On Sunday night, while Carissa Beard was helping her daughter tidy up her bedroom,
received a text message from her husband.
The husband was a pastor and told his wife that an investigation report on sexual abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention had been released online.
Carissa immediately checked the nearly 300-page report.
Sure enough, the results were as bad as she imagined.
The Southern Baptist Convention is the largest Christian Protestant church in the United States.
It is headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee, with more than 15 million members.
It is second only to the Catholic Church in the United States in terms of the number of beliefs and religious denominations.
In the beginning, this place was the temple in the hearts of many congregants.
However, in recent years, sexual abuse scandals involving church personnel have come one after another, and often remain unsolved.
The voices of victims have been repeatedly suppressed, and pastors or staff who abuse others are shielded and shielded by the church's senior leadership, and will not receive any punishment.
Under such circumstances, many victims do not have the courage to tell their experiences and can only bear it alone.
But paper cannot contain the fire, and things become more and more troublesome.
Last summer, there were calls for Southern Baptists to investigate sexual assault allegations,
Guidepost, an independent investigative agency Solutions, commissioned by Baptist Church , conducted an investigation into the actions and decisions of church leaders from 2000 to 2021.
They interviewed about 330 people, including 22 victims, and collected more than 5 megabytes of data.
months later, a 288-page report was born.
Carissa herself is a victim of sexual and emotional abuse in the church,
She is currently pursuing a graduate degree in psychological counseling to help others who have been through the same trauma as hers,
Last year, she and her husband traveled to Nashville to vote in favor of calling for an investigation into the Southern Baptist Convention at the annual meeting,
Although she won the victory, Carissa still felt a deep sense of powerlessness in the face of this report....
The report said that some church leaders and external consultants cooperated internally and externally, calling the sexual assault accusations "Satan" "Conspiracy" distracts their attention from the gospel.
These high-level officials are either hostile to the victims or simply ignore their appeals and resist reporting.
The purpose is to distance themselves from the relationship and prevent the church from being stigmatized by sexual assault.
The church’s senior leaders even have a list of clergy accused of sexual abuse in their own hands. ,
However, they did not take any action or issue a warning to the congregants. This attitude made sexual assaults more wanton.
One victim reported that he was frequently abused and sexually assaulted by a Georgia chapter youth pastor between the ages of 12 and 15,
but a top Southern Baptist official told him, "Churches are autonomous, and we can do nothing except pray."
Between 2006 and 2011, the church and its senior leaders stopped responding to the victim's emails or answering his calls, and refused him to attend conferences for various reasons.
In 2011, the victim made a public accusation and learned that two of his church friends of the same age had also been sexually assaulted at the same time.
The pastor pleaded guilty and voluntarily resigned, but his Georgia branch later announced its disassociation from the Southern Baptist Convention and rehired him.
Another female victim who was sexually assaulted by a clergy became the target of attacks by netizens because she insisted on filing a lawsuit.
Her mailbox was filled with hate mail, her blog was always filled with terrible comments, and someone called her specifically to scold her,
Once, an anonymous text message was sent to her mobile phone, threatening to "cut off her head"...
There was also a girl who became pregnant after being sexually abused by the same priest many times, but she was forced to ask for forgiveness in front of the congregation.
The church also threatened her not to identify the father of the child because it would damage the image of the church.
Although these experiences are shocking enough,
However, in the eyes of more than 700 other victims, this is just the tip of the iceberg.
After the release of the nearly 300-page report, more and more people on the Internet spoke about their experiences that year:
"When I was a child, I was immersed by someone in the south. The leader of the letter association had sexually assaulted me.
My parents were getting divorced at the time, and when they had to go out to run errands, they would put me over at the deacon’s house for the night.
I never said anything to the church because I felt that I was the one who did the wrong thing (in the church in the 1990s, same-sex behavior was extremely sinful).
This is definitely a small part of all cases, I believe that more people have stayed silent like me . "
"Growing up, there were many incidents of sexual abuse in the church our family attended.
I never said anything as a child/teen, but I wish I had spoken up.
The youth pastor left after I left my hometown, and I am still looking for the courage to speak up.
I kept avoiding him because he always made me feel guilty. To the point of being creepy.
I feel very sad what happened to you. "
" Yes, this number will increase thousands of times.
What is the use of reporting (sexual assault)?
