The Charade of SBC Abuse Reform

Who played a role and why holding up a yellow ballot isn't enough

Another Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting has come and gone, and all I can do is sigh with relief.

Thank God it’s over.

It felt especially painful this year, in large part because of the untimely deaths of two survivors – Duane Rollins and Jen Lyell – just days prior to the convention.

Premature deaths are not unusual among clergy sex abuse survivors; the trauma and its long-continuing, brutal aftermath take a heavy toll on survivors’ health. So, for some of us who’ve been in this arena a while, the grief for Duane and Jen also conjured prior grief for other survivors who passed too soon.

Too often, we’ve seen the human cost of the Southern Baptist Convention’s callous refusal to reckon with clergy sex abuse and the heart-wrenching devastation wrought by its culture of clergy impunity. Mingled with our own clergy sex abuse traumas, which resurrect as we watch the duplicitous SBC showmanship, it all compounds into an unrelenting wail of grief and rage.

So, suffice it to say that these have felt like very dark days. (And speaking of dark… tomorrow we’ll watch the authoritarian spectacle of Trump’s $45 million military parade… but I digress.)

In my view, there’s not a basin in the world that’s big enough to wash away the blood that’s on Southern Baptist hands. Their scorched-earth torture-tactics against clergy sex abuse survivors have decimated countless lives, and flat-out taken some.

And so very many have been complicit in the cruelty.

The database is dead in the water

The SBC didn’t make any progress at all on sexual abuse reform measures this year. That comes as no surprise but the reality of it is still painful.

Despite the vote of the messengers, as delegates to SBC meetings are called, it’s now clear that the creation of a denominational database of clergy sex abusers is off the table. The SBC’s top CEO finally just flat-out said so – the database is “not a focus.”

With that belated honesty comes a growing realization among many of what a charade the whole “SBC abuse reform show” has been. I’m glad for that. To me, it had looked like a sham nearly from the get-go, but until recently, I had felt almost alone in my skepticism, like a voice in the wilderness.

The SBC’s charade of abuse reform

When the SBC’s Sexual Abuse Task Force kicked the can down the road to the Abuse Reform Implementation Task Force, I felt then the grief of it and worried it would all be just a show.

Then, with the realization that the volunteer task force had no funds, no staff, no authority, and no power, it seemed apparent that nothing would get done. Any institution that was actually serious about remediating a critical problem would not address it in such an unserious way.

But others clung to the hope that all those yellow ballots voting for reform would actually mean something. And now, they too are confronted with the pain of understanding that something they believed in was a fraud.

Tiffany Thigpen called it “the great gaslight” and said:

“I genuinely and wholeheartedly believe that it was all a sham to placate messengers and media, that there was never any intention…of allowing reform work, a database, accountability, protection, to come to fruition.”

That’s a painful realization.

This charade is a repeat performance

I remember how devastated I felt 17 years ago when SBC officials rejected a clergy abuser database the first time.

In 2007, after a nationwide media exposé, SBC messengers voted near-unanimously for a motion instructing the Executive Committee to conduct a study on the feasibility of creating a database of convicted, admitted and credibly accused clergy sex abusers. But the Executive Committee ignored the messengers’ will, never even allocated a budget for a study, and didn’t do anything that could reasonably be considered a study. Instead, it engaged a pretense, and then in 2008, announced its predetermined conclusion: There would be no database.

That taught me something: Just because the messengers raise their yellow ballots and vote for something doesn’t mean it’s actually going to happen.

Messengers at the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting raise their ballots. (photo by Jeffrey McWhorter, The Tennessean)

What I found hardest to comprehend, though, was that, over the course of that year, there had been no one – except me – who attempted to prod the Executive Committee into actually doing what the messengers had voted for – i.e., into conducting a legitimate study.

And at the 2008 meeting, not a single messenger even asked “Where’s the study?” They all just went along with what SBC leadership declared from the podium. Indeed, they applauded.

Even the pastor who had put forward the motion reacted as though hypnotized by the hive. He told the press that SBC leadership had taken the abuse issue “very seriously” and that their response was “adequate.”

It was dumbfounding. No one in SBC life spoke up in criticism.

(And as it turned out, the Executive Committee’s response wasn’t even honest, much less adequate. SBC attorneys had advised SBC officials that they could indeed create a clergy abuser database, and in fact the Executive Committee was already doing so, but holding it secret. This deception was something we didn’t learn about until fourteen years later with the Guidepost report.)

