Child sex trafficking and abuse ring uncovered in Bibb County, Ala., leaves community stunned

Bibb County, Ala.
(Wikipedia map)

 

After their county sheriff, Jody Wade, announced his office had uncovered an alleged child sex trafficking ring that included at least 10 children ages 3 to 15 years old, residents of Bibb County, Alabama, were at a loss for what to think or do, so they met at a small Presbyterian church and prayed.

"There were Baptists and Methodists and some who claimed no denomination at all, heads bowed and eyes closed in a rare show of interfaith unity amid criminal allegations considered so evil that some openly wondered if Satan himself had taken up residence here," reports Holly Bailey of The Washington Post.

“We can’t assume that just because we’re in small towns that everything operates like it did in the days of ‘The Andy Griffith Show,’” Robert Turner Jr., the district attorney for Alabama’s 4th Judicial Circuit, which includes Bibb County, told WAKA-TV.

The closely-knit rural county was shocked to hear a child sex trafficking ring 
was operating on the outskirts of town. (Ala. Conservation photo)

At the center of the finding was an isolated, underground storm shelter on the "dusty outskirts of Brent, an adjacent town of about 3,000 people located an hour south of Birmingham," Bailey explains. For at least the last three years, children were taken into the bunker and "allegedly drugged and abused in an operation that included sex trafficking [and] torture."

After the bunker was discovered and one of the defendants agreed to cooperate, "seven people were arrested and charged with a laundry list of crimes, including numerous charges of rape, sexual abuse, trafficking and kidnapping," Bailey reports. "The defendants include the parents of at least four victims."

Wade warned the community that the initial "revelations are probably only 'scratching the surface,' with additional victims and more arrests expected," Bailey writes. He told her, “I know God’s forgiveness is boundless, but if there was a limit to it, I think we reached it.

Rural elders are estimated to endure much more abuse than what is reported. Protecting them comes with speaking up.

Rural adults are less likely to report
abuse. (Photo by Danie Franco)

While research on elder abuse in rural areas may be limited, evidence shows that one in 10 elders report being abused. A report from the National Center on Elder Abuse said that for every report of abuse ”there are 24 incidents that may go unreported,” according to Liz Carey in an article for the Daily Yonder.

“Older adults living in rural and remote areas are at greater risk of abuse because of their geographic isolation, lack of support services, and poorer health,” Carey said.

These conditions may work to conceal abuse. Rural elders tend to have less education and fewer financial resources that could, “possibly [create] barriers to leaving abusive situations,” according to a Rural Health Research Center (RHRC) study quoted by Carey.

Alexis Swendener, co-author of the RHRC policy brief, told the Daily Yonder that it was difficult to know the scope of the problem. “Some of the laws are about vulnerable adults or dependent adults. Some of them have age defined in them and some of them don’t.”

The study looked at reports of emotional abuse, financial abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, neglect and self-neglect. Swendener told the Daily Yonder that sexual abuse and self-neglect were the least likely to be “clearly mentioned.”

Nels Holmgren, the director of Aging and Adult Services in Utah, said in an interview with the Daily Yonder that a key element to protecting elders is reporting. However, he also said due to a sense of independence and lack of services in rural areas, people are less likely to ask for help.

Female farm workers often victims of sexual violence; researchers want legal working age raised, other steps

Graph from The Conversation from Department of Agriculture data

Americans don't usually connect female farm workers with sexual assault, but maybe that should change.

ABC's "American Crime" opened its third season on a tomato farm in North Carolina, "where it showed a young woman being brutally raped in a field by her supervisor. . . . 'People die all the time on that farm. Nobody cares. Women get raped, regular,' another character tells a police interrogator. The show's writers did their research, report Kathleen Sexsmith, Francisco Alfredo Reyes, and Megan A. M. Griffin for The Conversation, a platform for journalism by academics. Studies show that 80% of Mexican and Mexican American women farm workers in the U.S. have experienced some form of sexual harassment at work. "While violence against women in agriculture may seem like an issue mainly experienced in developing countries, the truth is that it also happens all too often to women and girls on farms in the U.S."

Researchers found that most women are abused "by men in positions of power, such as foremen, farm labor contractors, farm owners and co-workers . . . . Immigrant women farm workers are vulnerable because of power imbalances in their male-dominated workplaces. Women represent 28% of the nation's farm workers, making them a minority on many farms. Most are immigrants from Latin America, and many are undocumented. Girls under the age of 18 are particularly vulnerable to sexual harassment and abuse on farms."

Agriculture's unique labor laws may also contribute to abuses. The researchers report: "Children as young as 12 can be hired on farms without a cap on the number of hours they work, as long as they don't miss school. . . . Experts say young girls may be especially vulnerable to sexual harassment and violence on farms because they are less likely to recognize and report abuse. Democrats in Congress have repeatedly introduced versions of the Children's Act for Responsible Employment and Farm Safety Act since 2005. The bill would help address the vulnerability of young girls in farm work by aligning the legal farm working age with other industries."

