Avoiding an Exodus: What Addressing a Decades-Long Sexual Abuse Crisis May Mean for the Southern Baptist Convention and the Republican Party

Form Southern Baptist Convention President J. D. Greear speaking at the convention’s annual meeting in June 2016. Photo by Mark Humphrey.

On June 15, 2021, the United States’ largest Protestant Christian denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), elected their new president: Ed Litton—the senior pastor of Redemption Church in Saraland, Alabama. The conservative Evangelical denomination’s first and only Black president, Fred Luter, nominated Litton to the role with frequent attributions to the pastor’s commitment to racial reconciliation and his moderate political nature. 

However, in the weeks following Litton’s election, promises for denomination-wide efforts on racial justice have been largely ignored. Instead, the church is beginning to reckon with a decades-long sexual abuse crisis, and this new chapter for the SBC, one filled with investigations into the denomination’s handling of assault accusations, hints at a comparable situation for America’s conservative voters. Frankly, white evangelicals are finally beginning to examine sexual assault in their own spaces. This reckoning could indicate both a progression in how the GOP is fracturing and a declining tolerance for abusers as viable candidates within the party, at least among the more centrist faction.

Litton’s defeat over the ultraconservative Pastor Mike Stone from rural Blackshear, Georgia, was a blow to the increasingly influential right-wing side of the denomination: namely, the Conservative Baptist Network (“The Network”). According to their website, this special interest group vehemently rejects “Critical Race Theory, Intersectionality, and other unbiblical agendas deceptively labeled as ‘Social Justice.’” Highlighting his rejection of “unbiblical ideologies such as Critical Race Theory” and “clarity to stand boldly… in an increasingly anti-Christian culture,” The Network endorsed Stone for SBC president on May 20, 2021. 

Rightly so, many moderate and minority congregants within the SBC are claiming Litton’s close victory (he won just 52% of the votes) as a welcome opportunity to build bridges and dodge culture wars with groups like The Network. However, for many voters, dodging far-right leadership may not have been the primary motivation behind their pro-Litton decisions. Instead, both online and offline efforts from sexual assault survivors within the church shaped the election results, and consequently, the denomination’s priorities moving forward. Though it would be incorrect to assume the SBC is a monolith of white conservatives, it is impossible to escape the reality of its majority-white demographics, combined with the jarring statistic that nearly 78% of white Evangelical Protestants identify themselves as Republican. For these reasons, any major shifts within the SBC can suggest a parallel of impending priority changes within the GOP.  

For decades, sexual assault accusations have rippled through the SBC’s estimated 47,000 churches, and in 2019, the Houston Chronicle published a six-part exposé detailing the severity of these crimes since 1998. Their investigative work uncovered hundreds of employees and volunteers who have been convicted of or have pleaded guilty to sex crimes, harrowing stories of the over 700 victims, and the all-too-frequent lack of response from the SBC’s Executive Committee. 

More recently, leaked letters, including one from Russell Moore, the now-former president of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, highlight how sexual abuse issues overshadow any present conflict within the denomination. Moore wrote in February 2020, just over one year before he departed from both his career and personal affiliation with the SBC: “The presenting issue here is… sexual abuse. This Executive Committee, through their bylaws workgroup, ‘exonerated’ churches, in a spur-of-the-moment meeting, from serious charges of sexual abuse cover-up.” He later mentioned interactions with “a president of [a subcommittee of the SBC Executive Committee] who was, at that very moment, using his pastoral authority to sexually sin.”

Moore’s highly public departure, combined with those of other former members such as bestselling author Beth Moore (no relation), and the aforementioned investigative work, have indeed suggested instability for the SBC and their future as America’s mega-denomination. Nevertheless, some of the most influential work in paving the way for accountability within the church is not just from SBC executives or news networks; rather, survivors’ own stories are gaining the most traction.

Hannah-Kate Williams, an SBC survivor, shared the official SBC Sexual Abuse Survivors Joint Statement via Twitter on June 13, 2021. The document, a testimony in itself, was signed by eight self-identified abuse survivors and outlined five demands, including supporting “the hiring of an outside organization to audit and assess abuse and mishandling of abuse within the denomination.” Williams detailed more about the SBC over several days on her Twitter account, primarily noting how she and other signees distributed copies of the statement to the thousands of attendees at the election meeting. By the 15th, the Houston Chronicle reporter Robert Downen posted a photo of the document with the caption “Pretty sure these are on most/all seats at #SBC21, which is saying something because there are a loooooooot of seats. #SBCtoo #SBC2021.” 

Since the dispersion of the statement, Ed Litton has appointed seven members to a task force charged with the task of hiring an independent investigative group to search the SBC’s history of sexual abuse. Rachael Denhollander, a current lawyer and the first woman to publicly accuse Larry Nassar of sexual assault, will serve as an adviser of the probe.

No comparable task force or public campaigns from the SBC have been made since the election about racial justice or improving race relations within the church. Granted, Litton has been busy after numerous plagiarism accusations surrounding his sermons. Nevertheless, many will continue to credit his election to his soft nature and history of creating diverse church spaces, but reckoning with the ongoing sexual assault issue seems to take priority for the SBC at this time. 

All of this begs to question whether handling sexual abuse within one of the country’s most conservative denominations, often seen as synonymous to Republicanism itself, will lead to tangible differences within the GOP. A renewed focus on #MeToo—or, as coined by author Emily Joy Allison, #ChurchToo—from the Southern Baptists suggests a high likelihood for the continuation of divisions within the Republican party and ideally an end to apathy about abuse crimes. These two entities, the SBC and the GOP, are inching closer each day to reckoning with old skeletons, and whoever is or is not ready to acknowledge these newly uncovered stories could represent the future of each party. Only time will tell if ultraconservatism—political, theological, or even both—steps forward as a victor.

Ava Young (CC ’25) is a first-year student at Columbia College studying Religion and Political Science. Though not a member of the SBC, she is from the South and is generally indifferent toward conventions.