Message-ID:

BOFH excuse #349: Stray Alpha Particles from memory packaging caused Hard Memory Error on Server.

>Here's the cackling, Woke moron the Democrats now think should be
president
>(though she didn't win a single delegate in the primaries... so much for
>"preserving democracy").

Gays make rightists heads explode because Christian rightists like it in
the ass. Kiddy fucking is what right wing American Christians do.

The sexual abuse scandal rocking the Southern Baptist Convention, explained

America�s largest Protestant denomination covered up a sexual abuse problem
for decades.

by Emily St. James
Jun 7, 2022, 10:40 AM EDT
Train tracks beside a lit sign for the Community of Faith church.
The Southern Baptist Convention faces a massive sexual abuse scandal,
initially broken by the San Antonio Express-News and Houston Chronicle.
Community of Faith Church is based in Houston. | Loren Elliott/AFP via
Getty Images
Emily St. James
Emily St. James was a senior correspondent for Vox, covering American
identities. Before she joined Vox in 2014, she was the first TV editor of
the A.V. Club.

A new report summarizing an independent investigation into the history of
sexual abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) details decades of
gaslighting and cover-ups.

The SBC is a collection of loosely affiliated member churches, boasting
just under 15 million members. It has no firm, established hierarchy; it
doesn�t even have a central headquarters. In theory, individual churches
can preach or believe whatever they want, but the larger �convention� can
remove member churches that don�t toe certain lines. Representatives of
these churches meet each year at an annual event � also called a
convention. At the 2021 convention, member churches voted to conduct an
internal investigation of sexual abuse within the church.

Complaints about sexual abuse and sexual assault on the part of pastors
were sent to higher-ups who then kept those accusations quiet. Though the
report, by Guidepost Solutions, was only commissioned to study the cover-up
from the years 2000 on, it found incidents of sexual abuse and warnings of
the same going back to the 1960s. In all, Guidepost found accusations
leveled against people at all levels: church volunteers, staff, and
leadership, including those at the top of the church�s ladder. Those
accusations were made by people of different ages and genders, and they
include allegations of child sexual abuse, the grooming of adolescents, and
the sexual assault of adults.

These findings were not unprecedented. A major investigation by the Houston
Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News, published in 2019, first brought
many of the accusations against church leadership to light. The publication
of that report galvanized a grassroots drive by individual Southern Baptist
churches to hire a firm to conduct an investigation.

What the Guidepost report has shown is the sheer enormity of the problem,
beyond the already staggering scope the Houston and San Antonio newspapers
had revealed. Russell D. Moore, formerly the head of the SBC�s Ethics and
Religious Liberty Commission until he resigned both from that post and the
SBC entirely in 2021, called the report the �Southern Baptist apocalypse�
in a column for Christianity Today.

�It is horrifying. I expected to be the last person surprised by anything,�
Moore said of the report, �and there were sections that were stunning even
to me. It�s a horror, a sense of grief. It makes me contemplate the fact
that I don�t even know a thimbleful of what must be being experienced by
people who have survived these horrific acts of abuse in church settings.
That weighs heavily.�

�Whatever vindication there is here for us, it very much goes hand in hand
with grief,� said Christa Brown, the author of This Little Light: Beyond a
Baptist Preacher Predator and his Gang. �I know the stories that are behind
the names of these pastors [named in the report]. I know the people. I know
the decimation in their lives. I know the human cost of what it has taken
to get this truth out into the open.�

There�s a natural comparison point for these incidents: the scandal that
ensued when the Catholic Church�s cover-up of its knowledge of priests who
were child sexual abusers came to light, most prominently in a 2002 report
by the Spotlight team at the Boston Globe. In this situation, too, the work
of dogged newspaper journalists uncovered a scandal that the SBC was
finally forced to step up and acknowledge.

The path forward to actually effecting change within the SBC is fraught
with its own difficulties, however. Chief among them is the SBC�s structure
� or lack thereof. Where the Catholic Church boasted a rigid hierarchy for
parishioners and journalists to inveigh against in the name of justice, the
SBC is loose and almost structureless. That will make reforming it very
difficult indeed.

