Southern Baptist leaders quietly seek protection from abuse suits

For six months, virtually no one heeded the brief Southern Baptists quietly filed in a case headed to the Kentucky Supreme Court.

At the center of the case is a woman whose father, a police officer, was convicted in 2020 of sexually abusing her over a period of years when she was a child. The woman later sued several parties, including the Louisville Police Department, saying they knew about the abuse and had a duty to report it. Now the state’s highest court is considering whether victims of sexual abuse can get more time to sue “non-perpetrators” — institutions or their leaders that are obligated to protect children from such abuse.

None of it seemed to have anything to do with the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. But in April, attorneys representing the denomination filed an amicus brief opposing the expansion of the statute of limitations for lawsuits against third parties, including religious institutions.

The short, reported by The Louisville Courier-Journal in October, hit Southern Baptist circles like a bombshell. The organization has struggled in recent years with revelations that its national leaders suppressed reports of abuse and resisted reforms for decades. The letter, which abuse survivors and critics of the church say, offers the first clear look at the church’s true position on whether its leaders can be held responsible for abuse.

It has prompted a flurry of blistering reactions and attempts by SBC leaders to distance themselves from the order, which they characterize as an attorney-driven decision. The letter states that the denomination has a “strong interest in the statute of limitations issue” in the case, and argues that a 2021 state law that allows abuse victims to sue “non-perpetrators” of third parties was not intended to are applied. retroactively.

“I have never seen such outright and righteous anger among Southern Baptists,” said Russell Moore, former head of the denomination’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission who is now editor-in-chief of Christianity Today.

The order has disrupted ongoing reform efforts in the denomination, which have since gained momentum an investigation by The Houston Chronicle and The San Antonio Express-News in 2019, it emerged that hundreds of Southern Baptist leaders had pleaded guilty or been convicted of sex crimes over the decades.

The denomination has since passed on resolution calling abuse both a sin and a crimecommissioned and published a third-party investigation into addressing abuse and pledged to create a searchable database of people credibly accused of abuse in Southern Baptist settings.

The denomination’s president, Bart Barber, who has supported abuse reforms, said in a statement that he “full responsibility” for the denomination joining the assignment. He said he was asked for approval by the SBC’s legal team and regrets not giving it the attention it should have. “I know this damages my credibility with you, perhaps irreparably,” he wrote in an open statement to Southern Baptists.

Yet he said in the same statement that he has not yet made a decision on this matter. “I don’t know exactly what I think about limitation periods. I think they are a mixed bag,” he wrote. “I’m uncomfortable with the damage statutes of limitations can do, but I also think they sometimes play a valid role in the law.”

States, including California and New York, have expanded the statute of limitations for filing civil lawsuits in abuse cases. About a dozen Catholic dioceses in the United States are currently in bankruptcy proceedings.

Victims and their advocates say the order undermines the intentions of the thousands of local pastors and other delegates at the denomination’s annual meeting who have consistently supported reform efforts.

In the past few years of floor votes, “abuse reform has been undefeated,” said Mike Keahbone, a pastor in Oklahoma who serves on the denomination’s executive committee and on the Abuse Reform Implementation Task Force formed last year.

Mr Keahbone said members of the executive committee, the denomination’s highest leadership body, were unaware of the lawyers’ intentions to join the brief.

Jules Woodson, who has said her youth pastor sexually abused her at a Texas church in the 1990s, said she and other abuse survivors felt the denomination appeared to be acting behind closed doors to oppose what it defended in public.

“This is exactly what we survivors have been saying all along,” Ms. Woodson said, describing the denomination as an institution that, when push comes to shove, operates as coolly as a business.

Ms. Woodson and two other survivors issued a statement calling the order a “disgusting” step to “actively detonate all justice that is rightfully ours as victims of abuse.”

The signing parties include Lifeway Christian Resources, the denomination’s publishing arm, and the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Both are defendants in a lawsuit filed in Kentucky by a woman who says that her father, a Baptist pastor, abused her for years and that employees of various institutions failed to protect her.

Al Mohler Jr., the seminary’s president, said in a statement that the seminary should turn to legal advice on “questions of law.” A Lifeway spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment.

Jonathan Whitehead, a lawyer who often represents religious institutions in court, said that while the goal of correcting abuse is noble, it may be too much to expect the denomination to provide pastoral support to victims, to accepts legal responsibility for past abuses and to protect its own existence.

“It is terribly difficult to be the party of care and the party of responsibility at the same time.”

For reform advocates, the episode was disturbing.

“We are definitely alienating women, and we are alienating generations like millennials,” said Keith Myer, a pastor in Maryland. organized a fundraising campaign to help victims of abuse attend the annual meeting this summer. “It cannot just be about preserving our institutions. You have to think about maintaining membership and preserving what we stand for.”