"As we see it, sexual exploitation perpetrated by men in positions of power instills fear that keeps farm laborers obedient, despite precarious working conditions – and keeps fruits and vegetables cheap," Sexton, Reyes and Griffin write. "We agree with the United Nations that sweeping change is needed to empower women, raise farm productivity and promote human rights in the global food system. As U.S. lawmakers craft the next Farm Bill, they could do enormous good for women around the world by setting an example in American fields and farms."

Based on their research conclusions, Sexton, Reyes and Griffin outline steps to change below:
As a first step, we believe lawmakers should pass the CARE Act, which would raise the legal working age on farms to 14, reducing the number of young girls who are vulnerable to abuse.
Second, legalizing the nation's approximately 283,000 unauthorized farm workers would make those workers less vulnerable to sexual abuse by expanding employment opportunities outside of the agricultural sector.

Third, in our view, efforts to legalize farm workers – most recently through the Farm Workforce Modernization Act – should strengthen labor law enforcement and provide well-funded channels for reporting abuses and changing jobs when abuse occurs.

Southern Baptist Convention faces issues of declining numbers, women pastors, use of 'abuse reform' database

Saddleback Church has a broad reach. (Photo via saddleback.com)

The Southern Baptist Convention faces pivotal decisions on female pastors and sexual abuse oversight at this week's yearly gathering in New Orleans. "Messengers, as representatives from thousands of Southern Baptist churches are called, will vote on whether to sustain the convention's executive-committee decision to expel some churches from the denomination because they had women serving as pastors," reports Adolfo Flores of The Wall Street Journal. "This year's election for president is being seen as a referendum on the denomination's efforts over the past year to hold abusers accountable and protect members of the church."

In February, the convention's Executive Committee voted to exclude Fern Creek Baptist Church in Louisville "for having a woman pastor — the same issue it cited for expelling four other churches," including the huge Saddleback Church in Southern California, reports Peter Smith of The Associated Press. "All Baptist churches are independent, so the convention can't tell them what to do; however, it can decide which churches are 'not in friendly cooperation,' the official verbiage for an expulsion."

The issue of women as lead pastors is emotionally and theologically debated. "The SBC's official statement of faith says the office of pastor is reserved for men, but this is believed to be the first time the convention has expelled any churches over it. Both of the congregations say Baptists should be able to agree to disagree — while making a common cause for evangelism," Smith reports. Rev. Linda Barnes Popham, pastor of Fern Creek for the past 30 years, told him: "I want to worship under that same umbrella and do missions together like Southern Baptists have done all of these years. . . .We want women to rise up and be able to answer God's call, just like men do."

Convention members will also decide whether to approve continuation of the convention’s Abuse Reform Implementation Task Force, Flores writes: "The task force is expected to present a database it has been developing over the past year of pastors, denominational workers, ministry employees and volunteers who have been credibly accused of sexual abuse." Jason DeRose of NPR notes, "Parts of this church are under investigation by the U.S. Justice Department because of the way it handled earlier sexual misconduct. And all of this is happening at the same time as an election to decide the [convention's] next president. . . . The incumbent is facing a challenger."

The deployment and use of the Abuse Reform Implementation Task Force's database is a sticking point in the election, alongside declining membership. "Bart Barber, the sitting president, is being challenged for a second term by an opponent who has questioned aspects of the database," Flores reports. Mike Stone, pastor of Emmanuel Baptist Church in Blackshear, Ga. . . . said he sought the nomination, in part, because an audit of the SBC Executive Committee found that it was on an unsustainable financial trajectory. The troubling finances, Stone said, are part of an overall decline in the number of members and churches that he said he would rectify through an evangelistic outreach initiative."

In rural Arkansas, parents angry over sexual abuse and a cover-up knew where to turn: their local weekly newspaper

L-R: Al Cross, director, Institute for Rural Journalism; Ben Gish, The Mountain Eagle, Whitesburg, Ky.; Publisher Ellen Kreth and General Manager Shannon Hahn, Madison County Record, with institute's Tom and Pat Gish Award for courage, integrity and tenacity in rural journalism. (Photo: Yung Soo Kim, University of Kentucky School of Journalism and Media)

When older boys on a junior-high basketball team put younger players through an initiation ritual that included sexual abuse, and school officials tried to cover it up, angry parents knew where to go: their local weekly newspaper, the Madison County Record of Huntsville, Ark. The paper's pursuit of the story won it the Tom and Pat Gish Award for courage, integrity and tenacity in rural journalism from the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues (publisher of The Rural Blog), which was presented last night in Lexington, Ky.

“This story wouldn’t let us go, and we weren’t about to let it go, either,” Publisher Ellen Kreth said as she and General Manager Shannon Hahn accepted the award.