What�s more, the SBC�s theological underpinnings will make elevating the
voices of those accusing pastors of abuse difficult because it privileges
the voices of those pastors over those of their parishioners, especially
women parishioners. In short, once a charismatic man becomes the leader of
an SBC church, it can be very hard to punish him in a meaningful way.

Yet the SBC isn�t the only institution with a charismatic man problem.
Those institutions litter the entirety of American evangelicalism and
America itself.
Why the structure of the SBC poses unique challenges to reforming it

Let�s start with one thing that may not be immediately obvious: The SBC
publicly releasing both the Guidepost report and a list of accused abusers
that it kept secret for years is an unprecedented move for the
denomination. Moore sees some hope in the fact that the report exists at
all.

�Before the [Texas newspapers�] report, I would have to spend a lot of time
convincing congregations that this was a problem that could happen to
them,� he said. �There was often this sense of screening out predators by
vibe. People would often think, �Well, we know people [in our
congregation], so we know we don�t have any problems like that.� I noticed
a big shift in that after the Houston Chronicle report. This investigation
happened because grassroots Southern Baptists came to the convention last
year and demanded that it happen over and against much of their
leadership.�

The most obvious parallel to this scandal is the Catholic Church�s sexual
abuse scandal. However, where these two scandals differ lies in how
differently the Catholic Church and the SBC are structured.

The effectiveness of the Catholic Church�s response to its scandal is
highly debatable, but the church�s hierarchical structure (priests report
to bishops report to cardinals report to the pope) meant that parishioners
and the media had several pressure points they could push against in the
process of trying to understand what had happened. Abuse survivors could
also sue individual dioceses to receive financial restitution.

The SBC lacks a similar hierarchy. It doesn�t see itself as a formal
denomination but, rather, a loose association of churches that believe
similarly. This structure gives individual churches under its banner lots
of leeway to handle matters on their own. If your church�s pastor is
misbehaving, it�s not always clear whom to report him to, especially if you
don�t believe anyone in the church�s membership will do anything. But it�s
not as though the SBC was unaware of the abuse problems within its ranks,
despite its lack of traditional hierarchy.

�When it comes to addressing sexual abuse, up until now, they have claimed
that because of their church policy, they don�t have the authority to track
abusers and hold local churches accountable,� said Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a
professor of history at Calvin University and the author of Jesus and John
Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.
�But in the report we found that they had, in fact, been tracking abusers
in their churches and had been maintaining a private database for their own
protection. They had not in any way reached out and tried to prosecute
those abusers to keep people safe.�

In addition, while lawsuits can be brought against individual churches or
clergy members, the lack of anything like a diocese within the SBC means
that any lawsuits will necessarily target either the smallest units of the
organization or the organization as a whole. There isn�t really a good
middle ground. The convention does have an executive committee, which
possesses a fair amount of power to set the stage for what is considered
acceptable within the SBC, but very little fills the gap between that
executive committee and individual churches.

The difficulty of seeking legal restitution and the lack of a strong
hierarchy combine to explain why finding justice for survivors of sexual
abuse in many Protestant denominations could prove very tricky.

�It�s not just an SBC thing,� Joshua Pease, a pastor who has also worked as
a journalist covering sexual abuse in the evangelical church, said. �There
are multiple different denominations that have very loose affiliations or
very loose organizational structures. And then there are nondenominational
churches that genuinely have zero denominational structure to them, where
it literally is just one church, all on its own.�

Click here to read the complete article

Subject	Author
(OT) "Stay Woke" — the Cackling Moron	RonB
Re: (OT) "Stay Woke" — the Cackling Moron	CrudeSausage
Re: (OT) "Stay Woke" — the Cackling Moron	Leyland Reynolds

BOFH excuse #349: Stray Alpha Particles from memory packaging caused Hard Memory Error on Server.

comp / comp.os.linux.advocacy / (OT) "Stay Woke" — the Cackling Moron