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That SBC powderkeg: Clearly, executive committee is bitterly divided on sexual-abuse issues

June 7, 2021
11 min read

Several decades ago, early in the media coverage of the Catholic clergy sexual abuse scandals, a veteran Catholic educator gave me some sobering advice.

When dealing with stories about sexual abuse, he stressed, the usual doctrinal and cultural labels do not apply. There wasn’t a “left” or a “right” side of the story because there were people hiding their sins on both sides. When dealing with sexual abuse, most conflicts centered on issues of honesty and integrity and, most of all, a willingness to repent and admit that these sins and crimes were real.

I thought of that the other day when reading the Religion News Service story that started dominos falling in America’s largest non-Catholic flock: “Leaked Russell Moore letter blasts SBC conservatives, sheds light on his resignation.” (I apologize for getting to this story late, due to a week of travels with family, followed by a painful health crisis that has me rather drugged and could return me to an emergency room at any moment.)

Journalists and SBC insiders were not surprised that RNS scribe Bob Smietana was involved in breaking that story, in part because of his years of experience in the Nashville market at The Tennessean, as well as five years with Lifeway Research, an organization linked to Southern Baptist life. This is one of those cases in which a reporter can build on years of experience and contacts in a complex, massive organization and, thus, Smietana has been landing one SBC scoop after another in recent years. It’s crucial that this RNS story was supported by a post featuring the full text of the 4,000-word Moore letter.

The next key story, by Sarah Pulliam Bailey, ran in The Washington Post: “Newly leaked letter claims Southern Baptist leaders ‘covered up’ sex abuse allegations.” Click here (.pdf file) for a full text of this second Moore letter. It’s packed with material from crucial voices on both sides of this conflict, with most of them speaking on the record. This is another MUST read report.

The ink will be flying fast and furious, I imagine, as combatants prepare for the 2021 national Southern Baptist Convention, which will be held June 15-16 in Nashville, with preliminary gatherings two days earlier.

As Moore stated in the letter posted by RNS, many people will assume that this conflict centers on his highly public opposition to the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump. However, he stressed that he is convinced the main lightning rod was his efforts to fight sexual abuse inside the SBC, along with his bridge-building efforts to Black congregations, a growing and strategic network in the convention.

Let’s walk through a crucial chunk of that letter, starting with Moore’s claim that the Trump years — as opposed to the 2016 campaign — were a mixture of good and bad:

The lazy journalistic assessment would be that this is about the President of the United States. This has nothing to do with that. Y’all know my concerns about the perennial temptation toward political captivity of the gospel, and that will always and perhaps increasingly be a concern in this era. But this is not the issue here. Most Trump voters and supporters have been nothing but kind and encouraging to me — from Southern Baptist laypeople and pastors to Administration officials all the way up and down the ranks. Just as we did with President Obama, we express disagreement where warranted, but we do so respecting the office and doing so requesting a different viewpoint, not engaging in polemics or attack. And when we agree with what the Administration is doing, we say so and work to achieve good public policy as informed by a biblically-grounded ethic, again just as we did when we could under President Obama, and as I did, before I was in this role, with President Bush. The Administration has asked us to take leadership on too many issues to list here — from working on opioid and mental health concerns in faith-based communities to ensuring religious liberty for adoption providers to working on the plight of persecuted Christians and other religious minorities in China and elsewhere.

This brings me to the reason that I opened this post with the reference to the Catholic sex-abuse scandals.

My reading of this situation is that Moore is being brutally honest when he says that the key issue, right now, is divisions among SBC leaders over how candid they can afford to be (or want to be) about sexual abuse.

Things went from tense to explosive in 2019, when Rachael Denhollander — speaking at the SBC “Caring Well” conference on sexual abuse — directly criticized the convention’s executive committee for its handling of the Jennifer Lyell case (RNS story here), which centered on accusations of abuse by a seminary professor.

Once again, it’s easy for journalists to see this as a conflict between “liberals” and “conservatives” with those labels defined either in political or doctrinal terms. But this story is much more complex than that. When you look at the crucial issues here in terms of moral theology, there is no way pin a “liberal” label on leaders such as Moore and current SBC President J.D. Greear. And if these leaders are “woke,” they are only “woke” in the context of SBC life.

Yes, this may be a matter of “young Turks” vs. an “old-boys network” in key corners of SBC power. I also think that bitterness from fights about Trump are at play.

But the key is that it’s hard for people — left or right — to hunt down and expose sexual abusers (and their protectors) who are members of their own “inner rings” of power.

