One person, two hours, three SBC stories
In no longer than it took me to drink my coffee this morning—about two hours—I logged three SBC stink-bomb stories.
I’m just one person and I follow the news haphazardly at best. Yet SBC stories of abuse, corruption, malfeasance, and general awfulness are so pervasive and prolific that one person can hardly keep up.
Here are the three that caught my eye in just two hours.
Federal RICO lawsuit
In Tennessee, clergy sex abuse survivors filed a civil RICO lawsuit in federal court. RICO is the acronym for the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. It’s a statute that is more typically invoked for trying to bring accountability to the tentacular machinations of organized crime.
As plaintiffs in the RICO case, the survivors are alleging that, together with four named churches, the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee acted as a corrupt enterprise and engaged in a pattern of racketeering activity for the purpose of enabling criminal conduct.
Specifically, survivors allege that the SBC Executive Committee “maliciously and systematically engaged in covering up and concealing instances of sexual abuse by the church members and employees as a strategy of denying the rights of sexual abuse survivors.”
They contend that “each participant in the SBC Executive Committee’s racketeering enterprise has a systematic linkage to each other participant through organizational ties, organizational relationships, financial ties, and the continuing coordination of their activities through the Southern Baptist Convention.”
You can see the whole of the plaintiffs’ court filing here.
This is big stuff; I’ll be anxiously awaiting further developments.
SBC pastor opposes ban on child marriage
In Missouri, lawmakers are trying to end child marriage with a bipartisan bill that “protects the girls.”
That was how Republican senator Holly Thompson Rehder described the bill, and it’s apt. Research showed that, over an eighteen-year period, 86% of children who got married were girls, and they were married to men over the age of 18.
You might think that, in this day and time, no one could possibly oppose such a bill. But you’d be wrong.
A Southern Baptist pastor, Timothy Faber, testified in opposition to it. Faber is not just a pastor but also a lobbyist for the Missouri Baptist Convention and the director of missions for the Lake of the Ozarks Baptist Association.
Thanks to the ever-observant
for catching Faber’s Southern Baptist connection.Deacons required to sign pledge of support for pastor who concealed child sex abuse
Pastor Steven Smith at Immanuel Baptist Church in Little Rock has checked all the boxes—and then some—on how NOT to respond to clergy sex abuse reports.
The story has only gotten worse since I wrote about here last December. Thankfully, journalist Frank Lockwood has doggedly stayed on top of it with some two dozen articles in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
The gist of the story—and I’m deliberately keeping things really short here—is that Smith concealed from the congregation child sex abuse allegations involving an assistant children’s minister named Patrick Miller.
Smith “did not inform the congregation at the time Miller was arrested, charged with a crime, convicted, or sentenced.”
Smith concealed this information for five years, right up until Lockwood published his first article about it. Then, after the news was already public, Smith suddenly claimed that he was adopting a “spirit of transparency.”
But transparency doesn’t seem to come easily to him—I’m guessing Smith hasn’t had much practice—and that’s why things continue to go downhill there at Immanuel.
In last Sunday’s sermon, Smith resorted to the tiresome, scapegoating maneuver of blaming Satan for the church’s troubles. You can see the video excerpt here, complete with soft guitar strumming behind him at the end.
I thought things couldn’t possibly get worse or more manipulative. But now Smith appears to have effectively strong-armed the church’s deacons.
That was this morning’s bombshell. I nearly spewed my coffee.
In order to continue serving, the deacons are supposed to sign a pledge that they will support pastor Steven Smith. The cult-like implications of that are disturbing.
So, despite his egregious keep-it-quiet conduct, and despite two dozen media reports about it, Steven Smith will stay in the pulpit.
Therein lies one of the biggest systemic problems of the Southern Baptist Convention: When there are no consequences for abuse enablers and cover-uppers, you can be sure that the preacher-predators will persist.