For decades, complaints of sexual abuse by pastors and staff at the Southern Baptist Convention (or SBC) have been ignored or covered up, according to an internal report released Sunday. The church is the largest Protestant denomination in the US.
The nearly 300-page document details how the allegations were kept as closely guarded secrets within the church to avoid accountability.
“In order to fulfill this objective, survivors and others who reported abuse were ignored and discredited,” the report says.
The document also maintains that church leaders covered up the allegations and allowed members of the clergy named as abusers to continue as pastors or in other positions of authority.
Lawsuits against the church were dismissed as opportunistic and without merit, adds the report conducted over nearly a year by an investigative firm.
The report was unable to contact an SBC representative to comment on the complaint.
The work was started by the Southern Baptist Convention in June 2021, when several complaints surfaced at its annual meeting.
The complaints focused precisely on cases of sexual abuse committed by pastors and volunteers and the lack of response from the church’s executive committee, which says it has 13 million members in the US and more than 40 million worldwide.
In 2019, the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News had reported that more than 700 people had been abused by pastors, leaders and volunteers from Southern Baptist congregations.
The scandal echoes that faced by the Catholic Church, which was shaken when the Boston Globe newspaper revealed in 2002 that the church had covered up for decades cases of sexual abuse involving its clergy.
