The Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant group in the US, said on Friday that the Justice Department was looking into claims of sexual abuse at the church and that the group would “fully and completely comply.”
Church leaders say that many parts of the church, such as seminaries and missionary groups, are being looked into. They also say that the church is still “grieving and lamenting past mistakes.”
A damning study put out by church leaders in May says that reports of sexual abuse were covered up for 20 years.
An outside consultant led the investigation, which looked into claims of abuse against male pastors, church staff, and officials going back to 2000.
One of the most shocking things the report said was that a member of the denomination’s executive committee, which is its national leadership body, had made an internal list of 703 people who were thought to be abusers.
According to the report, abuse survivors and other concerned Southern Baptists have been telling the Southern Baptist Convention about child molesters and other abusers who were in the pulpit or on the church staff for almost 20 years.
The article went on to say that the protesters “called, wrote letters, sent emails, went to meetings, and held rallies, only to be met again and again with opposition, stonewalling, and even outright hostility.”
Later, the church released a 205-page list of hundreds of ministers and other church employees who had been “credibly accused” of sexual assault.
In June, delegates at an annual convention in Anaheim, California, decided to set up a way to keep track of pastors and other church workers who have been accused of sexual assault and have good evidence against them.
On Friday, the church’s leaders promised to keep making changes to stop sexual abuse in its ranks. They admitted that their efforts to change things were not done. “Our commitment to collaborate with the Justice Department is predicated on the fact that we have demonstrated our willingness to address the problem of sexual assault in an open and sincere manner.”
Some of the leaders of the group were presidents of seminaries, members of the executive committee, and the heads of missionary groups.
On Friday, a spokesperson for the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department would not confirm the investigation and had no immediate comments.
In recent years, pastors and churchgoers have spoken out about how frustrated they are with what they say is the Southern Baptist Convention’s lack of action. When The Houston Chronicle and The San Antonio Express-News did an investigation in 2019 and found that about 380 Southern Baptist leaders and volunteers, from youth pastors to top ministers, had admitted to or been found guilty of sex crimes against more than 700 victims since 1998, the crisis became clear.
In the past few years, the Justice Department has looked into Roman Catholic dioceses for sex abuse violations, but it has been hard to go after them so far. The Associated Press says that in June, the FBI started looking into the Roman Catholic Church in New Orleans.
In 1845, Southern Baptists split from Northern Baptists over the issue of slavery, which the South supported at the time and the North did not. It was because of this that the Southern Baptist Convention was made. The S.B.C. is made up of more than 47,000 churches and nearly 14 million people from all 50 states.
