Report shows SBC Executive Committee pattern of resistance to addressing abuse claims

[T Howard]

So, a church has to choose between protecting itself from a potential lawsuit and financial ruin and warning other churches about the former pastor / member.

This is one of the challenges of a religious institution operating within a secular society. I think there are ways around that, but I think it is challenging and maybe even impossible to erect something like this within the very loose framework of the SBC. The Roman Catholic church can enforce something more easily because the priest are under the RC framework, and the RC can hire and fire priests at various churches. The SBC purposedly does not have such a structure. At the end of the day, it is still independent churches. And to share non-criminal information with separate entities could open up the church to lawsuits. It is a massive challenge in my opinion.

[dgszweda]

And to share non-criminal information with separate entities could open up the church to lawsuits. It is a massive challenge in my opinion.

Is it libel if it is true? Some situations are undoubtedly unprovable, but if you are passing on the truth, I don’t see how it can be libel.

I don’t know as I am not a lawyer, but I think you can make true statements that mostly would protect you from lawsuits

[Don Johnson]

dgszweda wrote:

And to share non-criminal information with separate entities could open up the church to lawsuits. It is a massive challenge in my opinion.

Is it libel if it is true? Some situations are undoubtedly unprovable, but if you are passing on the truth, I don’t see how it can be libel.

I don’t know as I am not a lawyer, but I think you can make true statements that mostly would protect you from lawsuits

Being honest helps, but there is a type of harassment lawsuit that seeks to intimidate a person into silence, or punish him for speaking. There are also proverbs in law about “New York Lawyers” who are able through clever rhetoric and legal maneuvers to persuade juries and judges of all kinds of nonsense. So there is some risk in honestly appraising men and putting them on a “do not hire” list.

(note; I am not saying every lawyer from New York is a crook; merely that there is a subspecies of crooked lawyers often referred to by that name!)

I personally think that risking harassment lawsuits is worth the goal of keeping lawless men out of the ministry, because getting sued by a rogue at point A in his sins beats the heck out of getting sued by the rogue’s victims after his sins get to point B.

We’ll see where it turns out, but I am very encouraged to see that the SBC even commissioned this report. And hopefully people take a close look at the allegations against Johnny Hunt and give him the bum’s rush if appropriate. I suspect it is.

You can not be held liable for libel OR defamation as long as the statement is true and verifiable, Don. I’d have to ask an attorney to be certain.

I get that there’s legal risk to admitting fault on the part of the pastor or church but the risk of legal liability is much less important than preserving God’s Name to the unbelieving world. Ephesians 5 is clear - expose the evil deeds of darkness.

[Don Johnson]

dgszweda wrote:

And to share non-criminal information with separate entities could open up the church to lawsuits. It is a massive challenge in my opinion.

Is it libel if it is true? Some situations are undoubtedly unprovable, but if you are passing on the truth, I don’t see how it can be libel.

I don’t know as I am not a lawyer, but I think you can make true statements that mostly would protect you from lawsuits

I agree with you. The challenge becomes that most of the time everyone only holds part of the truth. Even those named in the Guidepost document are claiming that the information is slanted, or it is missing key details, or it is mischaracterizing the situation….. And those may very well be true. Truth is often a challenge in many of these situations. In addition, whether it is true or not, doesn’t stop a lawsuit from taking place. Given enough energy, somebody with enough will can bankrupt pretty much any church in lawsuits. Given the fact that these situations can be murky at best, opens up a lot of options in the court system.

I don’t say all of that, to say that it shouldn’t be tried. We have to do something, and being quiet isn’t one of them. But I can see how a lot of people with small concerns created a big mess.

The claim of the lawsuit would be invasion of privacy, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and, if facts are in question, defamation.

So, even if what the church shares is true and accurate, the person can turn around and sue for invasion of privacy and intentional infliction of emotional distress, etc.

Again, churches have to decide whether the risks of legal action and financial ruin are more important than protecting other churches from a suspected (but not criminally convicted) predator.

The lawyers have been dealing with this for decades—there are certain things you just don’t do and remain a lawyer, and the list is actually more similar to the TItus & TImothy requirements for pastors. So the response to “you inflicted distress on me” is (a) it’s true and (b) it’s relevant to the job.

That noted, it is indeed possible to end up on the wrong side of a civil judgment even if you’re in the right—all you need to do is to economize on your lawyer and/or fail to make your case. And sometimes, a weird jury will give an award that baffles the world. I can think of the billion-dollar award against GM when the gas tank didn’t hold when a 15 year old car was rear-ended at 55mph, and also the case where $6 million was awarded when a guy got stinking drunk, climbed a 15 foot fence with barbed wire, and peed on the “El” third rail.

The courts are weird that way sometimes. You can choose your odds by minding your Ps & Qs, but as we ought to know, the outcome is in the hands of God.

I understand the legal issues if you suspect but don’t know if there is a problem with someone. But surely you don’t have to give a recommendation if they are trying to move on.

Don, the report documents numerous clear, credible allegations of sexual assault and the like. I can understanding “moving on” from ordinary interpersonal difficulties, but I think that things like sexual assault impose a moral requirement for the previous church to speak up. No?

