Southern Baptists say the Justice Department has closed its abuse investigation into the leadership body
A leader of the Southern Baptist Convention said Wednesday that the Justice Department had completed a sex abuse investigation into the organization’s executive committee without filing any charges.
The statement from Jonathan Howe, interim president and chief executive of the executive committee, referred only to the conclusion of an investigation into the executive committee and did not address additional Justice Department investigations into other Southern Baptist entities. A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, Nicholas Biase, declined to comment.
Federal investigators opened the probe into the denomination’s handling of sexual abuse in 2022 after Baptists ordered a third-party investigation that found national leaders in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination had suppressed reports of abuse and had resisted reform efforts for decades. The report sparked widespread outrage among Baptist churchgoers and galvanized activists who pushed the denomination for more transparency.
The SBC’s executive committee, a group of 86 people who direct the denomination, said it was notified last week that the U.S. attorney’s office had completed its investigation “with no further action required,” Mr. Howe in the statement.
“While we are grateful for the closure of this specific issue, we recognize that sexual abuse reform efforts must continue across the convention,” he said.
When the investigation began, denomination leaders said the Justice Department was investigating “multiple SBC entities,” a category that also includes seminaries, missions organizations and the denomination’s public policy department. Leaders said at the time they would fully cooperate.
Victims and their allies emphasized the limited nature of the apparent closure of the investigation into one entity of the denomination. If the Justice Department doesn’t pursue federal criminal charges, “that’s a pretty low bar,” said Christa Brown, a longtime activist for reform in the denomination. “The SBC and its executive committee remain morally responsible for serious documented harm.”
The sexual abuse crisis within the Southern Baptist Convention came into the public spotlight in 2019 an investigation by The Houston Chronicle and The San Antonio Express-News reported that more than 350 Southern Baptist leaders and volunteers, including pastors and youth leaders, had pleaded guilty or been convicted of sex crimes against more than 700 children and adults since 1998.
These revelations prompted the SBC to change the way it handled allegations of sexual abuse in churches. It hired an outside consulting firm to conduct an internal investigation and published the damning findings. And a task force was created that recently announced plans to create an independent nonprofit organization that would take over the long-term work of implementing changes designed to prevent abuse.
But progress has been slow, in the eyes of some victims and their allies. At their 2022 annual meeting, Baptists overwhelmingly approved a series of recommendations to address abuse, including plans to set up a website to track pastors and church workers they said had been credibly accused of sexual abuse. But that list has not yet been published, with leaders of the task force citing unexpected legal and financial challenges.
The conservative denomination also faces questions about funding reforms at a time when membership has long been declining. The executive committee laid off staff members last fall, in a nod to “financial realities.” It has also struggled to install a permanent leader after several years of turmoil. In August, an interim president resigned after it was revealed he had falsified academic credentials on his resume. A new candidate will be put to the vote later this month.
Some critics see the reformers’ handling of abuse as overblown and tainted by personal revenge, and say building a new bureaucracy is unlikely to be helpful in tackling incidents in individual churches.
On Wednesday, some of these critics expressed their triumph in the apparent exoneration of the executive committee.
“It’s almost as if impartial, objective, professional investigators don’t think misleading letters, mischaracterized recordings, rumors and political speeches constitute factual evidence,” Mike Stone, a Georgia pastor who lost a 2021 bid for the denomination’s presidency after is accused of hindering his reform efforts, wrote on social media.