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Aaron Renn's article: https://aaronrenn.substack.com
Welcome, everyone, once again to another edition of the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris, with two other guests today. We have Aaron Wren, who is the co-founder of American Reformer.
You can go to his website, AaronWren .com and find his writing there, which he didn't mention this, but I'll mention also his popular email publication is called The Masculinist, and it's really good stuff.
And then you have Alan Atchison. He's joining us as well, and he is the editor at Capstone Report. And Alan and Aaron have both been covering and following this story about the SBC's or the Guidepost's investigation into SBC sexual abuse allegations.
And so I want to welcome both you guys. Thank you so much for being willing to just help interpret this for everyone listening. Happy to be here. So I want to start with you, Aaron. You wrote a piece, and you can find it if you go.
In fact, I'll put the link in the info section if you go to AaronWren .com, but it's your substack. The title is The SBC's Title IX Recommendations on Handling Abuse. And I thought this was really perceptive, and it fits in with a number of other things I'm sure we'll discuss here.
But I just want to give you the floor here to kind of explain what your concern is about the recommendations, or at least one of them, in this Guidestone investigation, and what you think could potentially happen that would be bad for the Southern Baptist Convention.
Well, this report has around 30 pages of recommendations in them, and it's a lot of details in there. So I read through it, and the one thing that really jumped out at me immediately is we are talking about some of the most severe criminal acts that exist in America.
Sexual abuse, sexual assault, and yet the first thing I would think of when I think of that stuff is if you find out about it, call the cops. And yet the legal system, that is to say the criminal or the civil legal systems, really don't play much into their recommendations of how to address this at all.
There are some references to mandated reporting, which is a situation where people, say a school teacher or a doctor or people of that nature, are required to report suspected sexual abuse of a child or things like that.
There's legal obligations to report that to the police. But other than mandated reporting, there's really not a lot about the legal system, which I thought was really curious. And instead, what they basically propose to do is to create an administrative entity, I believe they call it, that would be functionally similar to these Title IX entities that exist on college campuses to adjudicate different allegations there.
So in the legal system, you have the right to confront your accuser, to compel testimony, to compel evidence production. There's due process. There's a standard of proof that has to be made. There's rights of appeal.
You have the right to counsel. It's all public. On and on, everything that we know about the legal system designed to protect the rights of the accused. And it's actually similar. That's in the criminal system.
And in the legal system, civil system, it's actually quite similar, except there's some variations around standards of proof and things of that nature. And we have these because sometimes the truth comes out.
It's not what we think. When we get everybody under oath, when all of a sudden people get a lot more serious when they're under oath or they're talking to a police officer. Just as we saw, for example, in the Johnny Depp Amber Heard civil case in which we got to hear her on tape, you know, admitting to hitting him and in which the jury found that she had in fact defamed him when she wrote her op-ed in the Washington Post.
So this is part of the bedrock systems of American jurisprudence. These Title IX type tribunals that they have in colleges, there's none of that. There's no safeguards. You don't get any of these procedural rights.
There's no real due process. You know, it's all done in secret. You may not be able to compel testimony, have an attorney, any of the stuff that you have. And so they've essentially become kind of kangaroo courts.
And this seems to be setting up a tribunal that's relatively similar to that. And really the heart of it is what is in effect a de facto privately run sex offender registry called the Offender Information System.
And the idea is we want to make it public, you know, all of the known offenders in the abuse realm. And really all it takes to get put on this list as a, you know, quote unquote known offender is what's called a credible accusation.
And a credible accusation is defined as anything that's not manifestly false or frivolous. So in essence, to be accused is to be guilty. Anybody who's basically accused could be put on this list as essentially a, you know, a known offender and essentially have, you know, their entire life in ministry destroyed.
So that's one part of it is essentially creating its own internal legal system and avoiding the courts. Let's not, you know, the criminal and civil systems that already are there to deal with these sorts of acts, set up their own Title IX like system.
And then the second half of it is taking the SBC's credentialing committee, which determines basically whether you're a member of good standing of the SBC. That's not the exact language that they they use and basically empowering them to essentially disfellowship or, you know, basically kick out churches that don't aren't with the program.
