The Southern Baptist Convention sex abuse scandal just got 1000X bigger
Southern Baptist leaders have responded to the exposure of sexual abuse allegation mishandling within their organizations in a big way–but it looks like the full story may be even bigger.Rather than continue the cover-up, the Executive Committee for SBC has released a list of abusers with the Baptist church system, and it is crushingly extensive.Even though it only covers abuses from February of 2007 onward, the list is 205 pages long with anywhere from two to five entries on every page, meaning there have been hundreds and hundreds (and hundreds) of sexual abuse allegations within the Baptist church system reported just within the past fifteen years.Related: Turns out the Southern Baptist Convention is even worse than we thoughtThe document contains partially and/or fully redacted entries throughout (presumably based on pending litigation for some), but the unredacted text and sheer scale of entries are enough to paint of picture of the enormity of the documented abuses.A report on many of the instances was published in the Houston Chronicle in 2019, while a number of the accused abusers were still in active ministry.
This report forced SBC to act, with many voting to create a task force to oversee the third-party review.SBC president Ed Litton, who assembled the task force, said in an interview, “I believe what we have is a revealing–a very rare revealing–from the grassroots Southern Baptists to say what’s really going on here.”Related: Man says church members held him down and beat him in attempt to expel his homosexual demonsIt seems, however, that there may still be much to be uncovered.According to Jennifer Lyell, an abuse survivor of a former Southern Baptist Theological Seminary professor, this investigation is.
