Yes, I am a born-again, evangelical Christian! You might be tempted to think otherwise from the following stories, but the point is, I hold myself and other Christians to very high standards.
Southern Baptists’ sexual abuse scandal prompts calls for criminal investigations, comparisons to Catholics
380 clergy - >700 victims in 20 years
Missing Migrant Children Being Funneled Through Christian Adoption Agency
Southern Baptists’ sexual abuse scandal prompts calls for criminal investigations, comparisons to Catholics
380 clergy - >700 victims in 20 years
People pray for America at the 2018 annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention in Dallas. In late July, the SBC announced plans to create a study group to develop strategies for combating sexual abuse. The move followed a series of revelations about sexual misconduct cases involving SBC churches and seminaries. (Vernon Bryant/Dallas Morning News via AP)
By Julie Zauzmer and Marisa Iati, WaPo
A report published in two Texas newspapers this past weekend detailing 20 years of sexual abuse allegations within the nation’s largest Protestant denomination has sparked calls for authorities to investigate whether leaders covered up abuse and allowed the accused to continue working in churches.
The investigation by the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News found more than 380 clergy and volunteers had been charged with sexual misconduct over two decades, leaving behind more than 700 victims to deal with the aftermath. The stories set off the sort of shock waves in the 15-million-member Southern Baptist Convention that similar blockbuster investigations have been causing ever since the Boston Globe’s Spotlight team exposed abuse in the Catholic Church in 2002.
That 2002 investigation sparked nationwide policy changes within the Catholic Church to drastically curtail abuse by priests. And last year, inspired by an exhaustive inquiry in Pennsylvania, more than a dozen state attorneys general opened civil and criminal investigations into crimes by priests.
Now, the Texas newspapers’ report has sparked calls for authorities to open the same type of investigations into the Southern Baptist.
“The truth is that this is a cultural problem," said Marci Hamilton, the chief executive of anti-abuse nonprofit organization CHILD USA. "It goes across every single organization where any adult has had access to children alone. No prosecutor at this point could possibly believe there are parts of society where this didn’t happen. It did.
“I do expect there will be more interest from prosecutors" in Southern Baptists, she added. "I also think it’s going to create added pressure in the Southern states for statute of limitation reform.”
Alabama and Mississippi, two states with the largest concentration of churches in the Southern Baptist Convention, have some of the shortest limitations on prosecuting child-sex crimes, Hamilton said. Neither state has a large Catholic population, so the Southern Baptist investigation may bring more pressure to change those laws, as New York recently did as authorities stepped up their inquiries.
“These states have very large Baptist populations. I think you’re going to see an uptick in interest in creating justice for the victims,” she said.
Many of the state attorneys general who are investigating the Catholic Church did not immediately respond on Monday as to whether they would open investigations into Southern Baptist clergy. Most of the instances of abuse identified by the Texas newspapers involve pastors and volunteers who have already been charged with sex crimes. None of the leaders of the denomination have been charged with covering up such crimes.
However, SB seminary President Paige Patterson was fired, apparently for covering up child sexual abuse within the seminary and abusive treatment toward victims.
New Jersey’s attorney general’s office said that it encouraged any victim to come forward. In Pennsylvania, which started the wave of investigations into the Catholic Church’s handling of sex abuse complaints, attorney general’s office spokesman Joe Grace said he could not comment on any investigation that may or may not be underway. “Our prosecutors will investigate and prosecute child sexual abuse wherever they find it,” he said. “Whether that is in a large institution like Penn State University or a law enforcement agency like a small town police chief -- or a church. Wherever we find it, our prosecutors will investigate and file charges where appropriate.”
Within the Southern Baptist Convention, however, some had already began the call for a wider investigation.
“When we learn of any information that provides evidence that anyone has committed this type of crime or has attempted to cover it up, it should be investigated by the criminal authorities,” said Boz Tchividjian, the grandson of evangelical leader Billy Graham and founder of the anti-child abuse organization GRACE. “I don’t care where it is.”
Tchividjian, a former sex crimes prosecutor, said there are important differences between investigating Catholics and investigating Baptists. The Catholic Church is hierarchical and keeps extensive written records. It’s easier for a prosecutor to know who is in charge and to find evidence of a cover-up. In the Southern Baptist Convention, each church is independent, a fact that the hierarchy-averse Baptists pride themselves on.
He said that lawyers for the church have seen that independence as an advantage in the past, fearing that if the local churches were more closely linked to the denomination as a whole, it could put the entire denomination at risk of lawsuits that otherwise would target just one church.
But Tchividjian said the denomination ought to relinquish some of that independent spirit to more closely exert control over churches to prevent abuse. The denomination could require, for instance, that any church that wants to remain in the fellowship must agree to mandatory anti-abuse training and must participate in a shared database that would warn churches not to hire pastors let go from other churches amid accusations of sexual misconduct.
