The Southern Baptist's go #MeToo

Well hey everyone, once again, welcome to Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris. I wanted to read an article to you that I thought was just really good about the Southern Baptists, and it's called the Southern Baptist Me Too Moment by Megan Basham at The Daily Wire.

And the article is, it does have some original reporting, but it really, it pokes a hole in the narrative that was just voted on yesterday by the convention, and I think puts things in perspective fairly well.

The Southern Baptist Abuse Narrative and the Guidepost Report

So we're going to talk about this. I'm going to talk a little bit about the Tom and Jennifer Buck situation with Southeastern, and just explain that to the best of my ability. But let's read this. It says, in a recent op-ed for the UK Sunday Times, Douglas Murray observed that the wheels are coming off the Me Too movement because of conflating unmistakable instances of abuse with messy adult entanglements.

And she says that's basically what's happening with the Southern Baptist convention. And so it continues, SBC leader Russell Moore calls the investigation that Guide posted an apocalypse, and David French called it a horror.

Proof the denomination does not merely contain some bad apples, but is in fact a disease orchard. While purple prose has been flowing freely in regards to the SBC, little of it has bothered to detail what the apocalypse looks like in hard statistical terms.

And this is where the wheels start coming off. That's likely because according to the recent release report generating all the coverage, a total of 409 accused abusers were found over the course of 21 years in approximately 47 ,000 SBC churches.

Lyman Stone, demographer at the Institute of Family Studies, tells me the actual data contained in the abuse report, the result of an eight-month investigation by Guidepost Solutions, does not come close to meriting the hyperbolic terms that are peppering coverage in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and CNN.

Statistically speaking, he said, there were not that many cases. This is not actually that common of a problem in this church body. Stone goes on to estimate that there are about 100 ,000 to 150 ,000 staffers in SBC churches, but many thousands more volunteers in these ministries.

Of all the allegations that Guidepost investigators reviewed, they found only two at present that involve apparent SBC workers. If you wanted to argue that based on this report, executives of the SBC mismanaged the cases that were brought to them, then Fine Stone says, but if you want to say this shows that the SBC is corrupt, hypocritical, and rightful with sexual abuse, the report doesn't demonstrate that.

Stone adds that he was shocked that the Guidepost investigators only found two current cases, given how many exist in the general population. If I had been betting beforehand, I would have bet for a couple hundred, he says, because if you're talking about 100 ,000 to 150 ,000 people who are disproportionately men, just your baseline rate of sex offenders tells you you should have gotten a couple thousand sex offenders in there just by random chance.

He concludes that while the report may show the need for reforms in response to allegations, it does not show an endemic problem of sexual abuse, adding it's important to distinguish these. So he's starting off, and I made this point before too, but this is obviously making the point better with numbers, that this is not a systemic thing.

This is something that happens because it's a large group of people, but it's not like this is something that characterizes or is fundamental to the convention. And so it's just like the whole accusations of racism, this is the same thing.

Corroboration. Victim advocates like attorney Rachel Denhollander have argued that misconduct within the SBC isn't just a question of numbers, they also take issue with the executive committee's resistance to creating a public database of the credibly accused, assembled by third-party trauma-informed investigators like Guidepost.

Jennifer Lyle, David Sills, and the Question of Corroboration

But a deep dive into how Guidepost handled the most prominent allegations of abuse should set off alarm bells. And this is a story that, this is interesting because I've heard about this story now for years and it's been used as one of the big examples of sexual abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention.

And this is the story. The story of Jennifer Lyle is, in 2004, she was a 26-year-old master of divinity student when she met cultural anthropology professor David Sills, who was 23 years her senior.

And that was on a campus of the campus of Southeast, or no, sorry, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Shortly after she became close with the entire Sills family, including David's wife, she alleges that it was on a missions trip with Sills and his daughter that Sills first sexually acted against her.

That incident, she says, began a pattern of sexual abuse that lasted 12 years until she was 38, continuing even as she moved to Chicago in 2006 and later Nashville to further her career as a publishing executive.

During that time that Lyle was a publishing executive, she often worked with Sills, contracting with him for books and articles and arguably holding more power over his career than he did over hers. In essence, Lyle was claiming that Sills was able to continue committing acts of sex abuse against her even if she left the state because she would return to visit the family.

Now the allegation here, the Me Too allegation, is because there was a power disparity that constitutes abuse. That that's all the proof you need. You really don't need anything else. So the possibility of it being consensual is kind of irrelevant in the Me Too thinking, but they kind of just assumed, Al Mohler really, just assumed and labeled this abuse.

In 2018, at the height of the Me Too movement and two years after her contact with Sills had ended, Lyle told her boss at Lifeway about the relationship and there was arranged meeting with Albert Mohler.

