In case you missed this, the Southern Baptist Convention has announced that the federal investigation into the Convention’s treatment of sexual abuse survivors has come to an end. Here is Liam Adams at The Tennessean:
A historic federal investigation into sexual abuse within the nation’s largest Protestant denomination is officially over after yielding just one conviction.
The U.S. Department of Justice notified the Southern Baptist Convention it’s not pursuing additional criminal charges against the convention or SBC-affiliated agencies, called entities. The news confirms earlier speculation surrounding the conclusion of a case last week when a federal judge in Manhattan sentenced former Southern Baptist pastor and seminary professor Matt Queen, who pleaded guilty to lying to federal authorities.
But some abuse survivors and allies’ hope for more serious criminal proceedings evaporated with the news of the inquiry’s official conclusion. Outside legal counsel and staff for the SBC Executive Committee, which manages business for the Nashville-based denomination outside the two-day SBC annual meeting, confirmed the news in response to a request for comment.
“We’re grateful that we can close this chapter in our legal proceedings and move forward,” Jeff Iorg, chief executive for the SBC Executive Committee, said in a statement Wednesday.
Lawyers for the executive committee who specifically handle abuse-related legal proceedings, Gene Besen and Scarlett Nokes, said the DOJ notified them earlier Wednesday of the investigation’s closure. Besen and Nokes then relayed the news to Iorg and his team. “We are pleased that the matter has been resolved without any charges or further expense against the EC or other SBC entities,” Besen and Nokes said in a statement.
One of the likeliest charges to apply in this scenario would have dealt with racketeering, commonly referred to as a RICO case — an abbreviation for the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. Unless there was trafficking across state lines, the prosecution of most incidents of clergy sex abuse is under the jurisdiction of state attorneys general or local district attorneys.
A May 2022 report from third-party investigator Guidepost Solutions on cover-up and neglect by top Southern Baptist leaders prompted the DOJ to pursue an investigation across the denomination and its 11 major entities, which are based in different states. But the SBC’s hierarchy — local churches, regional associations and state conventions are autonomous and voluntarily partners with the national convention — long presented a dilemma for a RICO prosecution, for example.
Read the entire piece here.
What are Southern Baptists and others saying?
Abuse survivor Christa Brown:
Christa Brown at her Substack:
The U.S. Department of Justice has now shut down its investigation into sexual abuse within the Southern Baptist Convention.
So say attorneys for the SBC Executive Committee who assert that the DOJ notified them today of the investigation’s closure. (A cautionary note: The DOJ itself rarely comments, and it’s worth noting that we heard a similar story a year ago, with a top SBC official claiming the DOJ investigation had ended even as survivors were saying FBI agents had assured them the investigation was ongoing.)
On social media, many Southern Baptists cheered this latest news of the investigation’s shut-down as though it were proof that there’s no abuse crisis in the SBC – as though it were proof of their righteousness. (For examples, see my update below.)
This strikes me as either ill-informed or disingenuous or both.
The shut-down of a federal investigation is not a substantive determination on the absence of crimes. It’s a procedural event.
Furthermore, crimes involving sexual abuse and assault are more typically crimes that fall under state law.
So, the absence of federal prosecutions does not in any way indicate the absence of criminal conduct, the absence of immoral conduct, or the absence of harmful conduct.
This is why, together with David Clohessy and Dave Pittman, I had previously called for state attorney general investigations of abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention, similar to the nearly two dozen state investigations that have been conducted on sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.
Nothing about the closure of the DOJ investigation changes a thing about the fact of 700 known victims that were documented by the Abuse of Faith exposé on sexual abuse in the SBC. (And those were almost all child victims in cases with criminal convictions, which experts recognize as the tip of the iceberg.)
Nor does the closure of the DOJ investigation change anything about the Guidepost investigatory report’s documentation of how terribly top SBC officials treated clergy sex abuse survivors and of how they did nothing to help survivors – or to protect others – when confronted with clergy sex abuse reports.
Nor does the investigation’s closure change anything about the fact of hundreds of Southern Baptist pastors who were listed on the SBC Executive Committee’s own long-secret list of credibly accused abusive pastors… or about the fact that they kept the list secret for so many years.