And the number one criteria for them to evaluate is whether or not you've complied with the decisions of this, you know, Title IX type panel in terms of, you know, not allowing anybody on their list to to be be a pastor.
And so this essentially I thought this was particularly interesting because it, you know, creates a little more of a not entirely let's let's not overstate the case, but it moves away from less of a Baptist style system or towards a Presbyterian style system where essentially the ministers are vetted by the denomination and the churches are much more subject to sort of denominational oversight that's there.
But I just really I thought it was notable that they seem to be allergic to both the criminal and civil courts. They want to create this Title IX style entity and process to adjudicate these things. Extremely low standards of due process and proof.
And again, you know, also affecting not just the ministers, but also the churches. And there's a lot more that they recommend in there, but that's really the core of it. There's also essentially a victim's compensation fund.
They want to create essentially a, you know, a survivor's Sunday on the church calendar. You know, there's a lot of things that are in there. You could look in more detail, but I think that's really the heart of it.
Now, this is the Guideposts report. I believe it was Guideposts that recommended it. So the actual sexual abuse task force of the SBC issued its own recommendations yesterday. And this does draw, I think, from the Guideposts report, although their standard of proof is actually higher than in the Guideposts report.
You can still be put on their list if you are credibly accused. But in order for an accusation to be considered credible, you have to have an outside party determine that it's more likely than not credible.
Not that it's more likely than not that you're guilty. That is more likely than not that the accusation is credible. And so this set of recommendations actually came out both after my piece and after a piece that was published at almost the exact same time by Matthew Schmitz in The Wall Street Journal, raising questions about this low standard of proof.
So I do believe it's eminently possible that the task force said, whoa, we got to do something here because this is certainly low standard of proof. But I would still say this falls far short of the kinds of due process that we should have, the evidentiary standards we should have, particularly when it involves basically hitting people with the scarlet letter, in effect, destroying their life and their ministry.
And it's in clear contravention of the scriptures, you know, around you cannot accept a charge against an elder except on two or three witnesses. I didn't even get into the Bible because I'm not a theologian, but that's like pretty plain English in the Bible there, as it were.
Yeah, you can you can quote it and you did just fine. And that was an excellent explanation, I think, for people who are trying to understand this and where it's going. Alan, I want to hear from you a little bit.
You know, I had Joni Hannigan and I had Wilma Craney on yesterday for the podcast. And one of the points that they were making essentially is that this whole investigation, but the whole emphasis, the me to emphasis has left out certain victims while really making a big deal about other victims and culprits.
And sometimes people who have been accused and it hasn't even been completely verified, but they're still going through the same motions as if they were guilty. And so you have Danny Aiken at Southeastern taking down everything that would represent or be connected to Paige Patterson or Joni Hunt.
And so there seems to be already, at least some think, a political agenda going on. If what Aaron just talked about were to come to fruition, do you think I think I know the answer, but but Alan, do you have reason to think that would also be a politically motivated tool that would be kind of arbitrarily used against certain people and not others?
Or could it be is that potential there?
Absolutely. And you know that there's that this entire thing is political when you look at one of the main instances here, which is you've got you've got the guidepost recommendation coming up and saying that you have to reserve a minimum number of seats on this new board for women.
I think for something like that, they want they recommended specifically women be put appointed to a certain number of seats. We are we hired a group to come in and do this report, who obviously buys the foundational assumptions of identity politics, their assumptions here.
They've made the decision that that's the way that it should go. And we know based on what was left out of the guidepost report through Joni's story, that it's highly politicized, that some people who have obviously done some things wrong were highlight or not highlighted in the report.
And then, of course, it seems almost in some ways protected. So I don't think we can trust anything that's kind of come out of that guidepost report. And I think then why would we trust a committee on credentials that would have tremendous authority over the Southern Baptist Convention?
And I think it clearly is heading us even further down the path toward hierarchy, which is something that has been completely repudiated by our foundational documents. And this has been something I warned about over the last couple of years.