Kreth said of school officials, “Their first order of business was to cover it up . . . The parents’ first order of business . . . was to contact the Madison County Record. They trusted the newspaper; they knew they could trust us to tell the story. Most importantly, they also knew they could trust Shannon. She lives in the community and has children in the school, and they knew they could come to her.”

The paper didn’t name any students involved, but focused on how officials handled the allegations, reducing or rejecting the recommended punishment for the violators. It reported the district’s failure to immediately report the allegations, as required by law, and multiple open-meetings violations of the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act. Its reporting prompted an investigation; special open-meetings training for the school board, which didn’t do it in the time required; a lawsuit by a parent alleging violations of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which ban sex-based discrimination in any school that gets federal funding; the board’s admission of liability in that suit; the electoral defeat in May of three of the four board members who sought re-election; the charging of the superintendent and coach with first-degree failure to report; and their resignations.

“They never attacked the facts that we reported, because they knew that they were true, but . . . they attacked our role in the community,” Kreth said. “They said we shouldn’t report the allegations, that we were harming the victims, and that we should also be quiet about it. During multiple school-board meetings, the board members attacked the paper, saying our job was to promote the school, not report on it. We were to be their public-relations department. And that’s the one area I think about this whole story in the context of rural journalism that screams the loudest to me. The most common comment, but also the most surprising, was “I can’t believe a local newspaper would cover something like that.”

Noting the Institute’s maxim that “Rural people deserve good journalism as much as urban dwellers,” Kreth said, “We always believed our role in this story and in our community is telling the facts, telling the story, digging in deep and piecing the facts together. This story was built on trust” among the paper and the parents of the victims. “It was built on filing FOIA request after FOIA request and then literally pasting text messages . . . that were exchanged between school board members. They sent them all out of order, so we spent 12 hours cutting and pasting them so we could build our timeline.”

And through it all, the paper's staff remained part of the community: “We shook hands with everyone who would throw darts at us,” Kreth said. “In the same editions where we ran those Title 9 stories, we still had school lunch menus, church news, obituaries, library news, city council coverage; we told people where to get their Covid vaccines, and we also reported on Decoration Day at local cemeteries. That’s what rural journalism is to us: the good, the bad, the ugly and every single thing in between.”

Board members who sought re-election “were soundly defeated at the polls,” Kreth said. “Sometimes democracy works to support journalism, right?” That line won applause from the crowd of 160, which also saw Chris and Allison Evans of The Crittenden Press in Marion, Ky., get the Al Smith Award for public service through community journalism by Kentuckians.

Southern Baptist Convention head says blind partisanship 'destroys everything,' criticizes Christian nationalism, Trump

Bart Barber, the newly elected president of the Southern Baptist Convention, is opposed to Christian nationalism, the leader of of America's largest evangelical institution told Anderson Cooper in an interview that aired Sunday on "60 Minutes." Barber was critical of the SBC's handling of a years-long sexual abuse scandal and Donald Trump, and said blind partisanship "destroys everything."

Bart Barber (60 Minutes)

About 60% of white evangelicals believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen, said Ryan Burge, a professor, pastor and data analyst on religion and politics. Barber, however, said he believes that President Joe Biden was legitimately elected. Prior to the 2016 election, Barber called Trump a "demonstrably evil man" and didn't vote for him. Barber did vote for Trump in the 2020 election, noting that he was encouraged by the former president's advocacy for sentencing reform and his consistent pro-life support. The pastor's opinion of Trump turned negative again after the president incited a mob to storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. 

"I, and I think a lotta Southern Baptists, would be thrilled to have the opportunity to support someone for leadership in our country who's strong on the values that matter to us, who can do that without putting the vice president's life in danger," Barber said. 

Barber was elected president of the SBC in June, just a month after an investigation revealed that the convention's prior leadership had for decades "ignored hundreds of credible accusations of sexual abuse in Southern Baptist churches and seminaries, partly to avoid being held financially liable," Cooper reports. Barber said that sort of behavior is what he's trying to work against, adding that at times the SBC did more than just ignore sexual abuse victims but sometimes "impugned their motives. Sometimes we attacked them." Barber said he's cooperating with a Justice Department investigation and appointed a sexual abuse task force that's building a registry of credible abuse reports to help churches track predators. 

"I have strong feelings about this," Barber said. "I'm -- it's not just anger. Although I'm angry about it. God called me to be a pastor when I was 11. I believe in this. For people to sully this hurts me. I'm not doing this to try to accomplish some PR objective for us.  I'm doing this because I wanna serve God well."

A relative moderate with rural roots is elected president of the Southern Baptist Convention, by a wide margin

Pastor Bart Barber (Baptist Press photo via Kentucky Today)

An exurban pastor with rural roots and a relatively moderate stance on issues facing the Southern Baptist Convention was elected president of the nation's largest Protestant denomination Tuesday night.

Bart Barber is pastor of First Baptist Church in Farmersville, Texas, population 3,612, an exurb of Dallas. He is from Lake City, Ark., pop. 2,326, just east of Jonesboro.

