Is "Sorry" Repentance Enough?

SBC Executive Commitee sets the example for institutional unaccountability

My name appears dozens of times in the Guidepost investigatory report. The reason my name appears so often is because the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee treated me so awfully for so long, and the Guidepost report documents that.

As I stood before committee members recounting a pastor’s rapes of me as a child and pleaded for action to protect others, one member chortled and another physically rotated himself in his chair so as to turn his back to me.

So, look at that fabulous image by David Hayward, and imagine it with a laughing-out-loud grin on one man’s face. Then imagine it with another man physically turned in his chair so as to put his back to me. That’s what I faced.

As columnist David Brooks rightly noted: “That is the sort of dehumanization that creates indifference that enables rape, abuse, and all the other horrific dehumanizing acts down the road.”

In a room filled with powerful men—leaders in the country’s largest non-Catholic faith group—not a single man spoke up to protest such incivility.

When I showed up at another Executive Committee meeting, I was maligned as “a person of no integrity.” And again, all others sat silent.

“And then they lied about her”—that’s how the Houston Chronicle described the Executive Committee’s treatment of me when it wrongly published a phony claim that I had made “false accusations.”

And all of that is just the gist of the brutishness with which SBC officials tried to disparage and discredit me.

This conduct did me harm, separate from the harm of sexual abuse. The Executive Committee’s treatment of me was repeatedly re-traumatizing, dehumanizing, and soul-crushing.

Studies have shown that institutional betrayal is associated with harm over and beyond the harm of sexual assaults. This academic research is consistent with what clergy sex abuse survivors almost invariably say—that the trauma from the institutional betrayal caused more damage than the trauma of the sexual abuse.

For myself—and for others—the Executive Committee played a huge role in that institutional betrayal.

Yet, even with the documentation of the Guidepost report, the SBC Executive Committee still stares into the face of its own cruelty and inhumanity, and effectively shrugs. It makes no amends and imposes no consequence on itself as an institution. As such, the Guidepost report seems as yet one more thing that the Committee thumbs its nose at.

At this point, sixteen months after release of the Guidepost report, I personally hold no hope that the Executive Committee will hold itself accountable for its own reprehensible conduct. I ask only that the Committee state plainly the truth of its institutional position: Is it the Executive Committee’s position that “Sorry” is repentance enough for the kind of conduct documented in the Guidepost report? Yay or Nay?

The Executive Committee meets next week, and I’d appreciate an answer. If the Committee has no intention of making amends for its own harms, then it should just say so.

Again, I’m not expecting anything. But the fact that they ignore their dreadful conduct doesn’t mean that I’ll ignore it.

The Executive Committee’s treatment of me was awful. I will not be complicit in its apparent efforts to minimize the conduct, ignore it, or induce amnesia about it.

They SAY they want to change the SBC’s institutional culture to promote accountability. But that’s just talk. The reality is that the Executive Committee doesn’t even hold itself accountable.

[This post was adapted in part from a column I wrote for Baptist News Global: “Four things the SBC Executive Committee should do right now to address clergy sex abuse.”]

[You can check out more of David Hayward’s art here. For a lot of us, his work resonates. In David’s words, it’s “art that starts honest conversations about life, healing, and spirituality.”]

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