Sills' employment was terminated, a year then passed before Lyle provided her account to Baptist Press. As the house media organ of the SBC, this Baptist Press presented Lyle's account in March 2019 and it did not contain any concrete description of violent behavior.

They had doubts about framing it as she wanted in part because they feared Sills might sue. They asked Baptist Press editors to replace the word abuse with morally inappropriate relationship, though the story retained a quote wherein Lyle accuses Sills of grooming and taking advantage of her.

And that was changed before going into print. Once the story was published, commenters on the Facebook page criticized the fact that Sills had lost his job while Lyle had not, prompting her to demand Baptist Press restore the term abuse.

Months of sporadic back and forth communication followed in which committee members waited options for coming to terms with Lyle. Then in 2019, at a conference on sexual abuse, Rachel Denhollander recounted Lyle's story from the stage, identifying Sills by name and calling Lyle a survivor of horrific predatory abuse.

So, executive committee sources who agreed to speak with me anonymously say that the SBC's insurance agency did not want to settle with Lyle, believing she did not have a strong case, but already facing bad press over Denhollander's conference comments, committee members feared further fallout from dragging the issue out.

In May 2020, the same sources say the committee paid Lyle just over $1 million, thinking that would be the end of the matter, and it wasn't. GuidePost issued its report on May 22nd. Lyle was by far the foremost accuser in it.

Again and again in the 35 plus page feature, her version was corroborated. What that would mean in a police investigation is that witnesses offered other evidence against Sills. What it appears to have meant to GuidePost is that Lyle told her story to two people, Geiger and Muller, and both men said they believed it.

The report does briefly mention testimony from unnamed employees at Sills' missions agency and his former pastor, but both GuidePost and the task force refused numerous requests to provide me with the agency staffer's specific comments.

GuidePost defends its choice to refer to Sills as an abuser rather than an alleged abuser. There is no record of Sills or Lyle. Lyle has never publicly disclosed specifics about her allegations. Rachel Denhollander argued on Russell Moore's podcast that asking for a significant high level of detail about accusations represents a voyeuristic engagement with sexual abuse.

Yes, that's right. So you shouldn't have to have the details. But there's skepticism when you start looking into Lyle's claims. If Lyle had multiple pastors and seminary administrators willing to tell GuidePost investigators they believed her version of events, David Sills, too, has associates in the SBC and ministry circles willing to say the same about him.

His former colleague, Old Testament Professor Russell Fuller, was not especially friendly with Sills, but he recalls thinking before Lyle's accusations came to light that their relationship appeared both intimate and consensual.

I remember seeing the two of them eating and laughing with their heads very close together in the lunchroom at Southern Seminary, Fuller says. They were so public you almost thought, well, guilty people wouldn't be that way in public.

They would be more careful. I spoke to three men in ministry who have known Sills for decades, all told me that they could never conceive of him behaving violently and chided him for being passive. She talked to Pastor Thomas Winn, who had been friends with the Sills family for 40 years, and Lyle's claims that Sills threatened to shoot both her and Moeller with a gun.

He burst out laughing, though, at that. He said, wow, that's just totally bizarre. He says, that just totally shocks me. I could never imagine David doing something like that. Tom Nettles, who worked with Sills at Southern Seminary, has also known him on a personal level for 30 years, feels the same.

So basically, the people that knew Sills the best are all saying this doesn't match who he is. Unlike other friends, missionary Mike Boyette first learned the details of the history with Lyle, not from the newspaper or a faculty meeting, but when the two men grabbed coffee together after the Sills family moved back to Mississippi.

He was like a whipped dog, Boyette says of Sills' demeanor, but he was quick to tell me very vaguely about the incident, why he wasn't teaching anymore, and I didn't press anything. There's also hard evidence that Lyle's initial account may not have been entirely truthful or that she misspoke about some details.

A sentence in the contentious Baptist Press article reads, Lyle told Baptist Press she has attempted to contact the Louisville Metro Police Department Spectrum Victims Unit. In a 2021 video obtained by the Daily Wire, she repeats this claim and adds that Moeller was so concerned Sills might leave their confrontation and immediately drive to Nashville to hurt Lyle.

He too contacted the authorities to have them track his whereabouts. Except the Louisville Police Department tells me they have no records pertaining to Jennifer Lyle or David Sills. And Lieutenant Glenn Parkas, commander of the Sex Crimes Unit, could not find anything matching Lyle's description.

When I spoke to Lyle's, Megan Basham writes, she was not willing to provide details about her allegations on the record and believes there was a mistake regarding her reports to the police and that she reported Sills to the Jeffersontown Kentucky authorities.

