Justice Department Serves as the SBC’s Pontius Pilate: “What Crime Have They Committed?”
In yet another rebuke to the so-called #SBCToo movement, the United States Department of Justice has reportedly closed a 2022 probe into Southern Baptist Convention leaders’ criminal responsibility for mishandling abuse allegations. The investigation resulted in no charges.
As reported by the Tennessean, the DOJ opened up the investigation in the wake of a Guidepost Solutions investigation commissioned by 2021’s Sex Abuse Task Force and the Guidepost report published prior to the 2022 Annual Meeting. The report was largely a dud, spending a good portion of its nearly 500 pages outlining the bizarre emotional affair between Jennifer Lyell and David Sills and the compromised and inappropriate kiss between Johnny Hunt and a young pastor’s wife – both sinful situations but neither meeting the threshold for sexual abuse.
The Guidepost report was spun by secular media (and many voices in the SBC) as evidence of a massive scandal in the convention. The 2022 SBC Annual Meeting commissioned yet another task force (the SBC Abuse Reform Implementation Task Force) to “do something” about the nothing-burger report. In what should come as no surprise, the “something” that was done amounted to a few resources to educate churches in preventing and responding to sex abuse and millions of dollars of faithful giving going to lawyers, investigations, and boondoggles like $2 million websites and $60K/month receptionists.
Meanwhile, SBC president Bart Barber has blown around like a shaky reed on the issue, first stating that the SBC had “attacked” abuse survivors in an interview with Anderson Cooper before eventually admitting that the SBC was not capable of nor responsible for adjudicating abuse cases in its member churches.
In the wake of the announcement, go-to abuse “advocate” Rachel Denhollander claimed that unnamed Department of Justice officials assured her that the investigation was not closed despite reports coming from SBC interim president Jonathan Howe. Denhollander has recently come under scrutiny for both being on the SBC payroll and acting as a legal advisor for parties suing the SBC.
This announcement by the DOJ comes as the SBC president race heats up, and is sure to present challenging questions for several of the candidates – most notably Mike Keahbone, an Oklahoma pastor who has been a leading voice in pushing SBC action on a sex abuse “scandal” that has cost millions, forcing layoffs of SBC staff. In a near-comical conflict of interest, Keahbone is serving as an incorporating party for the new, independent non-profit handling abuse and (predictably) needing further funding from Southern Baptist churches.
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