Barber, who strongly supported conclusions of the SBC's Sexual Abuse Task Force, was elected on the second ballot, defeating Pastor Tom Ascol of Grace Baptist Church in Cape Coral, Fla., by 61 to 39 percent. Barber got almost 48% on the first ballot. Other candidates were "former foreign missionary Robin Hadaway of Oceanside, Calif., and Pastor Frank Cox of North Metro Baptist Church near Atlanta, a last-minute entrant into the race," reports Frank Lockwood of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

"Ascol, favored by Baptists who want to move their denomination further to the right, had adopted the campaign theme 'change the direction.' Barber, on the other hand, urged fellow Baptists to set their differences aside and focus on the gospel, calling on 'an army of peacemakers' to help unify the 13.7 million-member body."

Lockwood gives Barber's Baptist bio: "Barber was 5 years old when he responded to the altar call at Bethabara Baptist Church, a small congregation on the east side of the St. Francis River, roughly four miles north of Lake City. He was 11 when he first felt the call to ministry, a call that was confirmed while attending summer church camp three years later. While still in high school, he was 'licensed to preach the Gospel' by First Baptist Church in Lake City. Barber preached his first sermon while in high school and soon was asked to serve as interim pastor at New Hope Baptist Church near Black Oak, according to [Traci] Smith, his sister. Barber went to Texas to attend Baylor University, preaching at a small country church on the weekends. He's been ministering ever since." For more bio, from Baptist Press, click here.

Southern Baptist Convention publishes full sex-abuse report, including a database of alleged abusers

In a bid for greater transparency, the Southern Baptist Conference's Sexual Abuse Task Force has published online an independent report detailing how its leaders protected pastors and local church staff accused of sexual abuse while ignoring, pressuring and trying to discredit sexual-abuse survivors.

The report includes the database of alleged abusers, along with links to news articles and other details. However, a note at the top cautions that the list is incomplete, has not been proofed or adequately researched, and is not always specific to Southern Baptists. Some names and other details have been censored, possibly to preserve the privacy of minors.

In a press release accompanying the report, the task force called on other Southern Baptists to heed the report's findings and care for abuse victims as well as "provide a culture of accountability, transparency, and safety as we move forward."

The task force called for specific reforms:

• The next SBC president should create a task force to ensure reforms are implemented.
• The Executive Committee should hire experts to work with victims and train state conventions on how to respond to abuse allegations.
• All SBC boards and committees should undergo background checks as part of the selection process, and should and receive training on sexual abuse prevention and survivor care.
• All SBC-affiliated seminaries should teach staff and students about sexual abuse prevention and survivor care.
• The Executive Committee should budget for and hire a salaried staffer for the SBC's Credentials Committee, which assesses whether churches are operating within SBC standards of faith and practice.

Southern Baptists reeling in wake of sex abuse report; it's an opportunity for local action and local coverage

UPDATE: The Executive Committee apologized and its lawyer "said it is working on making the list of sex abusers available to the public once the committee makes sure the names of survivors are not disclosed and ensures the names of abusers are substantiated," The Washington Post reports.

Southern Baptists across the country are reeling in the wake of a new report detailing how Southern Baptist Convention leaders protected pastors and local church staff accused of sexual abuse while ignoring, pressuring and trying to discredit sexual-abuse survivors. It's a topic for local coverage.

Several pastors who spoke to the Times said they plan on using the report as an opportunity to open dialogue with congregants who may be scared, angry, and worried. Philip Meade, pastor of Graefenburg Baptist Church in Kentucky, told The New York Times he will devote part of Sunday's service to "a lament for the mishandling of sexual-abuse claims and for the survivors who have suffered so much." Griffin Gulledge, the pastor of Madison Baptist Church just outside of Atlanta, said it's imperative for him and others to address the scandal. "What all my pastor friends are hearing is we better get this right, and we better fix this."

"The report quickly proved to be another dividing line within the denomination, with some pastors and members seeing it as a call to action for deep cultural and structural changes on abuse, as well as a range of issues around politics and the treatment of women," the Times reports. "Critics say some pastors have focused more on fighting women in leadership and critical race theory than they have on rooting out abuse and the power structure that keeps it under wraps."

The report shows how SBC leaders used the denomination's decentralization to avoid accountability; an alleged abuser could simply pull up stakes and move elsewhere to preach, secure in the knowledge that Baptist leaders couldn't or wouldn't sound the alarm to local churches, which are autonomous and choose their own pastors.

Todd Gray, executive director of the Kentucky Baptist Convention, told his constituents in a letter today that when he read the report, "The Lord led me to pray for sexual-abuse survivors in a way I never had before." Gray noted that in November, the convention established a Sexual Abuse Task Force that was designed to be preventive "rather than investigatory," but Guidepost Solutions, which wrote the SBC report, "has requested many of our internal policies and will help us discover if there are gaps where we can better guard against sexual abuse."