We've seen legal filings by the North American Mission Board and the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission to both the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court, which have called the Southern Baptist Convention basically a hierarchical organization where the national body has jurisdiction over the other bodies.
In fact, the outcry was so bad, the ERLC had to repudiate its amicus filing to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. But this is definitely a power grab. And the question is, can you trust these people?
And as I go back right back to that point, these people are recommending that we go and preserve certain seats to certain people based on their identity, their status, women. And I think that shows just how far these assumptions for culture have seeped into the people that are recommending things to the SBC.
Now, there's been some talk, I don't know if we need to spend a lot of time on it, Alan, but there's been some talk about Guidestone and just, I guess, the company, if I'm not mistaken, did they have a stance on LGBT stuff that might contradict the beliefs of the SBC?
I remember reading something about that being an issue there that they didn't share SBC values, but yet they're the ones tasked with doing this investigation.
I think Tom Littleton did an extensive little dive into Guidepost and said that their PR firm puts on their website, they will not work with any group that's not LGBTQ affirming and promoting and all of that.
So Tom Littleton has something on his blog, 30 Pieces of Silver, that kind of examines that, provides the evidence. He had a conversation with the PR firm trying to do some background work. So, yeah, there's some things out there that suggest that these are not necessarily people who are going to share our values.
And then further down that type of thing, we know the Sex Abuse Task Force itself hired outside counsel when it was kind of talking about whether the executive committee should waive privilege. They hired outside counsel that was radically LGBTQ affirming.
That law firm, I can't remember the name now, but it was a national firm that was very radical on that. And then, of course, the SBC itself, since it ran off its Christian longtime counsel that was Southern Baptist, they hired a new firm, which is a national firm, which is, again, LGBTQ affirming, in some ways very radical.
So it's in many ways, we have an entire new way of doing business. And these are people that are influenced by LGBTQ stances.
Well, it's just it's interesting because it's that's the very issue, that realm, at least, of sexual ethics that you're having these entities advise on. And they don't even share, I mean, it's not even like it's close.
It's like in a different universe, the values that they have on sexual issues. And then the ethics of the SBC and biblical ethics, of course. Aaron, I want to ask you a question, kind of a broader philosophical question here.
If the law, if at the local level churches are failing to report predators to law enforcement, you know, they're failing at their task. Let's say also the local associations are failing. The entities are failing.
Some people think that it will go a lot better for the SBC if they just implement this new this new board that's supposed to advise the credentials committee. It seems silly to me a little bit just because you already have all these other options, especially the logical and obvious ones that are not being used.
But I want to hear from you. What why would that not be? Why wouldn't that at least help the situation? Someone might say, well, if we're failing on the local level, why not have a broader it's the same argument, actually, on the national political level?
Why don't why don't we take mental health and put it into the hands of the federal government, you know, along with education and everything else, if we're failing on the smaller levels there?
Well, I mean, look at our federal government's COVID response and other things. I think, you know, what we've seen is these, you know, centralized entities themselves have not crowned themselves in glory.
I do think in general, you know, in America, we have had leadership that has not been doing the job for our country. And, you know, unfortunately, that applies to religious leadership as well. And there are, you know, plenty of cases of abuse and not just abuse, all kinds of other things, all these churches and all these scandals of like big name people who are associated with all these blue chip brands, you know, guys like Joshua Harris repudiating his faith.
And you see this stuff and you're like, wow, this is not right. And the idea that you can essentially just kind of bureaucratize your way out of these problems, I think, is one that does not hold water in terms of, you know, history.
I mean, if you look at, you know, many of the traditional mainline denominations, they have tremendous amounts of centralized oversight and bureaucracies and layers and layers and layers of reviews. And, you know, it's even hard to really understand what's going on.
You look at some Presbyterian investigation, hundreds of pages on something like how could they possibly write hundreds of pages about this one little point? But they do. And it hasn't saved them. So I think if you just look at the other denominations and say, you know, look at what look at what they've done with this bureaucracy, it's not right.
You know, I think, you know, we have to find a way. If the idea is, well, you know, we found out about sexual abuse, but we didn't call the police. That's like a big problem, you know, and we just have to the answer is we have to get, you know, to all the answers.