[Bert Perry]

Don, the report documents numerous clear, credible allegations of sexual assault and the like. I can understanding “moving on” from ordinary interpersonal difficulties, but I think that things like sexual assault impose a moral requirement for the previous church to speak up. No?

haven’t read the report, so no comment on that

my point is not expressed completely. Typing on my phone!
Now on iPad, not sure if it will be better. So… if an individual is suspected of abuse, and it is reported to police, but no charges filed, what should the church do? Suppose they decide it’s a good time for the church and individual to part ways … not a firing, but just the best way forward.

what do they do if someone calls checking the background?

can they report the accusation and subsequent police non-action? I think that would be problematic. Nothing has been proven.

but at least they could say we’ve decided to sever ties and we would not hire the individual back.

does that make more sense?

And on page 60 or so. It’s TOUGH reading, and I’d encourage everyone to read it. This is so much worse than “Pastor X did Y and then the regional convention sat on their hands”. It’s intentional wickedness and depravity at a level I can’t begin to fathom by multiple men over decades. The “Abuse of Faith” stories are just the very tip of the iceberg.

Many of the stories are not new but the narrative of the intentional strategy of stonewalling, obfuscation, deceit and callousness is hard to fathom, particularly by men who knew that pastors were literally raping their congregants but were more concerned about ‘restoring’ the pastors than they were helping the rape victims or warning a new church that a rapist was heading their way but doing absolutely nothing to stop, if they didn’t help the guy find a new ministry to start with.

This is going to have reverberations for decades and I really don’t know if the SBC will survive what will be a tidal wave of legal claims against it. Men like August Boto, in particular, are legally liable as the result of “wanton, willful and callous disregard” for their fiduciary duties as per Tennessee Law. Only God will be able to revenge this level of sin against the congregations and individual members.

I’d argue that there are a lot of cases where you know more than enough to exclude someone from ministry positions without there actually being a criminal conviction for several reasons:

• Many moral offenses (e.g. adultery) are not criminal at all.
• Many crimes are not often prosecuted, like statutory rape.
• Very often, a report of a “not crime” will, upon further investigation, be rightly classified as a crime.
• We can also see patterns of behavior that are not consistent with being an elder per Paul and Christ’s instructions.

More or less, there are any number of cases where we would be fools (in the Proverbs sense of also being evil) to ignore certain patterns of behavior. You’ve got the youth pastor being caught alone with the girls, the Sunday School volunteer “pressing the boundaries” in terms of affection and/or trying to teach sex ed to kids, the driver who never seems to find another adult in the church van, etc.. A lot of these are “tells” that something more may be going on, and if you’ve documented things well, you generally will win in court if you’re challenged.

And in doing so, you’re going to tend to guide people to repentance who desperately need it.

The stories are lurid and horrific, but the thing that scares me the most is that the SBC seems to have done a similar thing to what the BSA and Catholics did; they had a list of offenders that they did not release to prospective employers. For a plaintiff’s lawyer, that’s like waving a red flag in front of a bull.

Another thing that is very disheartening is that towards the end of the document, they’ve got a list of cases (anonymized) where instead of removing a convicted sex offender from ministry, the church simply withdrew from the SBC. So there are a fair number of churches out there which have not “gotten the memo” about the need for repentance for these things.

Not going to be pretty going forward.

[Bert Perry]…. towards the end of the document, they’ve got a list of cases (anonymized) where instead of removing a convicted sex offender from ministry, the church simply withdrew from the SBC. So there are a fair number of churches out there which have not “gotten the memo” about the need for repentance for these things.

Not going to be pretty going forward.

I wonder how many of these cases the church involved just didn’t believe that the accusations were true or that the convictions were correct. It just strains credulity that churches could think it’s a good idea to keep these people involved in ministry. But history has also shown that some of the worst predators are extremely persuasive and charismatic individuals, so they tell a story and the church buys it and keeps him, conviction or not.

I wonder sometimes too if a theology/pulpit rhetoric that encourages people to think “Christian = good person unbeliever = bad person” contributes to all of this. Oversimplified “us vs. them” thinking can result in extremely naive views of what Christians are like… or might be like versus what we’re supposed to be like. But the reality is that on both sides of conversion people run a wide range of levels of decency and goodness in terms of conduct.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/26/opinion/the-southern-baptist-sexual-…

As social scientists have shown in one experiment after another, it’s very easy to get people to dehumanize each other. You divide people into in-groups and out-groups. You spread a tacit ideology that says women are less important than men or Black people are less important than white people. You use euphemistic language so that horrific acts can be abstracted into sanitized jargon.

You tell a victimization story: We are under attack. They’re out to get us. They’re monsters. They deserve what they get. You tell a righteousness story: We do the Lord’s work. Our mission is vital. Anybody who interferes is a beast.

You bureaucratize: You create a system of nonresponsibility in which rules and procedures matter, not people. When you read the report on the Southern Baptists you realize, once again, how much horror can be done by dutiful functionaries who focus on minimizing legal liabilities but not honoring human beings.

The scholar Simon Baron-Cohen calls this “empathy erosion.” In his book “Moral Disengagement,” Albert Bandura detailed how Catholic leaders put a lot of effort into not knowing what was going on. After this shameful warning, Southern Baptist leaders did something quite similar.

On the “victimization story” - This is what Ravi and his organzation did