New report has shocking details about cover-ups of sex-abuse cases by leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention

Southern Baptist Convention leaders routinely ignored, pressured, and/or discredited people who said they had been sexually abused by pastors and other church staff since 2000, according to a third-party investigation released Sunday. "The report also names several senior SBC leaders who protected and even supported alleged abusers, including three past presidents of the convention, a former vice president and the former head of the SBC’s administrative arm," reports The Washington Post's Sarah Pulliam Bailey, who has chronicled the scandal in depth.

The nearly 300-page report, compiled by Guidepost Solutions at SBC's request, includes "shocking new details about specific abuse cases and shine a light on how denominational leaders for decades actively resisted calls for abuse prevention and reform. Evidence in the report suggests leaders also lied to Southern Baptists over whether they could maintain a database of offenders to prevent more abuse when top leaders were secretly keeping a private list for years," Bailey writes. "The report — the first investigation of its kind in a massive Protestant denomination like the SBC — is expected to send shock waves throughout a conservative Christian community that has had intense internal battles over how to handle sex abuse."

The investigation roiled SBC even before it was published. Leadership approved the investigation after an explosive 2019 Houston Chronicle investigation that detailed hundreds of sexual abuse reports. Many in the denomination's Executive Committee, including SBC President Ed Litton, supported waiving attorney-client privilege so investigators could have on-record conversations with leadership about what they knew. But the committee's acting CEO, Ronnie Floyd, resigned in October, saying that waiving attorney-client privilege would expose them to lawsuits that could bankrupt the SBC. 

"Sex-abuse survivors, many of whom have been sharing their stories for years, anticipated Sunday’s release would confirm the facts around many of the stories they have already shared, but many were still surprised to see the pattern of coverups by the highest levels of leadership," Bailey reports.

Executive Committee leaders "knew the scope of the problem. But, working closely with their lawyers, they maligned the people who wanted to do something about abuse and repeatedly rejected pleas for help and reform," Kate Shellnutt reports for Christianity Today.

Christianity Today's Russell Moore, who resigned last year as president of the SBC's public-policy office, had long called for more accountability amid what he described as a culture of ignoring and mishandling sex abuse claims. But what the investigation uncovered was even worse than what he had imagined, and throws into sharp relief a denomination with badly misplaced priorities, he writes: "Who cannot now see the rot in a culture that mobilizes to exile churches that call a woman on staff a 'pastor' or that invite a woman to speak from the pulpit on Mother’s Day, but dismisses rape and molestation as 'distractions' and efforts to address them as violations of cherished church autonomy? In sectors of today’s SBC, women wearing leggings is a social media crisis; dealing with rape in the church is a distraction."

One of the worst results of the investigation, Moore writes, is that it has made clear that SBC leadership took advantage of innocent supporters. Most of the people in the pews believed the Bible and wanted to support the leaders who did also. They didn’t know that some would use the truth of the Bible to prop up a lie about themselves," Moore writes. "We were told they wanted to conserve the old time religion. What they wanted was to conquer their enemies and to make stained-glass windows honoring themselves—no matter who was hurt along the way."

Arizona student journalism package recounts the history of child sexual abuse in Native American communities

Journalism students at the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication have produced an outstanding multimedia package on child sexual abuse in Native American communities. "Little Victims Everywhere" also explores where the federal government, which is responsible for investigating such cases, has not been held accountable for its track record since it wasn't required to publicly disclose the disposition of such cases until about a decade ago. 

The stage-setter of the package explains how widespread the problem of child sexual abuse is in many North American indigenous communities. "Some experts estimate it could impact as many as half of all children," it reports. The second chapter recounts how many cases fall through the cracks of the justice system. The third shows how tribal courts and police have limited authority and resources to sufficiently investigate cases and hold abusers accountable. The fourth shows how some Native Americans are trying to find their own ways of bringing healing and justice to their communities. The final chapter steps back for a longer view, discussing how intergenerational trauma dating back to the colonization of North America has contributed to the problem of sexual abuse in Indian Country.

Pastor known for racial reconciliation work is narrowly elected president of the Southern Baptist Convention

Ed Litton speaks at a Southern Baptist Convention luncheon.
(Washington Post photo by William DeShazer)

The Southern Baptist Convention elected the Rev. Ed Litton as its president Tuesday, signaling a defeat for the "hard right" in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, Sarah Pulliam Bailey reports for The Washington Post.

Litton narrowly defeated Georgia pastor Mike Stone, the favored candidate of the right wing, with 52 percent of the vote in a runoff election at the group's annual meeting in Nashville. 

"For the past few years, the convention has been mired in debates over racism, politics and sexual misconduct that mirror many of the same debates in the Republican Party," Bailey writes. "In recent weeks, as leaked letters and backroom deals dominated conversations among Southern Baptists, Litton, pastor of First Baptist Church North Mobile in Alabama, pitched himself as someone who would lead the convention toward more racial reconciliation. Fred Luter, the first and only Black pastor to serve as president of the SBC, nominated Litton for the position."