“What’s most important?” Tchividjian asked. “Protecting the reputation of the Southern Baptist Convention, or protecting kids in the thousands of churches that are part of the denomination? ... Maybe it’s time for the Southern Baptists to step outside their cultural paradigm and say, ‘Yes, we’re independent churches. But if you want to be a part of a Southern Baptist community, if you want to be called a Southern Baptist church, you’re going to have to voluntarily participate in child-protection policies.’ ”
The denomination similarly requires that member churches adopt other policies, he noted, like mandatory stances on gender and homosexuality.
In an essay published on his personal website Monday, Albert Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and one of the leading voices in the denomination, agreed. He called for an independent, third-party inquiry into sexual abuse within the convention. He said any church that knowingly protects sexual abusers should no longer be considered “in friendly cooperation” with the convention and should be stripped of its membership.
Mohler also said ministers should be subject to a background check before they move from one church to another. Each congregation ordains its own ministers without any credentialing system from the convention, Mohler wrote. In the past, he said, Southern Baptists have approached sexual abuse as isolated events, causing “an avalanche of destruction.”
J.D. Greear, the convention’s president, and Brad Hambrick, pastor of counseling at the Summit Church in Durham, N.C., said in a blog post published Monday that the church had failed victims of abuse. “The appropriate response of anyone who is representing Jesus to you should be care and compassion,” they wrote.
The pastors encouraged abuse victims to involve their current church in their recovery if the abuser is not in leadership there. They also urged church leaders to share the blog post’s list of resources with their communities and to avoid becoming defensive. “The way we respond in this moment — either in protecting and caring for victims, or defending ourselves and our institutions — will either obscure or adorn the gospel we claim to preach,” Greear and Hambrick wrote.
It may also garner a response from the One about Whom you preach! It is He you need to impress with your response, not the people.
While I am reluctant to use far-left sources like PATHEOS and some others mentioned below because of their rabid anti-Christianity which results in unnecessary slants and hyperbolic language, if you can get past that, there are many questions raised here that do need an answer.
BY MICHAEL STONE, Patheos
The Trump administration says it can’t reunite missing migrant children with their families; instead, many of the children are being shipped to a Christian adoption agency with ties to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.
Earlier this week the Trump administration told a federal court that it would require too much effort to reunite migrant children with their parents. Associated Press reports:
The Trump administration says it would require extraordinary effort to reunite what may be thousands of migrant children who have been separated from their parents and, even if it could, the children would likely be emotionally harmed.
According to the Associated Press report, the Trump administration is also concerned that reunification would “present grave child welfare concerns” because the children would be removed from their “sponsor” homes:
Jonathan White, who leads the Health and Human Services Department’s efforts to reunite migrant children with their parents, said removing children from ‘sponsor’ homes to rejoin their parents ‘would present grave child welfare concerns.’ He said the government should focus on reuniting children currently in its custody, not those who have already been released to sponsor homes.
The entire situation is horrific. Commenting on the horror, and expressing the feelings of many, Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley tweeted:
Senator Jeff Merkley✔
@SenJeffMerkley
This is what evil looks like.
ACLU✔
@ACLU
BREAKING: Tonight the Trump administration filed documents that don’t dispute the recent report that there may have been thousands more separated kids. They’re arguing it would take too long to figure out where those kids are because they have no tracking system.
As for the fate of the thousands of children the Trump administration does not want to reunite with their parents, Progressive Secular Humanist previously reported that many of the migrant children ruthlessly separated from their family by the Trump administration are being shipped to Bethany Christian Services, a Christian adoption agency with ties to the family of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.
Last year Rewire News reported on the condition of some of those children separated from their parents, linking the migrant children to Bethany Christian Services:
Migrant children in Michigan who have been separated from their parents by the Trump administration are attending “a special school” run by Bethany Christian Services, an anti-choice organization with a record of coercive adoption practices that has yet to receive instructions about how to reunify these children with their detained parents.
Fact checking website Snopes confirms the well established links between the DeVos family and Bethany Christian Services:
The links between the extended DeVos family and Bethany are undeniable. Tax filings archived by ProPublica show that between 2001 and 2015, the Dick and Betsy DeVos Foundation (the philanthropic organization run by DeVos and her husband) gave $343,000 in grants to Bethany Christian Services.
Between 2012 and 2015, Bethany received $750,000 in grants from the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation, which is run by the Education Secretary’s father-in-law, the billionaire founder of Amway Richard DeVos, and his wife Helen.
Furthermore, Brian DeVos — a cousin of Betsy DeVos’s husband Dick — was the Senior Vice President for Child and Family Services at Bethany as recently as 2015, and Maria DeVos — who is married to Dick DeVos’s brother Doug — has served on the board of Bethany.
