SBC Sexual Abuse Coverup

The Southern Baptist Convention's sexual abuse crisis is the most comprehensive documented institutional failure in the history of American evangelical Christianity — and its cover-up is directly connected to the same power structures that drove the SBC Resurgence. Timeline of the documented crisis: February 10, 2019: The Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News published a joint investigation — 'Abuse of Faith' — documenting at least 700 victims of 380 Southern Baptist church leaders and volunteers over two decades. Reporters Robert Downen, Lise Olsen, and John Tedesco documented that many accused pastors had been allowed to move to new churches after abuse allegations, that victims had been pressured to keep silent, and that the SBC's congregational polity (which gives each church independence) had been used as a rationale for institutional non-accountability. SBC response: The SBC leadership initially defended itself on polity grounds — claiming that because the SBC has no authority over local churches, it could not be held responsible for pastoral abuse. This defense was demolished by subsequent reporting. May 2022: Guidepost Solutions, an independent investigative firm hired by a vote of SBC messengers over the objection of SBC leadership, released a 288-page report documenting: - The SBC Executive Committee had maintained a secret list of accused pastors for years while publicly denying the existence of such a list - Executive Committee leaders, including former president Ronnie Floyd and general counsel Augie Boto, had worked to block reforms, intimidate survivors, and discredit advocates - Survivors who sought help were routinely dismissed, gaslit, or accused of threatening the church - The Executive Committee had hired legal counsel to advise it on protecting the institution rather than survivors - Key leaders received advance warnings about the Houston Chronicle investigation and took steps to manage the response rather than address the underlying problems The Resurgence connection: The theological framework that enabled the coverup — absolute pastoral authority, submission to church leadership, protection of institutional reputation as a form of spiritual warfare — is the same framework that the Patterson-Pressler Resurgence installed. Paige Patterson, one of the two architects of the Resurgence, was removed as president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in 2018 after reports that he had counseled women to stay in abusive marriages, had mishandled a rape allegation, and had made inappropriate comments about a teenage girl's appearance. Russell Moore, who as ERLC president had pushed for abuse accountability and been sidelined for it, published letters in 2021 documenting that SBC Executive Committee members had threatened him and attempted to block his reforms. His departure from the ERLC in 2021 was directly connected to this conflict.

Documented themes

• Patriarchy
• Christian Nationalism
• Gender & Patriarchy

Connections to SBC Sexual Abuse Coverup

• Purity Culture Industrial Complex influenced (2019) — Purity culture's theological framework — female bodies as repositories of male honor, sexual violation as the victim's spiritual failure, shame as the primary response to sexual transgression — was the precise architecture that made systematic abuse coverup possible within SBC institutions. When abuse occurred, the framework placed the burden of shame on victims, made disclosure feel like personal sin, and incentivized institutional silence over accountability. Survivors' accounts documented in the Guidepost Solutions investigation (2022) repeatedly describe purity culture's shame theology as the mechanism that kept them from reporting. The theology that said a woman's sexual purity was her most valuable possession made her the responsible party when that purity was violated — regardless of how.
• Russell Moore responded to (2021) — Russell Moore's internal fight against the SBC Executive Committee's handling of sexual abuse predated his public break with the SBC by years. He had been pushing the Executive Committee to respond seriously to documented clergy abuse cases, arguing that the SBC's congregationalist polity did not make institutional accountability impossible — it just made it inconvenient. The Executive Committee resisted. When Moore's letters were leaked to the Religion News Service in May 2021, they documented not just the abuse mismanagement but the intimidation of survivors and the retaliation against those who raised concerns — including Moore himself. The letters were a direct catalyst for the Guidepost Solutions investigation commissioned that year. The 2022 Guidepost report confirmed everything Moore had alleged, and more.
• SBC Conservative Resurgence influenced (2019) — The SBC Resurgence's theology of absolute pastoral authority, submission to church leadership, complementarian gender hierarchy, and institutional reputation protection created the conditions under which clergy sexual abuse was systematically covered up. The Guidepost Solutions (2022) report's documentation of SBC Executive Committee leaders silencing survivors and protecting accused pastors reflects the same power dynamics that the Resurgence installed: authority concentrated in male leaders, accountability external to the institution treated as attack, dissent treated as theological rebellion.
• Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary influenced (2019) — The abuse reckoning that eventually produced the Guidepost Solutions investigation had many origins, but the Patterson case at Southwestern was among the most catalytic. When documentation emerged that Southwestern's president had personally intervened in a rape allegation to discourage the survivor from contacting police — and had arranged a private confrontation between the survivor and her alleged attacker — it demonstrated the institutional consequences of the resurgence's patriarchal theology at the seminary level. Patterson's firing in May 2018 and the public attention to the case preceded and helped precipitate the Houston Chronicle investigation (February 2019) that documented the broader SBC abuse pattern.

Sources

• Abuse of Faith — Houston Chronicle / San Antonio Express-News (2019)
• Guidepost Solutions Report on the Executive Committee of the SBC — Guidepost Solutions (2022)
• Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation — Kristin Kobes Du Mez (2020), pp. 290–310