Critical race theory, a framework for examining structural racism, was a hot topic at the meeting. "Opposition to CRT among SBC leaders led to an exodus of Black pastors over the past year and some feared more would leave if the convention had voted to condemn it," Bailey notes. SBC considered several proposed resolutions concerning the notion, but ultimately adopted a resolution that condemned racism but didn't address CRT specifically.

Ed Stetzer, who once led the SBC's research arm, LifeWay Research, said there was some concern before the meeting that more conservative members would push back against recent SBC efforts to advance racial reconciliation. But "the crowd was younger and more diverse than most expected, and that crowd carried the day," he told Bailey.

Southern Baptists gather as race, gender issues and politics tribulate their convention and other evangelical churches

Revs. Ronnie Floyd and Dwight McKissic in 2014
after Floyd was elected president of the Southern
Baptist Convention. (AP photo by Steve Ruark)

The Southern Baptist Convention, which was created because of race and slavery 15 years before the Civil War, is arguing about race, sex and other touchy social issues as it prepares to convene Tuesday in Nashville. And it reflects simmering political conflicts in much of American evangelicalism.

With talk of critical race theory, "demands for political loyalty" and "a fight between conservatives and ultraconservatives, it sounds like current debates within the Republican Party," writes Sarah Pulliam Bailey of The Washington Post. The meeting will shape the future of the 14-million-member denomination, and will be "probably the largest religious gathering since the pandemic, as well as the biggest Baptist meeting in decades," with 16,000 attendees expected.

"What is especially unusual about the meeting is infighting at the highest levels of leadership that has become public in recent weeks," Bailey reports. "New details released to news-media outlets have shined a light on the backroom dealings of several of its high-profile leaders." Russell Moore, who ran the SBC's public-policy office, "recently left his position and his church for a new position at Christianity Today magazine. On his way out, two letters he sent to SBC leadership were leaked to media, in which Moore described a culture of racism and mishandling of sexual-abuse claims."

The current flash point is critical race theory, the concept that racism is a product of society, not only individuals, and is often embedded in societal institutions. "Prominent members of the SBC, including Albert Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, the denomination’s oldest academic institution, have demonized C.R.T., calling it, among other things, Marxist and anti-Biblical. Mohler, of Louisville, and south Georgia pastor Mike Stone, who has called CRT a “weapon of division,” are running for SBC president. The other candidate is Ed Litton, "a soft-spoken pastor who has been involved in racial-reconciliation efforts in Mobile, and who believes that the fight over CRT has become a way to avoid talking about the need for structural change" in the convention, Eliza Griswold reports for The New Yorker magazine.

If Litton doesn't win, that is expected to accelerate the departure of Black pastors and congregations, Griswold reports. Her object example is the Rev. Dwight McKissic of Arlington, Texas, who got SBC help to start his church 38 years ago but isn't going to the convention: "Until recently, much of the racism that he’d encountered in the SBC was 'passive,' McKissic said. But after the election of Donald Trump, in 2016, he felt that the racist rhetoric became more overt. McKissic was also unsettled by what he saw as a growing antipathy toward allowing women to serve in leadership roles in the church."

The long-simmering gender conflict in the denomination, which limits the roles of women, was highlighted this spring when "Beth Moore, a hugely popular speaker and author, stepped away from the SBC because of what she saw as its continued racism and sexism," Griswold notes.

Bailey notes that the convention, like most evangelical groups, is less of a denomination than most denominations: "The SBC prides itself in the 'autonomy' of individual churches, which operate independently but contribute to multi-million-dollar budgets for missions, seminaries and other collective efforts" of the convention. "The transactional nature of the denomination allows pastors and lay members to financially benefit from things such as pastors’ health insurance and reduced tuition rates at its schools. What matters at the convention is that individual members come forward and vote collectively to find a unifying voice on different matters and to vote for its next president."

The tribulations of the SBC reflect those in other evangelical groups and society, Baptist professors told Griswold. Karen Swallow Prior, a professor at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C., said she sees an “evangelical reckoning . . . These tensions reflect an emerging schism in what it means to be an evangelical. Theological conservatives are reclaiming the moral authority of following Jesus without blindly following the old battle lines of the culture wars.”

Keith Whitfield, a theology professor at Southeastern, told Griswold, “We’ve understood since 1995 that we have to open the doors for other people to come in if we’re going to remain viable for the future—if not, the effectiveness of our gospel witness will be compromised. . . . The SBC is a mirror for what’s happening in American evangelicalism, and the culture writ large.”

Ed Stetzer, a Southern Baptist who runs the Wheaton College Billy Graham Center, told Griswold that churches have become increasingly politicized: “People are now sorting themselves into churches that align more with their political ideology than their theology They want the sermons they hear on Sundays to align with what they hear on cable news all week.”

