Since decades of sex abuse and coverups in the Catholic Church were reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have published lists of priests they say have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to prevent the transfer of abusers to other churches. Unlike the Catholic Church, the SBC has a non-hierarchical structure.
In March 2007, the Rev. Thomas Doyle, a priest and canon lawyer who first warned of the looming Catholic sex abuse crisis, wrote to the SBC and Executive Committee presidents, according to the report. He expressed his concerns that SBC leaders could be falling into some of the same patterns as Catholic leaders in not dealing with clergy sex abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists should learn from Catholic mistakes and take action early on to implement structural reforms so as to make children safer.
The report states that Frank Page, who was leading the Executive Committee at the time, responded to Doyle in a short letter that “Southern Baptist leaders truly have no authority over local churches” but that they would attempt to use their “influence” to provide protections. In an article, Page accused a survivor group of having a hidden agenda of setting up the nation’s largest Protestant body for lawsuits. Page later resigned from his position in 2018 over a having “morally inappropriate relationship.” Page did not immediately return a request for comment.
Rachael Denhollander, a former USA gymnast who outed Larry Nassar’s serial sexual assaults, is an adviser on a Southern Baptist task force on the issue and said that the report shows a need for institutions like the SBC to seek outside expertise on sex abuse.
“It shows a level of coverup and harassment and resistance to reforms on an institutional level that has led to decades of survivors being victimized and hurt,” Denhollander said. “The question Southern Baptists have to ask is, ‘How could this happen?’”
The issue of sex abuse was a prominent theme in leaked private letters written by Russell Moore, who left his position in 2021 as head of the SBC’s policy arm, the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. Moore said he expects Southern Baptists to receive Sunday’s report in a similar way to how Nikita Khrushchev shocked the Soviet Union when he detailed Joseph Stalin’s crimes in a speech in 1956.
“The depths of wickedness and inhumanity in this report are breathtaking,” Moore said. “People will say, ‘This is not all Southern Baptists, look at all the good we do.’ The report demonstrates a pattern of stonewalling, coverup, intimidation and retaliation.”
Moore said he hopes the SBC will consider replacing a statue of evangelist Billy Graham, which was moved from Nashville to Graham’s home state in 2016, with a statue of Christa Brown, the abuse survivor who spent the past two decades fighting for reform.
