UNITED STATES
Salon.com
June 18, 2018
By Ashlie D. Stevens
A proposal for a church-wide registry of sexual abusers and harassers gets new life after a decade of dormancy
In 2008, The Nashville Scene published an article titled “What Would Jesus Say?” In it, journalist Elizabeth Ulrich wrote that churchgoers were asking for protection against clergy sex abuse, but the Nashville-based Southern Baptist Convention said “there was little it could do to fend for the flock.”
At the time, the Southern Baptist Convention — the world’s largest Baptist denomination with roughly 15 million members — was under fire for several instances of sexual abuse within their member churches.
There was the 2007 case of Steven Haney, the Cordova, Tennessee-based pastor who was indicted on charges of rape and sexual battery by an authority figure after a 21-year-old man told police Haney had molested him over the course of five years; the man said Haney subjected him to “obedience tests” during which he was forced to perform various sex acts.
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