However, their department too told me they were not able to locate anything on either Sills or Lyle. But whatever the truth of Lyle Sills' case, the point remains that most significant reason Guidepost investigators did not find any evidence to suggest Sills was not an abuser or simply because they didn't ask him.

Sills, who has declined all requests to speak to the media, relayed through an intermediary that, as far as he knows, Guidepost never tried to contact him. So you're seeing here that Guidepost, I mean, this is shoddy.

It's shoddy. That's even too light of a word to use. I don't know what word to use. It's embarrassing. But this just became common knowledge that in the SBC circles that this abuse happened and David Sills is an abuser.

This guy from Religion News Service, Bob Smietana, I think, incorrectly reported that Sills resigned in 2018 after admitting to abusing a former student. Well, that apparently didn't happen. He never admitted to it.

Conflict of Interest, Due Process, and Denhollander's Role

So, conflict of interest. In May of 2020, the Department of Education introduced new regulations to Title IX that prevent college campuses from depriving students, mostly men, who have been accused of sexual misconduct of due process.

One of the key provisions of those reforms is that investigations cannot be conducted by administrators who have any bias or conflict of interest. This was done in part to address the administrators who had approached investigations with the mindset that supporting victims was more important than pursuing truth.

Though Den Hollander is not a member of the SBC, she has played an outside role in how the denomination has approached abuse reforms. Three key motions led to the creation of a task force and set the parameters for investigating the executive committee.

Den Hollander helped craft all three. Megan Bastian talks about Pastor Grant Gaines, who was a co-sponsor to the motion. Remember last year he was with that girl Hannah Kate and he was making this motion while she was, I think, crying next to him, who was a co-sponsor of the motion to form the task force.

Told me, Den Hollander offered him advice on how to make sure the investigation would be thorough, including a requirement that the executive committee waive attorney-client privilege. It's interesting how much Den Hollander is behind so much of this stuff going on in the SBC.

It's like they all kind of take their cues from her. Once the task force was set up, Den Hollander was also appointed to advise it. Multiple sources speaking under the condition of anonymity tell me that not only was she instrumental in the decision to hire Guidepost, she was in regular communication with the company's CEO, Julia Wood, during the investigation.

Some legal experts told me Den Hollander's previous representation of Lyle against the executive committee made her later advisory role to the task force ethically questionable. And you can see why. North Carolina Superior Court Judge Philip Ginn said that it certainly raises red flags.

It goes against some basic sense of fairness. In some cases, attorneys are able to secure disclaimers to get around conflict of interest concerns, but he said if you want to get accurate and fair results, you certainly don't want either side tipping the scales.

So you have someone that can tip the scales being involved in this, influencing a report that she was intimately involved with. Den Hollander and Guidepost did not respond to a request for comment. And let's skip ahead here.

One-Sided Reporting and Political Factions in the SBC

The language in the report is one-sided according to Jenna Ellis. This is an extensive article. It brought up claims about victim Krista Brown that one executive committee member, I guess that's the word, chortled, and another turned his back on her in a disrespectful fashion without mentioning that committee members dispute her recollection.

Former SBC legal counsel Jim Gunther was at the meeting and he does not remember anything like what Brown is describing. So anyway, they're taking just the word of these alleged survivors and they're just going with it.

That's what Megan Bashan is reporting here. The only mentions in the report of Greer are positive. And so Den Hollander likes Greer and so that's interesting. Even though Greer hired Executive Pastor Brian Loritz, aware that Loritz had been accused of covering up sex crimes at a previous church.

So why isn't that in the report? Do you see how this is working so far? Den Hollander has suggested trauma-informed experts like those at Guidepost should be able to judge accusations within the SBC.

Wow. Based on a preponderance of evidence. Let's see. Many people within the national SBC leadership circles told me, Megan Bashan writes, on condition of anonymity that the subject of abuse has become a political football that various factions have been leveraging to settle bitter scores and sway the direction of the denomination.

So this is an interesting article to me because it just pokes a big hole. I mean, it's a cannonball-sized hole into that whole Guidepost report that everyone's getting up and arms about and she's saying we shouldn't just trust this thing.

So that's one of the things I wanted to show you. The other thing I wanted to talk about, and I don't think I have time to show you the videos, I'll just talk about it, is this whole thing with Tom Buck and Jennifer Buck.

The Southeastern Seminary Leak and the Tom Buck Controversy

I was watching the videos that Tom Buck put out on his Twitter feed and that Travis McNeely had uploaded to his YouTube. He uploaded Jennifer Buck's testimony. And the whole thing's sad. The whole thing's sad.