New debut novel a mystical, moving tale about surviving childhood sexual abuse and poverty in Appalachia

Every Bone a Prayer, a debut novel from Kentucky author Ashley Blooms details a young girl's journey to survive—and understand—sexual abuse and poverty in a tale that's part Southern Gothic and part magical realism.

"In this novel, poverty weaves through community; ownership — of property, of personal space, of land — is intrinsically tied to the bonds and boundaries of family. Layers of things unsaid are wrapped around shame, faith, and the natural world in ways that are often very close and difficult to bear," Fran Wilde writes for NPR. "Novels like Every Bone A Prayer are important specifically because they give a lyrical voice, agency, and a resonating mythos to those fighting to reclaim their names, and selves."

The novel is worth the journey, but packs an emotional punch, Wilde writes: "This book hurts. The detailed author's note in the frontmatter only reinforces the fact that Every Bone a Prayer is a difficult, important, and beautifully rendered story of generational trauma, survival, and healing. The characters I met within its pages have stayed with me, their names and stories etched on my memory."

Human trafficking is on the rise, and rural health-care providers are uniquely positioned to identify victims

Human trafficking may sound like a faraway problem to many, but it happens in rural areas, and rural health-care providers must be alert to it. That's because up to 88 percent of trafficking survivors said they interacted with health-care providers while they were trafficked, Jenn Lukens reports for the Rural Health Information Hub's Rural Monitor.

Human trafficking involves force, fraud or coercion to obtain labor or commercial sex acts, and it's on the rise. According to the federally funded nonprofit Polaris, which maintains a hotline and one of the largest data sets on human trafficking in the U.S., "Human trafficking has continued to rise, from 7,748 confirmed cases reported to the hotline in 2016 to 10,949 in 2018. Polaris’s demographic breakdown shows that nearly half of survivors are minors, there are five times more females trafficked than males, and minorities are more likely to be trafficked," Lukens reports. "It has been identified as a public-health concern by researchers, federal agents, and healthcare professionals alike."

Both sex trafficking and labor trafficking have been identified as problems in rural America, though sex trafficking is nearly eight times more common. There are no definitive statistics on the incidence of human trafficking in rural areas, but the secluded nature of many rural areas makes them attractive to traffickers, Lukens reports.

"While cinematic portrayals of human trafficking may resemble reality in some parts of the world, research has found that what is true in rural America can look much different," Lukens reports. "Those trafficked commonly have vulnerabilities, such as recent migration or relocation, single motherhood, recent contact with the child-welfare system, a substance dependency, homelessness, or mental-health conditions. Often, the victim already has a relationship with the perpetrator who has taken advantage of their trust and targeted their vulnerabilities to create dependency."

Rural health-care providers are uniquely positioned to identify human trafficking victims since health-care facilities are one of the few places trafficked people may be allowed to visit. Some states, hospital systems, and federal agencies have released guides or begun programs meant to help providers identify victims, like this one from the Nebraska Hospital Association. Lukens' article has a list of resources.

White House task force finds Indian Health Service needs big changes to better protect sexually abused children

"A White House task force called for broad changes at the U.S. Indian Health Service to protect children from abuse at the agency’s facilities, saying officials must redo earlier, insufficient attempts at fixes," Christopher Weaver reports for the PBS program "Frontline." "The task force was formed in spring 2019, after a joint investigation by The Wall Street Journal and "Frontline" revealed the agency had mishandled a pediatrician who sexually abused his patients on Native American reservations over the course of two decades."

The task force's report, released last week, confirmed many of the same conclusions and called for a wide range of changes to the agency that oversees health care for 2.6 million Native Americans. "It says the agency should reform the ways it recruits, vets and pays its medical providers. And it calls for the agency to replace child-protection policies and a staff training program it announced just last year in the wake of the Journal-Frontline reports," Weaver reports. The task force also "recommended the IHS standardize sex-abuse reporting policies across its entire network of hospitals and clinics, arrange yearly training conducted by federal law enforcement authorities on sex abuse for all employees, and centralize its efforts to screen new providers for problem backgrounds, an activity the IHS now allows local managers to conduct, among other things."

New memoir recounts how Appalachian author broke a generational cycle of abuse

A new memoir, In the Shadow of the Valley (Little A, $24.95), examines what it was like to deal with physical and mental abuse, as well as severe substance abuse, in Appalachian rural Kentucky in the 1980s. Bobi Conn, a debut author, interrogates her own assumptions and attitudes growing up, and narrates how she was able to escape the cycle of abuse and process her haunting past in a book Amazon named a "Best Book of the Month" in the Biographies and Memoirs category.

Conn wrote in the memoir that she rewrote the story many times over the years, and each time saw it more clearly: "With each revision, I understood that although many people had quieted me, even whipped me into silence, I still had words they could not take away from me."

"At times, the narrative is fragmented and disconnected, perhaps due to Conn’s struggle to make sense of it all, but the author is to be commended for her courage and determination to change her life circumstances," according to Kirkus Reviews, which called the book "an inspiration for those attempting to come to terms with abuse."