Holding up a yellow ballot is easy

Fast forward to today, and it’s apparent that SBC leadership duped the messengers yet again.

In 2022, messengers voted for the creation of a clergy sex abuser database, and yet after three years of “officials trailing out hollow words, impotent task forces, and phony dog-and-pony shows,” the database isn’t happening.

SBC officials talk a lot of talk, and the glossy brochures get glossier, but in terms of actually doing something meaningful, like the database that messengers voted for … nope.

And just as in 2008, nothing happens. The “nope” carries no consequence.

In a purportedly democratic system like the SBC’s, messengers must carry some responsibility.

It’s easy enough for a messenger to take a church-paid trip to the meeting and hold up a yellow ballot. That carries no risk. But it’s much harder to pay sustained attention to what’s actually happening and to hold leaders’ feet to the fire.

That’s something the SBC messengers have shown, yet again, that they will not do. So, they too are complicit in the SBC’s longstanding recklessness and cruelty on dealing with clergy sex abuse.

Task force members propped up the charade

The abuse reform task force members and advisers also carry some responsibility and complicity.

Some will no doubt talk of how well-intentioned they were and say that the task force was blocked.

And then comes the run of flimsy excuses and blame-shifting: others didn’t release the funding… roadblocks… a lack of resources… political conflicts… insurance concerns… unforeseen hurdles… blahblahblah.

None of that alters the bottom-line reality that the “implementation” task force failed to implement much of anything.

Instead, for two full years, the task force members and advisers functioned as props and pawns in the SBC’s charade of reform. They were part of the show. And like congregants in toxic churches, they overlooked red flags and kept pretending they were doing something meaningful despite all indications to the contrary.

This does not speak to their intentions, which for most were likely good, but it speaks to the ability of a powerful institution to exploit well-intentioned people – and those who are naïve – to further the institutional narrative.

Task force members and advisers parroted the SBC’s propaganda and lent undue credibility to an illusion. Some even hyped the purported “launch” of a database as “historic” when in reality it was nothing but an empty shell with no data at all – not a single name of any abusive pastor.

SBC Abuse Reform Implementation Task Force members and advisers at the 2023 SBC annual meeting (photo by Sonya Singh)

All of this served the SBC’s PR purposes, but it did not serve survivors. (And don’t even get me started on the SBC’s sham of a sexual abuse hotline, which hasn’t served survivors either.)

Perhaps the task force members and advisers were unwitting in the role they played in the charade – I believe some were. But whether through naivety or institutional loyalty, they played a role nonetheless.

This means that the very people who were supposed to be advocating for survivors were instead functioning as useful tools to further the phony institutional narrative of reform and to lend legitimacy to an illusion. That’s a trust-busting reality to stomach.

Moreover, if there were “bad guys” who put up roadblocks to the database, why don’t the task force members and advisers tell us exactly who they were? And why don’t they explain to us exactly how the database was blocked? And why won’t they be transparent about the truth of what actually happened?

I suspect the reason is because they don’t want to risk a backlash or retaliation. As Tiffany Thigpen said, “It would be career suicide for any one of them to tell the actual truth.”

What a dreadfully sick system it is when no one can dare to criticize the leaders. It’s the kind of system that fosters secrecy and coverups, and systems like that lend themselves to abuse.

When so many clergy sex abuse survivors sacrifice near-everything to bring truth to light, it’s a crying shame that those allied with the system – even those specifically tasked with survivor advocacy – won’t take risk for the sake of truth.

It’s a survivor who feels the shame of it

A survivor wrote me a while back to say that she now viewed the vote on the database as “just another PR stunt.” Having been one of the survivors who was seen in photos – as though happy with the SBC’s actions – she then complained that the SBC had used victims such as herself “to make others believe they were sincere.”

Then she lamented:

“I do not know why I had so much hope this time that they meant what they said, that they would make and publish this list of sex offenders… I stood up for the SBC and their promise to make this list, both publicly and privately. This makes me an accessory to this horrible lie.”

Personally, I don’t see this survivor as having been “an accessory.” I see her as having been duped and exploited by cunning and powerful people. But sadly, she ended her email by saying “I am ashamed.”

Of course, the shame shouldn’t be hers. And yet, once again, because she believed Southern Baptist leaders, a survivor carries a weight of undue shame.

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