But part of it is you got to start calling the cops, you know, and and you don't you don't fix the problem of not calling the cops by creating this title nine like, you know, entity. It's not like they're setting up a hotline that called this hotline and then that hotline will get in charge with the cops or the right authorities.
They're saying, no, call our hotline and we'll ingest you into our private bespoke process that is, you know, clearly similar to many of these entities in sectors that are 100 percent essentially progressive controlled.
Even if you wanted to do some centralized process, you know, as companies do like, you know, almost all big companies have some, you know, outside hotline that they run for like reporting whistleblower, like whistleblower numbers and things like that can blow the whistle.
They'll alert the board, they'll call the police, they'll do what they need to do. I mean, if somebody wants to create something that says, you know, call this number and we'll call the police for you.
I don't really have a problem with that, but the answer shouldn't be, you know, call this number and we'll bring you into our bespoke legal system that destroys people's lives based on accusations without any proof, without any due process, et cetera.
That doesn't seem like the answer to injustice.
Do you think that this is related to a broader thing going on in our culture with this the rise of managerial elite and thinking they have answers that us plebs don't have?
Well, if you look at, for example, our government, you know, a lot of people talk about the, you know, the so-called administrative state, the idea that today we are, in effect, governed by bureaucratic agencies and that the permanent civil service writes the rules often is, you know, they enforce the rules.
They often have their own courts, these administrative law courts, you know, the jurisprudence in the Supreme Court and that has been highly deferential to what these agencies do. The ability of the elected leaders, such as the president, to change policy is very limited because, you know, even if they put in new leaders of these, you know, cabin offices and things, you know, the people who are in them can simply declare themselves the resistance and many other things.
So in essence, you know, we have a scenario where our federal government, you know, is kind of on autopilot, many policies being made, you know, essentially by bureaucratic agencies, really beyond the political control of elected officials.
And so this is, you know, maybe broadly analogous to that as well. We're going to create this bureaucracy, just like we've seen in universities, a massive explosion in administrator-to-student ratio, administrator-to-faculty ratios.
You know, the faculty are not getting pampered in these universities. You know, they've switched to adjunct faculty, fewer tenure-track positions, et cetera. You know, tuition's going up. And yet the bureaucracy, like these Title IX bureaucracies, DEI bureaucracies, have exploded in size, lots of very high-paid positions.
And the same thing could very easily happen in religious entities like the Southern Baptist Convention, where you have the explosion of, you know, a bureaucracy that once it's established, you know, what does it do?
How do you control what it does? How do you how do you subject it to the oversight, you know, of the messengers or of whatever? You know, they kind of become their own, you know, their own force. And there's really also nothing stopping once you create this credentialing committee, for example, what's to stop it from simply deciding it's going to expand its own remit of who's credentialed and who's not based on their own desires, you know, that we've seen all throughout our government that the EPA decides, well, we can regulate carbon dioxide now, we can regulate this.
And so they just make these unilateral decisions to expand their jurisdiction and sort of dare you to stop them. And it becomes very difficult to do so. So we certainly have had administrative, bureaucratic, managerial bloat throughout our system, you know, we definitely see in the federal government, we can definitely see it in universities and, you know, wouldn't be surprised to see these patterns repeated and in all sorts of things.
I was reading this document and one of the things I'm like, this is something that it really could have been written for a corporation or any other kind of document. All of these things are clearly patterned on, again, the sorts of things you would expect to see in a traditional secular bureaucracy.
Yeah, it's actually stunningly similar, the pattern. And it seems like every organization, even if it's some voluntary association that has to do with hobbies or something, is going in the same consolidation direction.
Alan, I wanted to ask you about what practically can be done here, because as I was listening to Aaron, I was just thinking we don't live in a perfect world. There is no perfect solution this side of heaven for some things.
We do our best. God's given the sword to the government. We call the police when there's a problem. That's their job to handle predators like this. But things do fall through the cracks. Sometimes the police aren't called.