Appalachian novelist Elizabeth Chiles Shelburne writes: “From the first sentence, I smiled in recognition of a natural storyteller, one 'born and bound to this land,' who is a keen observer and a loving inhabitant of the land of which she writes. This book is a wonder—a dark, tragic Appalachian ballad come to full, lush life."

Series about the sexual assault crisis in rural Alaska up for annual Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting

A newspaper series about the sexual assault crisis in rural Alaska is one of six finalists for the annual Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, awarded by Harvard University's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy.

The Anchorage Daily News partnered with ProPublica's Local Reporting Network to produce "Lawless," a series that uncovered a sexual-assault crisis in rural Alaska and how the lack of public-safety services makes it worse. After the series ran, Attorney General William Barr declared the lack of law enforcement in rural Alaska a federal emergency, and his Department of Justice promised more than $52 million to improve the situation. The U.S. attorney in Anchorage announced the hiring of more rural prosecutors, and Gov. Mike Dunleavy said the state will hire 15 more state troopers.

Daily News reporter Kyle Hopkins pursued the story after he discovered that more than 70 rural towns didn't have local law enforcement, and that the state hadn't enforced village police hiring standards. In some towns, convicted criminals, including sex offenders, had been hired as police officers, Clark Merrefield reports for Journalist's Resource.

The series also recently won a Scripps Howard Award in the Community Journalism category. The Goldsmith Prize winner receives $25,000, and the other five finalists receive $10,000. The prize is funded by the Greenfield Foundation. The winner was meant to be announced Thursday, but the awards ceremony was canceled because of coronavirus precautions. The winner will be announced soon online, according to the Goldsmith Awards website.

Database tracks Catholic priests accused of abuse; some names may not appear in your local diocese's list

When Catholic priests sexually abuse parishioners, too often the church transfers them to another diocese instead of defrocking them, and their crimes are rarely publicized. That can endanger the priests' new flock. So, ProPublica has created the first central, searchable database of 6,000-plus priests who have been credibly accused of sexual abuse or misconduct, Lexi Churchill reports.

In 2018, a grand jury report in Pennsylvania named a lot of names, and prompted at least 178 Catholic community leaders across the nation to publish their own lists. ProPublica spent more than a year cataloguing those lists, resulting in a database with over 6,600 names, Churchill reports.

There was no central standard for who and what should be included in those lists, which led to incomplete and inconsistent reports that sometimes lack important details. "Several categories of clergy members are frequently left off lists. At least three dozen lists exclude members of religious order who were accused within their jurisdiction," Churchill reports. "Similarly, your diocese may leave off extern priests, who came to serve from another diocese or country, and priests who died before accusations were reported."

If your local diocese hasn't released a list, you can search state, city or nearby parishes and see if there is any overlap. You can also conduct your own public records searches for lawsuits against local Catholic churches and look into other resources. "BishopAccountability.org gathers information from a wide range of sources beyond official lists. It can be a useful resource as you try to figure out who may be on an unreleased list," Churchill writes.

Reporters can also pressure local church leaders on whether and when they plan to release a list. Of the 41 dioceses that haven't published a list, many have said they plan to publish one soon, but many have gone long past their initial deadlines. If your diocese has released a list, it may still be missing names, so keep digging, Churchill advises.

Wisconsin may join states that teach commercial truck drivers how to keep an eye out for human trafficking

A bill in the Wisconsin state Senate would give more long-haul truck drivers the tools to help fight human trafficking. A similar bill was introduced in 2017 but stalled in the Senate.

"At least eight other states have enacted similar policies, which one group says has led to a dramatic uptick in the number of trafficking reports from truckers—from sporadic calls to the National Human Trafficking Hotline to more than 2,300 reports and counting," Katie Queram reports for Route Fifty. "Those calls opened 635 cases of sex trafficking involving 1,186 victims, according to the nonprofit organizationTruckers Against Trafficking."

In Wisconsin, "Senate Bill 25, introduced in February and recently approved by a committee, would require commercial motor vehicle driver education classes include information on how to recognize and prevent human trafficking," Queram reports. "Proponents said the measure makes sense because human trafficking regularly occurs along highways and at truck stops and rest areas, places populated primarily—and sometimes only—by truck drivers."

Many private truck-driving schools already warn drivers to be on the lookout for human trafficking, but students at state technical colleges may not get that training, according to Dan Johnson, vice president of the Wisconsin Motor Carriers Association. Johnson testified in favor of the bill in March, telling lawmakers, "Education is the key to [fixing] this problem."

Wisconsin's more than 312,000 licensed commercial drivers are in a unique position to keep an eye out for human trafficking, according to Sen. LaTonya Johnson, a Milwaukee Democrat who is the bill's main sponsor. "This is a huge network of eyes and ears within the interstate trade industry that can support law enforcement in the investigation, arrest, and prosecution of traffickers," she said in a recent public hearing.