBC officials who knew about this.
Every one of those Southern Baptist leaders should speak up. But they don’t. As Wingfield explains:
“If SBC leaders want to help sexual abuse survivors, they need to make known clearly and specifically that Allen Jordan is a liar who is causing abuse survivors to suffer over and over again… It is not enough to ignore him… He must be repudiated in the strongest possible terms.”
I agree with Wingfield 100% that Jordan needs to be publicly repudiated and denounced. But I also know from long experience that it’s unlikely to happen.
So, the pattern will repeat itself. And this is the very dynamic that helps to perpetuate the SBC’s rampant clergy sex abuse and coverup problem.
Below is my prior June 21 column on this.
Feckless Leadership Fuels SBC Clergy Sex Abuse Crisis
Allen Jordan has conducted a decade-long smear campaign, and Southern Baptist leaders have let him do it.
On June 18, in what is only the latest in a long saga, Jordan wrote to Southern Baptist Convention CEO Jeff Iorg, urging that “there never was a clergy sex abuse crisis in the SBC,” complaining that Iorg hasn’t adequately refuted the crisis, and attacking the Houston Chronicle’s Abuse of Faith series that documented the crisis.
Jordan copied numerous other SBC leaders, including SBC president Clint Pressley, Executive Committee chair Philip Robertson, director of Sexual Abuse Prevention Jeff Dalrymple, and some other Executive Committee members, along with various journalists. That’s typical of Jordan’s missives – he blasts them to heaps of people – which means that plenty of Southern Baptist leaders have long known about Jordan’s unfounded (and sometimes unhinged) claims. (And if you’re wondering why I say “unhinged,” consider this: In 2022, Baptist News Global documented that Jordan sent 15 emails early in the year and then followed those up with 27 more emails in just a five-week period after release of the Guidepost report in May.)
Attached to his most recent email, Jordan included a copy of my prior column, The Charade of SBC Abuse Reform, and a copy of an interview that survivor Tiffany Thigpen did with ChurchLeaders – both of us critical of the SBC’s nearly nonexistent abuse reform “efforts.” (Along with his despicable attempts to discredit his own daughter, Amy Smith, Jordan’s smear campaign against me has been ongoing for many years, as he has repeatedly attempted to discredit me as “a provocateur and troublemaker.” I’m now wondering if the reason he added in Tiffany this time was because I quoted her – sorry, Tiffany.)
Jordan told Iorg this about Tiffany and me:
“Both of their stories are fabricated. They have fooled and misled a lot of people in the SBC for many years.”
That’s extremely hurtful – and “documentably false” – and don’t think for one second that, because I move past it as I write, I’m minimizing it. It’s just that I’ve experienced Jordan’s cruelty so many times before.
And what’s really interesting this time is what Jordan said next:
“What is most troubling, Dr. Iorg, is that you acknowledged to me in January 2025 that you knew both Brown and Thigpen’s stories were not credible and requested my help in exposing both the AOF and the GP report before the convention. At that time, you felt that the SBC world needed to know the factual truth that there never was a clergy sex abuse crisis in the SBC…”
Did you get that? Jordan is asserting that 1) Iorg said he knew our stories were false, and 2) Iorg requested Jordan’s help in discrediting the Abuse of Faith series and Guidepost report.
Thankfully, Mark Wingfield of Baptist News Global (which is NOT affiliated with the SBC) honed right in on that statement and immediately contacted Iorg through his media spokesperson to seek a response. Specifically, Wingfield asked whether Iorg agreed with Jordan that the abuse stories of Tiffany and me are not credible.
And here’s where things get even more weaselly.
You might imagine that the top CEO of the largest Protestant faith group in the country would be quick to denounce Jordan’s assertions. You might imagine that he would stand with and support a couple clergy sex abuse survivors whose stories are extensively documented. Or you might imagine that he would at least say “Yay” or “Nay” to the journalist’s question.
But you would be wrong on all of that.
Iorg “did not deny Jordan’s assertions.” Instead, he side-stepped the question and gave mush for an answer. “Past accusations,” he said, are not his focus.
As a journalist, Wingfield saw right through that, saying:
“I’ve been around this business long enough to know that if a public figure doesn’t at least feign denial of an accusation, the accuser has hit the target.”
Bottom line: Iorg was willing to let Jordan’s assertions stand.
This is the kind of conduct that feeds the SBC’s culture of impunity: the cowardly complicity and feckless leadership of men like Jeff Iorg.
It’s also why the SBC’s culture of cruelty toward survivors is so entrenched – the cruelty is normalized by men who do nothing. It’s a dynamic that causes long-continuing and exacerbated harm to clergy sex abuse survivors.
Men like Jordan heap coals on those who have been abused – again and again and again – while powerful men like Iorg sit back and do nothing.
When Southern Baptist leaders refuse to stand with survivors, and when they won’t denounce an abuse-denier like Jordan, it creates a permission structure for countless others to ignore abuse, and to treat survivors with contempt.
And when a know-nothing like Jordan can conduct a decade-long smear campaign and SBC leaders stay quiet – and even allow Jordan to think they agree with him – then there’s no need to wonder about why sexual abuse and coverups are rampant in the Southern Baptist Convention.
The reasons are on full display.
In related news, at the Southern Baptist Convention’s meeting a couple weeks ago, Jeff Iorg deflected on abuse reform by saying that the Executive Committee would instead “refer churches to existing databases of sex offenders and focus on education about abuse prevention.”
This is the same deflection that prior SBC CEO Morris Chapman made in 2008. Institutionally, almost nothing has changed within the SBC. They aren’t making kids and congregants safer. They’re just making their glossy brochures glossier.
For more on the ruses and maneuvers of the Southern Baptist Convention, check out my book, Baptistland: A Memoir of Abuse, Betrayal, and Transformation.
