"Abuse of Faith"

Houston Chronicle/San Antonio Express-News
04/29/2020

In the spring of 2018, reporter Robert Downen came to his editor with a story proposal. He had been assigned to look into a lawsuit that accused a prominent former leader of the Southern Baptist Convention of sexual abuse. But on his own, he had dug a little deeper. It looked as if there were hundreds of such cases around the country, incidents that had made news one at a time, but that pulled together with new details might add up to something much bigger. There were. And they did. Rob went to work, and during the next couple of months, we added two veteran investigative reporters to the team: Lise Olsen of the Chronicle and John Tedesco of the San Antonio Express-News, our sister paper. John has since joined the Chronicle staff. Our team eventually grew to more than a dozen dedicated journalists: photojournalist Jon Shapley, a data editor, digital specialists, designers, a graphic artist and editors in San Antonio.

The results were startling. In February 2019, we published “Abuse of Faith,” a three-part series revealing that 380 Southern Baptist church pastors and volunteers had faced credible allegations of sexual misconduct during the past 20 years. They left behind more than 700 victims. We built a database that has grown to include more than 260 convicted offenders who worked or volunteered in Southern Baptist churches – the exact sort of public tool that victims and advocates had asked Baptist leaders to provide a decade before.

The response was swift, and at times overwhelming. The story was picked up by multiple national publications and networks, along with local news organizations that did their own stories sourced by our database. It has attracted more than 1 million visitors. More importantly, leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention, who had long rejected victims’ demands for action, finally had no choice. The SBC president immediately called for a shift in the culture for the country’s second-largest faith group and warned against viewing the stories as an attack from secular media.

Since then, the SBC overhauled its national conference to focus on the newspapers’ findings, and thousands of delegates approved reforms that made it easier to oust offending churches and more difficult to shield abusers from accountability. The Texas Legislature changed state law to allow nonprofits and churches to share information about sex abuse allegations against former employees without opening the door to lawsuits. But our work continues, spurred by the responses of more than 350 people who wrote to us after “Abuse of Faith” was published, many of them victims of sexual abuse. With their help, we published a follow-up story in June.

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Submitted by Elizabeth Pudwill.