NASHVILLE (TN)
Baptist News Global [Jacksonville FL]
March 27, 2025
By Christa Brown
After years of trailing out hollow words, impotent task forces and phony dog-and-pony shows of purported reform, the Southern Baptist Convention’s top CEO straight-up admitted that a database of clergy sex abusers is “not a focus for us.”
This bit of truthfulness came during a February press conference when a reporter asked SBC Executive Committee president Jeff Iorg if the clergy sex abuser database was “really a dead option.”
Iorg’s answer came as no surprise, but the question I’m wondering is when exactly did the plan for a database die? Or was it dead from the get-go?
I suspect the latter.
The abuse reform task force never was designed to succeed. It was composed of volunteers who were given no significant funding and no power. So, of course, nothing would get done.
An institution serious about remediating a critical problem would not have addressed it in such an unserious manner.
But in the wake of the Abuse of Faith exposé and the Guidepost investigatory report, the SBC’s narrative of “we’re making a database” presented an image to the world of a responsible institution trying to rectify its wrongs and prevent abuse. It was an image that helped keep the dollars flowing. So, for nearly three years, SBC officials maintained that pretense, while simultaneously pursuing all manner of delays, distractions (women pastors!), and foot-dragging until the momentum dissipated.
If I’m right — that the database was dead from the get-go — this would mean SBC officials engaged in an extended charade. No doubt some individual task force members were sincere in their desire to build a clergy abuser database, but as a practical matter, they may have functioned as little more than props to give the institutional charade an appearance of legitimacy.
If I’m wrong and there really was an earnest plan for creation of a database, then when exactly did the plan change? And by what process did it change?
Whatever the answer — whether it was a charade from the start or became a charade at some point later — the incessant trailing out of unkept commitments has served only to further betray clergy sex abuse survivors and deepen the ditch of distrust. In other words, SBC officials are continuing to inflict harm.
Survivors were baited with the hotline
Despite the abandonment of the sexual abuse database, the SBC’s sexual abuse hotline persists.
Why?
From its inception in May 2022, the hotline was presented as being connected to the development of a clergy abuser database.
Those who developed and promoted the hotline said one of its primary purposes was to gather information to assess: “Is this person credibly accused and should they be going on the database.”
Further, the abuse reform task force claimed it was working to hire personnel “to receive and investigate reports of abuse and mishandling abuse” in Southern Baptist churches.
So, survivors were baited with the expectation that, if they reported a pastor to the hotline, it would initiate a process by which someone would assess whether the pastor’s name should go on the SBC’s database.
You can clearly see that expectation in this survivor’s comment about her contact with the hotline: “I gave her the name of my perp, I sent the scanned felony paperwork, the link to his being on the Texas sex offender list, and still, I do not see his name on the SBC list.”
Seven months after contacting the hotline, she wrote that to me. She had believed her hotline call would yield action and was disappointed that nothing had happened.
It’s now been two-and-a half years since her call to the hotline, and her perpetrator’s name is still not on any SBC database.
She’s not alone in her disappointment. There are no names at all on the SBC’s falsely touted “historic” SBC database — never have been.
The hotline always has been problematic
I have long been skeptical about the SBC’s sexual abuse hotline. I wrote three prior opinion columns about it — here, here and here — and none of them favorable.
Too much about the hotline has been veiled in secrecy and obfuscation. I couldn’t see any assurance that survivors would benefit from reporting to it, and I also thought the hotline carried risks.
Others raised concerns as well. For example, sexual abuse attorney Boz Tchividjian succinctly stated: “Without crystal clarity and transparency, this hotline simply cannot be trusted.” He also raised questions about “what it does with the information it collects.”
Now, the hotline’s problems are even more obvious
Despite the concerns, the SBC Executive Committee rallied its allies — task force members, advisers and others — and used its own Baptist Press to actively promote the hotline, telling survivors to “reach out for help.”
They said it was safe and claimed survivor information was protected and confidential.
But that wasn’t entirely accurate, a fact that became all the more obvious when, unsurprisingly, a court ruled that a survivor’s communications to Guidepost, the hotline administrator, had to be disclosed.
They also said the hotline would ensure abuse reports are properly handled. But from all appearances, it seems the vast majority of abuse reports simply vanish into a file somewhere.
With the passage of time and so little action by SBC officials, the benefit of a hotline report has become ever more difficult to discern. Now, with the abandonment of even the pretense of developing a database, the question becomes all the more urgent: Who does the hotline actually serve?
It sure doesn’t seem to serve clergy sex abuse survivors.
The most recent data from the hotline
Iorg recently announced there had been 674 abuse reports made to the hotline, 59% involving alleged abuse of minors and 41% involving alleged abuse of adults.
Yet we know near-nothing about who those reported pastors are, about whether congregants have been informed, or about whether independent investigations were done.
How do those reports, just sitting there, make anyone else safer? And how do they provide any healing validation to the survivors, who often want desperately for the truth to be acknowledged about their pastor-perpetrators?
What we do know is that not a single name of any reported pastor has been added to any SBC database, and none will be added anytime soon because the database is sidelined.
Denialism and recalcitrance
So, if the hotline isn’t being used to foster accountability for credibly accused clergy sex abusers, what is its purpose?
As it turns out, SBC officials are actually using the hotline to gather data for their own ends to bolster their blind-eyed claim that clergy sex abuse isn’t a widespread problem and to justify their continued refusal to keep records on sexually abusive pastors.
In ditching the database, Iorg pointed to the hotline data as a basis for his assertion that sexual abuse is “not widespread” within the SBC. In essence, he used the hotline data as though it provided a prevalence rate for SBC clergy sex abuse — which of course it doesn’t.
As some of us repeatedly and publicly pointed out, survivors had good reasons to be wary of the SBC’s hotline and to deem it untrustworthy. Therefore, even among survivors who knew about the hotline’s existence, many wisely chose not to make a report to the hotline. So, it was to be expected that the number of abuse reports would be low.
While Iorg acknowledged the hotline data was “not a comprehensive look,” he still pointed to how much they had publicized the hotline and stated the Executive Committee’s plans for responding to abuse were shaped by the hotline data.
As one savvy observer explained, SBC officials effectively twisted the hotline into another means of resisting reforms. “It’s a real phenomenon,” he said, “where you make the complaint process difficult or untrustworthy, then point to the lack of complaint as evidence of a lack of a problem.”
It’s Machiavellian.
Christa Brown, a retired appellate attorney, is the author of Baptistland: A Memoir of Abuse, Betrayal, and Transformation. Follow her on X @ChristaBrown777 and on Bluesky @christabrown.bsky.social.