They always imply that you are no longer 'pure' after having sex,
Good boy and A good girl would not take the initiative to attract unnecessary attention.
It must be the victim's fault. Even if you are still a child, it was your own fault.
‘What were you wearing? '
'Were you alone with the opposite sex at that time? '
'What have you done? '
'They must know You are full of sin. ’ This sentence refers to homosexuality. I heard it from a friend.
He told his parents that he had been violated, but he did not expect another round of humiliation.
This is systemic and has created a culture of fear.
I feel very sorry for what happened to you. You did nothing wrong. The person who violated you is evil and filthy. I hope you have come out. "
"I am a survivor of the Southern Baptist Troubled Youth Program.
Our leader molested girls, and every girl who reported on him was humiliated and punished by other staff members in front of all the students .
The staff would proudly refer to 'Mr. Steve' as a saint, and the girls (13 to 16 years old) were seen as cheaters trying to escape the project.
A few years ago, I was at ht. ml1 found his family on Facebook and sent his (now adult) children the full story of his crimes.
Go to hell, Steve. "
"A deacon at a Southern Baptist church in Texas sexually assaulted my stepbrother. He also raped at least three of my friends in the youth group (all boys).
When the incident finally came to light, no one continued to report it.
There was a special service in the church where the deacon stood up in front of the congregation and sobbed how 'sorry' he was.
They gathered around him, comforting him as if he was the victim.
This is so infuriating that I try not to think about it because when I do, it makes me extremely angry. "
"I was abused by a youth pastor (and at least one male church staff member) who made me perform oral sex on him in the church office bathroom when I was a seven-year-old child.
After the incident was exposed, the most important thing in the eyes of all adults was that a good person like him should not bear any bad reputation, even though he had passed away at that time.
Please note that this happened in 1979 at the Episcopal Church of St. Matthews Cathedral in Atlanta, Georgia.
I knew I was not the only victim, because there was at least one other child in the toilet at the time. I posted the news to various websites, trying to find them and uncover the identity of the other perpetrator. If he were still alive today, he would be in his 80s.
Church officials who are willing to take moral, legal, and financial responsibility for failing to protect children are welcome to contact me and we can solve this problem together. "
" I'm not shocked at all. I myself was molested at the altar of a Southern Baptist church in Alabama.
htmlOne Wednesday night when I was 18 years old, my friends and I finished the social meal, ran around in the church school, and finally ran into the church.
A group of men are practicing something there (when I was 8 years old, I thought they looked very old, but when I grow up, I think they should be in their 20s).
We were reprimanded for running around in the church, and one of the men grabbed me, stood me upside down on the altar, and tore off my underwear. I was completely exposed in front of everyone. As my friends laughed, he sexually assaulted me with his fingers.
I was so, so hurt and embarrassed that I ran straight to my mom and asked to go home.
But not once did I think about telling anyone what happened. I was afraid I would get in trouble for running away and not being a good girl.
Now I think that if I had spoken out, my mother and I would have been ostracized even more because of her divorce.
I begged, feigned, and did anything to stop going to that church, and every time we went I felt ashamed, like everyone knew I was the bad guy.
I no longer feel the freedom to run around in there, nor do I have any fun.
This is the culture of the Southern Baptist Convention.
If boys do something to you, it's 'you asked for it' because you didn't behave properly and you were a 'bad girl'.
If you were a boy who was molested by a man...I can't even fathom that.
The entire organization needs to be destroyed.
I will never allow my son to enter any church unaccompanied until he is old enough to make his own decision about whether to go to church or not, and old enough to understand that anything done to you against your will has no bearing on your worth. "
"Don't forget: these are the same people who are trying to overturn Roe v. Wade, who oppose same-sex marriage, who deny health care to women and transgender teenagers who will eventually grow into transgender adults.
They take the direction in republican . Think about how you want to vote."
A joint report by two Texas newspapers pointed out that there are about 380 church members involved in sexual abuse,
among them are church leaders and pastors. Teachers, including deacons, Sunday school and Christian school teachers, as well as church leaders and volunteers,
The ages of the victims vary, many of them are young children as young as 3 years old....
On Sunday, the newly appointed president of the Southern Baptist Convention, Ed. Litton said in the statement that he was "extremely saddened" by the victims' experiences and called on members to reform the church.
Other senior leaders also pledged to "take steps to eliminate sexual abuse within the church" after the report was released.
But now, can anyone still believe such a promise?