Denhollander, with Moore’s help, directly confronted members of the SBC executive committee. In Southern terms, she had “gone from preaching to meddling.” Her actions had legal implications, which meant they had financial implications. Read this next section of the Moore letter carefully:

This Executive Committee, through their bylaws workgroup, “exonerated” churches, in a spur-of-the-moment meeting, from serious charges of sexual abuse cover-up. One of those churches actively had on staff at the time a sex offender. J.D. Greear, our SBC president, and I were critical of this move, believing that it jeopardized not only the gospel witness of the SBC, but, more importantly, the lives of vulnerable children in Southern Baptist churches. Against constant backroom attempts to stop forward momentum, we were able to get across the finish line some modest steps toward addressing the crisis in our convention — the Caring Well Challenge, for instance, and the formation of a credentials committee.

As you know, our last ERLC National Conference was built around the issues of sexual abuse. We said from the beginning that we wanted a place for honest dialogue around these issues, and we would not police anyone from speaking what he or she had experienced or thought. At least one speaker harshly criticized us for not doing enough, or not handling things the way he thought we should. I welcomed that criticism. I learned from it, and was glad that the speaker felt the freedom to do so. At that conference, though, Rachael Denhollender participated with me in a conversation where, again, I refused to censor or stop anything that she had to say. …

This enraged some Executive Committee trustee leadership, who communicated that they were incensed that we would allow such a story to be told. That was communicated with special outrage since the Executive Committee had contributed some money to Caring Well as a reason why we should not have allowed this story to be told.

It will be easy, once the SBC national meeting is underway, to focus on the race to determine the next president of the convention — especially since the Rev. Mike Stone, a major Moore opponent, is one of the four candidates (click here for his response to the leaked Moore documents).

However, it will be just as important, or more important, to see what happens to the resolution to seek an independent investigation of the charges leveled against the executive committee.

There will be well-known SBC conservatives — young and old — who will back that effort and, thus, will be hit with labels such as “liberal,” “woke” or even, God forbid, “moderate.”

Some of these attacks could get very personal. Southern Baptists are known for their ability to seize a podium and preach. For example, reporters can probably expect to hear references to recent SBC leaders — Russell Moore included — who now attend non-SBC churches.

I would also expect fiery discussions of another hot-button issue — the ordination of women — that is not directly related to the sexual-abuse issue, but causes tensions that could muddy those waters. The same goes for resolutions opposing any discussions of secular Critical Race Theory and the sacred concerns of Black church leaders linked to it.

But there is one other story that I think reporters need to think about, when looking at the “big picture” of what is happening right now in SBC life.

The question: If SBC people are hitting the exit doors, where are they headed?

So here is one final section of the Moore letter:

Everywhere I go — everywhere I go — I am surrounded by former Southern Baptists. Last year, after speaking to the Anglican Church in North America national meeting, I went back to my hotel room and shook with tears. That’s because, as in virtually every one of such meetings, I was greeted by person after person after person who, like me, grew up in Southern Baptist churches, went to all the youth camps, knows the difference between Lottie Moon and Annie Armstrong, between an RA and an Acteen. I had more conversations about “Training Union” and “Centrifuge” there than I ever have at an SBC meeting. They were nostalgic and wanted to remember a denomination they loved.

None of these people, before they left, called the Executive Committee and threatened to defund anything if they didn’t get their way. The thousands of young people I encounter on college campuses who are now non-denominational don’t do exit interviews with their associational Director of Missions (they don’t even know what that is). Instead, they just look at the rage and the bigotry and the cover-ups and the buffoonery and they shrug their shoulders and say, “I guess they don’t want people like me.

Is it accurate to say that many, perhaps most, people leaving the SBC are headed “to the left”?

That is true, I guess, if the SBC is defined, somehow, as the ultimate “right,” in doctrinal and cultural terms. However, that is not accurate, as anyone knows who has studied the world of independent Baptist life.

But it is more likely that the current SBC warfare is linked to decades of growth among nondenominational evangelical Protestants. This has been a hard story for journalists to cover in short, snappy news stories.

But that is, without a doubt, part of what is happening here.

So journalists: Please think twice about any of the labels you use when covering #SBC2021. Plead with your editors to give you a few extra inches of type to explain why some of these believers are clashing with each other — when it is clear that they agree on so many crucial beliefs and doctrines.

Be careful out there. The Baptists are wrestling to painful sins and old loyalties. This will get very messy.

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