Nothing Good About the SBC's "Forces for Good Summit"

... and some parallels to the Epstein Files

The Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee will hold its first ever “Forces for Good Summit” on February 25 at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.

With a full day of speakers, they’re promoting the event as one that will address the “holistic stewardship of churches,” including sexual abuse prevention.

One of the featured speakers will be Robert Showers.

Yes. Robert Showers.

Robert Showers

I know some of you will recognize the name (and I swear I can hear you gagging), but for those who don’t know who he is, let me fill you in.

Robert Showers was an attorney for the Association of Baptists for World Evangelism (ABWE), which had a missionary named Donn Ketcham, who was accused of sexually abusing many young girls and women over the course of two decades.

Eventually, with an outside investigation conducted by Professional Investigators International (PII), the reports of 18 child victims and 5 adult victims were corroborated. That’s just the ones we know about.

How did Ketcham abuse so many for so long? Why wasn’t he stopped?

And why was an earlier investigation stymied?

According to the PII investigatory report…

ABWE “lied about and hid the existence of hundreds of documents pertaining to Ketcham at the direction of ABWE attorney Robert Showers.”

So, Showers is a guy who has been documented as having directed the concealment of a massive amount of information related to a missionary’s serial sexual abuses.

And now, despite that documented history, Showers is who SBC leaders choose to promote and platform at a seminar for educating churches.

To my eye, platforming a guy like Showers doesn’t look like the SBC is being a “force for good.” It looks like the SBC is doubling down on abuse concealment and obfuscation.

It looks like an effort to teach churches how to keep clergy sex abuse secret for as long as the ABWE did – or maybe for as long as the Epstein files.

Parallels to the Epstein Files

Thinking about the Epstein files with their excessive redactions of men’s names… whatever happened to the SBC Executive Committee’s commitment to un-redact some of the names on that long-secret list of clergy sex abusers they kept?

Remember? In 2022, after the Executive Committee was finally compelled to release its privately-kept list of more than 700 convicted and credibly accused clergy sex abusers, the Executive Committee’s chairman and its president jointly stated that there would be more research on the many redacted names, and that “some of the redacted entries will be fully released in the future.”

Almost four years have passed since then – sufficient time for further research – but where’s the follow-through? The image below may look like it’s something from the Epstein Files, but it’s actually from the SBC Executive Committee’s list of credibly accused clergy sex abusers.

Heck, they haven’t even un-redacted what appears to be Paul Pressler’s name – i.e., the black streak sandwiched on the list between “Powell” and “Prince,” and identified as “Former Texas justice.”

Why does that name still stay redacted? The lawsuit was settled, there was ”smoking gun” evidence, and Pressler is now dead. So why don’t SBC leaders finally acknowledge the truth?

If they were really “forces for good,” wouldn’t they at least do that?

Did you know that white evangelicals are the only religious group whose majority actually approve of Trump’s handling of the controversy over the Epstein files?

I think it’s because, within their churches, white evangelicals have long been conditioned to accept systems of impunity for predatory pastors. So, the endless obfuscation with the Epstein files seems simply more of the same. It feels normal to them.

Indeed, when I saw the callous performance of Attorney General Pam Bondi at that Congressional hearing, I was reminded of the callous indifference of SBC Executive Committee president Jeff Iorg and other SBC leaders as, repeatedly, they have refused to denounce the relentless smears made against clergy sex abuse survivors, like me.

Epstein survivors raised their hands to indicate they’ve been ignored by Trump’s DOJ, as Attorney General Pam Bondi refuses to acknowledge them. (Roberto Schmidt/AFP via Getty)

In dealing – and not dealing – with clergy sex abuse and church coverups, the feckless duplicity of Southern Baptist leaders has much in common with the handling of the Epstein files. Again and again, survivors have been revictimized by leaders’ charade of reform and their phony dog-n-pony performances.

As Stuart Delony said:

“You want the Epstein files? Look in the pulpits and the pews… Because the real conspiracy isn’t hidden. It’s in plain sight. And it’s still preaching on Sunday.”

The performance of goodness, but not the practice

In the face of many hundreds of confirmed abuse reports, and more predatory pastors in the headlines each week, and in the face of documented stonewalling and survivor maltreatment by the Executive Committee (for which they’ve made no amends), SBC officials preach platitudes and put out press releases about the SBC as a “force for good.”

But there’s nothing good about it. It’s gaslighting, not goodness.

Similar to Epstein’s powerful network of complicity, so too within the Southern Baptist Convention and white evangelicalism, there are tangled networks by which it seems men learn from one another how to hush-up abuse and cover for cronies.

This “Forces for Good” event looks like more of the same. It’s a gospel-wrapped seminar that adds yet another layer of spin while doing nothing meaningful to help survivors or to hold perpetrators & cover-uppers accountable.

Tickets for the event are $209. That’s right — the SBC Executive Committee is charging money to “educate” churches on how to deal with the abuse problem that they themselves have fostered and perpetuated for decades.

That too is documented. The Guidepost investigatory report revealed how the Executive Committee fostered abuse – stonewalling, ignoring, and maltreating survivors (for which they’ve made no amends). And that report was another thing that Robert Showers tried to stymie, insisting that the Executive Committee should not follow the will of the SBC delegates in the conduct of the investigation. (He lost on that one.)

But even if attendees don’t actually get any meaningful education on abuse prevention at the “Forces for Good Summit,” that $209 will at least get them a meal at what SBC leaders are calling the “Peacemaker Dinner.”

It’s an ironic name, eh? When it comes to dealing with clergy sex abuse, these are the people who have a decades-long track record of saying “Peace, peace” when there is no peace.

Again and again, SBC leaders have shown that they care only about the optics – about the superficial of what will make them look good.

They care about the performance of goodness, not the practice of goodness.

But hey, as long as they keep baptizing that performance in Bible verses, heaps of Southern Baptists will clap for it.

Imagine the kind of delusional arrogance it takes for SBC leaders to think that they’re the ones to offer an educational solution to the documented clergy sex abuse problem that they themselves have fostered, all while treating survivors with cruelty and dismissiveness, and while still doing near-nothing to warn congregations, provide meaningful care for survivors, or impose accountability on clergy sex abusers and cover-uppers. They have such misplaced confidence in their own righteousness that they charge $209 for their “educational” offering and they even platform a documented cover-upper.

In any other world, this would be sadly ludicrous and recklessly irresponsible. But in the Southern Baptist Convention, it’s what they brag about and call “good.”

What can we do?

While SBC leaders have seemingly endless offering plate dollars to push their phony “forces for good” narrative, we, the survivors, hold the power to stop pretending. We may not have money or power or platform or press arms, but we have voice and agency. We have the capacity to name for ourselves what is good, and what is not.

We can refuse to be gaslit. We can refuse to smile at the phony narrative of the powerful. We can refuse to parrot their propaganda. We can refuse to participate in their performance.

We can tell the truth.

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For more on the SBC’s “forces for good” PR schtick:

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