Sometimes the police are corrupt. So, you know, there's there's all kinds of things. And I think there's two things. One is, is there anything that can be done? Maybe some of the recommendations are good.
I don't know. When people go, the messengers go to Anaheim in a few weeks. And then so that's number one. Number two, is there anything they can do to stop what you, myself and Aaron are all concerned about?
And we've articulated in this podcast.
Well, I think the first thing that they can do is be ready to engage some of the proposals and modify motions, read up on Robert's Rules of Orders before you go out there and be ready to participate that way.
There's no question that the Southern Baptist Convention needs greater accountability. Things can fall through the cracks. There are problems. So what this investigation has done, I think, is set a precedent that messengers should be willing to demand more investigations and more accountability.
So since Russell Moore kind of created this moral panic over this situation, maybe it's time to admit that there are some issues. And the executive committee is not going to be where most of the issues are found because the executive committee does not have that many really employees in that large of budgets.
There are two organizations in the SBC that do, and there have been some issues in the past with the leadership. And I think messengers should really consider forensic audit demands for all the entities and tie that into how many NDAs have been signed, how much financial settlement, and what, if any, have gone to settle these types of claims with sexual abuse victims.
If you really want to get to the bottom of these types of things, let's find out how many NDAs and what they're being used for and what financial settlements and also encourage people to come forward.
We know Johnny Hunt, who was implicated in this last report, I say implicated because, again, the accuser was anonymous and we don't have really a lot of details and Hunt denies it now. So we can't really weigh the claim very much when we don't know.
We can't even judge the the accuser because we don't know who it is. But it does lay the groundwork that there are some problems. Well, Hunt has now been an employee for the North American Mission Board.
Joni Hannigan was writing about sex abuse and was attacked by the head of the North American Mission Board. It makes a very good case that you need to impanel some outside investigators, waive privilege and investigate that that entity.
It's seems to me like that's what messengers should go out there and demand.
Did you see anything good in the recommendations from either the executive committee or.
Guidestone? I know I'm in the minority on this. I don't have a problem with them creating a online database that list names of people that have been reported that have been accused in a court of law and that had been fully adjudicated.
That that I think the technologies there would not be perfect and it would not be as good as the national database for sex offenders. But it would be highly focused on people who are clergy that have a history preaching and working in Southern Baptist churches.
I think it was I think that's not necessarily in a very limited way would not have been a bad idea. Now, what they're suggesting now is a horrible idea. But if you go back and you have a very simple database, it may be OK.
And I understand why the lawyers at the Southern Baptist Convention were like, no, no, this is a huge liability issue. But I think sometimes leadership needs to exist to say, well, lawyers are always going to tell you this has liability here.
And this leaders have to decide what's the right course. And unfortunately, I think by not doing that minimal step between people who have been written up in the newspaper as convicted of a sex crime at a Baptist Southern Baptist church, what they've done is they they allow Russell Moore and his group to create a thing saying you're not doing anything.
Right. Which what are they going to do anyway? Because they are not hierarchical thing to to to expel that pastor. All they can do is kick the church out. Right. Which is fine. Nobody's opposed to that.
But do you need this new credentials committee with this type of gerrymandered type of group where we embrace identity politics? I think that would be a horrible thing to do.
Yeah, I think I mean, it's a simple analogy. But if you told a police officer, you know, what are you doing about all the fires around here or something, unless it was arson, you know, they don't have the tools and they're not expected to go put out fires.
That's the job of the fire department. That's who you call. And so there's different tools for different jobs. And and I'm concerned that we are getting into an area knowing of the corruption in the SBC.
I know that there's there are men, evil people who corrupt people who can take advantage of tools like this to demonize their opponents politically. I want to just thank both of you for coming on, though, and explaining some of this, because I know we could probably say a lot more about it.
But people need to know what's going on and they need to show up in Anaheim if they're in the convention and they need to find out about being messengers. Now's the time to do it and maybe change the direction of the convention.
So Alan Atkinson, you can go to CapstoneReport .com and for Aaron Wren, go to AaronWren .com to find out more information. Thanks a lot, guys. I appreciate it. Appreciate it.