All of this documentation remains. It’s not as if the closure of the DOJ investigation erased it, and it’s cruel for some Southern Baptists to pretend that it did.
Likewise, the SBC’s chronic failure to reckon with abuse remains.
Anyone who follows the headlines can readily see the ongoing stream of news reports about sexual abuse and coverups in the SBC.
Read Brown’s entire piece here.
Here is the current president of the Southern Baptist Convention:
Former Southern Baptist Convention J.D. Greear wrote this on his X feed:
I am grateful that this investigation has concluded with no federal charges related to sexual abuse. Our goal from the start was to foster cooperation by equipping churches to minister more effectively and stand guard against predators. Beginning in 2018, in response to multiple actions by the messengers, we set out to consider how Southern Baptists at every level could take discernible action to respond swiftly and compassionately to incidents of abuse and to foster safe environments within our churches and institutions. We knew we needed reforms both in our posture and procedures, so that predators would have no place to hide within our system. We knew our 1st impulse should be protection of the vulnerable rather than self-protection of our institutions. By God’s grace, many reforms have happened and the work continues. This was (and still must be) the focal point of all our efforts.
Here are few responses to the Pressley and Greear tweets:
I’ll probably stop ranting soon about the latest evidence that the SBC abuse crisis was an entirely manufactured false narrative, but I can’t help but think about how all of the sophisticated institutional types sneered at those of us who insisted that the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Atlantic, etc. were getting it wrong. In fact, they did worse than sneer, they defamed and slandered.
We were just a bunch of stupid, abuse-coddling MAGA outrage peddlers and that’s why we didn’t believe the smart people like Russell Moore, who has friends at the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Atlantic.
And just like with critical race theory and Covid, now that evidence keeps coming up that they were entirely wrong about the alleged abuse crisis, they’re just dropping the subject. They’re not gonna talk about it now. Because they’re too sophisticated to dip back into the past and remember how they acted and what they said.
And when the next thing comes up that we rubes are getting right while they sneer and shake their fingers at us, they somehow, once again, won’t remember anything that came before.
What does this mean? It means that after a 2-1/2-year investigation, the BIDEN DOJ was not able to bring a SINGLE charge against national SBC leader or entity. Not one. The only charge is against a lone seminary professor who lied to the FBI about witnessing the destruction of a document that contained abuse allegations against a student – – not a pastor or a leader, a STUDENT. And again, that was at a local seminary, not national leadership. What this once again confirms is that @drmoore’s claims that the executive committee was involved in widespread abuse coverups and “tearing women and children apart” (claims that were then amplified by @DavidAFrench , @peter_wehner, and others at @TheAtlantic, @nytimes, @NewYorker, @CNN and @washingtonpost) were a FALSE media narrative all along. Its purpose was to allow Russell Moore (aided by @jdgreear, @griffingulledge, @deaninserra, @bartbarber and Grant Gaines) to exact revenge on his political enemies, and to replace the former members of the executive committee, who were strong conservatives.
Do you expect any of these people to now acknowledge their role in slandering the character of the former executive committee members? Will they correct the record and acknowledge that there was never an “abuse apocalypse”? The SBC was never a “diseased orchard”?
But boy, we sure did spend a lot of money and get a lot of media coverage there for a while, didn’t we?
Reporter Robert Downen:
More:
Southern Baptist theologian Denny Burk on X:
So here’s bottom line on the SBC abuse “crisis.” There wasn’t one. A federal investigation closed after making one arrest—not for abuse but for making false statements under oath. An independent investigation by Guidepost Solutions found no systemic problem with abuse at the SBC Executive Committee. We have spent about 14 million dollars in legal fees as a result of investigations that uncovered no systemic problems with abuse. The problem here is not with the good intentions of Southern Baptist messengers who were doing their level best to address a problem that was presented to them. The problem is with the misinformation they were given about a “crisis” that in the end no one can find any evidence for.
Former SBC president Jack Graham and the director of the Liberty University Standing for Freedom Center:
