Special Episode: The Southern Baptist Convention's Apocalypse with Robert Downen
This past week a 400-page report outlining the culture of coverup and the widespread abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention was released. The SBC is the country’s largest Protestant denomination with roughly 14 million members. Together Its 45k churches bring in roughly 11 billion dollars annually. The bombshell report provides details of an abuse and cover up scandal in the SBC that goes both to the very top of the organization but also spreads to every corner of its vast network of churches.
Robert Downen has been covering the SBC and its various scandals since 2018. After having written dozens of articles on the abuse, the silencing of survivors, the threats against whistleblowers, and the resignation of executive leaders accused of rape and cover-ups, he sits down with Brad to discuss the newly released report.
Link to Jonathan Krohn's reporting for SWAJ on the 2021 SBC Convention : https://open.spotify.com/episode/3VVuBFO7xM48S4lmCNxZNn?si=2s4nfIJzTFyIiJvpjWpGDA&dl_branch=1&nd=1
Link to Jonathan Krohn's report from the floor of the SBC Convention in 2021: https://player.fm/series/straight-white-american-jesus-2916173/a-house-divided-dispatches-from-sbc-2021
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB.
And today we have a special episode because this week a bombshell report dropped regarding the Southern Baptist Convention and the many scandals and cover-ups.
and instances of abuse in the country's largest Protestant denomination.
So I'm joined today by somebody who's been covering this series of events going all the way back to 2018 and someone who's been just at the very heart of breaking this news as it has been revealed over the last four or five years and that's Robert Downan from the Houston Chronicle.
So Robert, thanks for joining me.
Thank you so much for having me.
Robert, you've just done incredible work on this.
You've, as I've said, kind of been at the heart of it in terms of just staying on this beat ever since the very first reverberations of abuse and scandal were starting to echo, going all the way back, as I said, to 2018.
This week, however, seemed as if all of it came to a crescendo in this 400-page report that was released by a third party firm that has been investigating and compiling information regarding the Southern Baptist Convention and its leadership and the various instances of abuse throughout the denomination.
For those of you listening, I'm sure many of you are familiar not only with the scandal, but with the Southern Baptist Convention.
But it bears worth repeating that this is the country's largest Protestant denomination with roughly 14 million members, somewhere between 45 and 50,000 churches that together bring in about $11 billion of revenue annually.
Right?
Robert, you reported on The Chronicle just a couple days ago, and so I'll just kind of go through some highlights of the report that you and your colleagues reported on.
There's a small group of SVC leaders who over the last two, three decades have routinely misled other members of the executive committee and kind of hidden reports of abuse and warnings from survivors and for victims.
There's been a concerted cover-up effort in fear of lawsuits and the same leaders have failed to inform SBC members, you know, the millions, the tens of millions of members of the SBC church, that there are predators and pedophiles in their churches and that they are targeting those churches.
Long-time leaders in the Southern Baptist Convention have kept a private list of abusive pastors and ministers, despite claiming for years that such an idea was impractical for stopping predators.
So, they said they couldn't do that, it was impractical too much, and yet they secretly did do it without sharing it with the people throughout the denomination.
You report that at least 35 church pastors, employees, and volunteers who exhibited predatory behavior We're still able to find jobs at churches during the past two decades.
And I'm sure we'll talk about more several past presidents and very prominent leaders in the Southern Baptist Convention are among those criticized by the victims.
I could go on and on.
The reporting is extensive.
The report is 400 pages long.
I'll just start with this question.
You've been on this beat for four or five years.
As the run-up to the release of the report kind of came, were you surprised by the extensiveness of this?
This is not only a scandal that goes to the very top of the SBC, but it also spreads throughout.
I want people to really understand that.
This is a lot of executive leaders.
acting in very menacing and insidious ways.
But this is also a situation where there are 700 or more abusers and perpetrators spread throughout this denomination.
And so it is not limited to the very top.
And so I guess first question is just how did, you know, when this was, I'm sure you were on top of it when this was ready to drop, were you surprised at all?
Or was this kind of what you expected as this came to light?
I mean, I don't think I was surprised, certainly to read a document that That kind of examined some of the problem in such a comprehensive way was heavy, but I don't think anybody who's really been paying attention even close, even just a little bit, should be that surprised by this.
I mean, this is what is contained in that report.
is precisely what survivors have been telling us for decades now, and it's precisely what Southern Baptists have ignored for decades.
Going to that, you know, you mentioned that 700 number, 700 victims is what we found in our initial reporting in 2019, that first series of Beast Faith, and then this report that came out on Sunday, found that SBC leadership had been compiling this list of accused or criminally convicted ministers, and they were at about 700 people, but they don't specify in the report.
They say, you know, I think most of those names were confirmed to have been SBC church, confirmed to be SBC churches, but We don't really know if that 700 number, we would need to get more details on that 700 number before I'm comfortable saying like XYZ number of people convicted because I don't trust other people's works.
I think it's really important to take a step back real quick and think about how those lists came to be both ours and theirs, because as part of our reporting, you know, this database, they had been requested, the survivors had requested this database for years.
And SBC routinely turned around and said, we can't force churches to report anything to this.
And also there's a sex offender registry.
So, you know, what, what, what is this list going to actually do?
Well, first of all, the sex offender registry is based on a hodgepodge of self-reported data from law enforcement agencies.
People can take plea deals, people get adjudicated pleas where they don't have to register after a certain amount of times.
There's all these different ways that make it a very, you know, it has gaping holes in it.
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