In fact, who was it? Janet Neffer did a whole article just really going through the different facts that are available in this now more complicated case. And the bottom line of it is this. You have Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, where I went, and they, so, without getting into everything that I already went over in Buckgate, I'm just going to briefly say, Karen Swallow Pryor was given a draft of an article that Jennifer Buck had written about abuse that happened previous to her marriage with Tom Buck, her husband, who is a prominent, more conservative-minded Southern Baptist pastor.

And they did not give permission to send the unedited draft, apparently, to anyone, but apparently it's floating around out there. And so, the question was, why is it floating around out there? And you had an outlet, SBC Voices, saying that they had it, and there was an article by this guy named David Bumgardner, that just, it exposed that this was out there and it shouldn't have been.

And so, they went back to Karen Swallow Pryor, basically, how is this out there? Why is this out there? And there was evidence of, especially, that was dropped from the guys at SBC Voices, that there was some kind of attachment Karen Swallow Pryor had to this, and she was asked by, apparently, an anonymous source, that Southeastern is specifically keeping anonymous, a couple of some kind, that she was asked, through her provost, Keith Whitfield, to corroborate and make sure the story, this unedited story was legitimate.

So, whoever it was, knew that Karen Swallow Pryor could authenticate it, or someone there at Southeastern, I guess, and Karen Swallow Pryor in particular, in that, Karen Swallow Pryor, of course, she's waffled on whether or not she sent it to more than one outlet.

She claims she didn't, but then she says she can't really remember, and then she claims, when she found out that the article, the unedited article was out there somewhere, that, and she said it's been out there for years, apparently, she didn't go to Jennifer Buck about it, because she was afraid of Tom Buck, and Keith Whitfield, the provost, claims, and these are through meetings that Tom Buck has recorded with Southeastern employees, including Whitfield and Danny Akin and Karen Swallow Pryor, Keith Whitfield claims Karen Swallow Pryor just said she didn't have an obligation to share that information with Jennifer Buck.

And so, this has created an interesting situation, in my opinion, where Southeastern is all, the employees, they're all up in arms about this report that I just read for you about, this, frankly, this is a report we shouldn't trust from Guidepost, and they want to do something about that, and, you know, I'm sure many of them voted to waive attorney-client privilege, or at least were in favor of it, and to commission the sexual abuse task force last year that hired Guidepost, and yet, they were, they're unwilling, Danny Akin's unwilling, to do the same kind of investigation at Southeastern.

They conducted their own internal investigation, and then basically absolved themselves of any intention to blackmail Tom Buck. But that was never really the issue. The issue was, where was the, who leaked the story?

Why is the story out there? Where did, why is it that a story that was just sent to Karen Swallow prior, this unedited draft, why was it, why is it out there in other places? How did that happen? How did that come about, and why was Jennifer Buck treated in this way, as, you know, you'd think she'd be treated like the other quote-unquote survivors that Guidepost talks about.

And yet, when Southeastern is on the ropes, people at Southeastern, it's a different story. And so, the hypocrisy is incredible, and you can go check that stuff out. Like I said, Travis McNeely's YouTube channel has Jennifer Buck's statement where, and it's emotional, she's talking about how she feels used, and just, she just feels that she was used to try to, people who are enemies of her husband tried to use her, her draft, and that she really just can't believe the way she's being treated by Southern Baptists.

And after the convention yesterday, I think it's probably becoming more believable for people, but this is just part of what's going on when it comes to this sexual abuse issue. There's hypocrisy, there's just an unwillingness to make certain entities look bad on certain people, there's protection for them, and for some odd reason, there's not the same level of, that protection that kicks in isn't there for others in the SBC who may be on the wrong political side or just are politically expedient.

And it's being used to transform the whole convention from one of the autonomy of a local church and due process to one of now we're going to take on liability that shouldn't belong to us, and we're going to police all this stuff, and we're going to spend an incredible amount of money to create a list and to implement perhaps more of the suggestions that Guidepost has given.

And so the whole thing, it just seems political. Is this really about quote-unquote survivors? It doesn't seem like it is. And it's just shameful what the Southern Baptist Convention has become. So I just want to share that with you.

I hope it's helpful to reinforce maybe what many of you have been thinking after what happened at the convention itself. But these are dark times for high levels of evangelical Christianity. And it's unfortunate because things could be a lot simpler.

If people were just honest, things would be so much more simple. And if we just stuck to the doctrine that the Southern Baptists just stuck to their own doctrine, but there's a desire to do something extra, something Me Too related.

But yet, obviously, when it comes to people that are important, when they're on the ropes, then all of a sudden there's hypocrisy that emerges. So anyway, I hope that helps. God bless. Bye now.