Democratic Underground explains the nefarious methods of the “radical Christian adoption trafficking mill” being run by Bethany Christian Services, noting:
They have no intention of trying to find, much less uniting parents with their children. It’s a radical Christian adoption trafficking mill.
More than a little hyperbolic!
In fact, there is already in place a huge and thriving business in the trafficking of children via Christian adoption agencies like the DeVos connected Bethany. In her 2013 book, The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption, Kathryn Joyce documents this alarming trend of conservative Christians adopting children removed from their natural parents via nefarious means to feed the business of Christian adoption and serve the agenda of Christian theocracy.
Christians have a theocracy agenda? Wow! I've been a Christian for 35 years and didn't even know! A Christian theocracy will occur when Jesus returns and not before.
Bottom line: The Trump administration says it can’t reunite missing migrant children with their families; instead, many of the children are being funneled through Christian adoption trafficking mills like the DeVos connected Bethany Christian Services.
‘I was surprised and devastated’
Jamie Forbes says former teacher Reynold Buono raped him in 1981 and 1982
By Laura Crimaldi Boston Globe
PORTSMOUTH, N.H. — The prosecutor and victim witness advocate called Jamie Forbes over the Christmas holidays as he was traveling through Asia with his family and delivered some wrenching news.
Six months earlier in June 2018, Reynold J. Buono, a former Milton Academy teacher, had been returned to the United States from Thailand to face charges that he raped Forbes when he was 15 years old, in 1981 and 1982.
Lawyers for Buono, 73, fought back, seeking to dismiss the indictments. On Dec. 26, Superior Court Judge Thomas A. Connors ruled in their favor, saying the evidence isn’t enough to prosecute a child sex abuse case that falls outside the 27-year statute of limitations.
The hole in the case, according to Connors? Prosecutors don’t have independent evidence to support Forbes’s account of being sexually assaulted by Buono at an on-campus apartment during his freshman year. Such corroboration is required, Connors wrote, in cases brought 27 years after the alleged offense occurred.
“I was surprised and devastated and scared that after all this he might walk away a free man,” Forbes, 52, said last month in an interview at his home in Portsmouth, N.H. “I hope that there will be an opportunity for a jury to decide.”
The office of Norfolk District Attorney Michael W. Morrissey, which is prosecuting Buono, has asked Connors to reconsider and wants the state Appeals Court to weigh in.
But in an era where notorious child molesters like Jerry Sandusky and Larry Nassar have been sent to prison for crimes that occurred years before they were reported to police, Buono’s case has laid bare the thorny legal issues, high stakes, and emotions synonymous with prosecuting child sex crimes once the victims enter adulthood.
An investigation by a consultant hired by Milton Academy found Buono molested 18 students during his 14-year tenure, but he only faces criminal charges for alleged attacks on Forbes.
If the case unravels, it wouldn’t because Forbes kept his story secret, but because his story didn’t reach police until decades later. A hearing is scheduled for Wednesday in Norfolk Superior Court.
“The statue of limitations is a major impediment in bringing justice to people who have been hurt and the survivor experience is pretty consistent in terms of the reporting. Very few survivors want to report,” Forbes said. “If they do ultimately decide to tell someone that shouldn’t be limited by time.”
Forbes, a descendant of 19th-century railroad magnate John Murray Forbes, grew up in Milton and enrolled in the elite private school in the fifth grade. Buono joined the faculty in 1973, teaching English and theater. He was known for teaching Shakespeare and his popularity with students.
In 1981, Forbes, then 14, went biking through Italy on a trip chaperoned by Buono. Prosecutors allege Buono sexually assaulted Forbes in Venice after a night of drinking. The next day, Forbes told two friends what happened.
“I remember that he was just terrified to say anything,” said Doug Cabot, one of the people Forbes told. “We were sitting in a stone windowsill in Venice and he told us what had happened.”
Cabot, 52, who grew up in the same neighborhood as Forbes and also attended Milton Academy, said he confronted Buono about the encounter.
Prosecutors describe Forbes confiding in friends and Cabot confronting Buono in court papers, but the alleged crime isn’t covered by the indictment because it occurred in Italy, beyond the reach of US prosecutors.
Buono is accused of sexually assaulting Forbes during tutoring sessions at Buono’s on-campus apartment between Sept. 1, 1981 and July 1, 1982, records show. He has pleaded not guilty to three counts of rape of a child and three counts of rape of a child with force.
The abused ended, prosecutors said, after Cabot told his mother about what happened between Buono and Forbes in Venice. Forbes’s mother was later informed as was Milton Academy, which removed Buono as Forbes’s academic adviser but let him keep his job, prosecutors said.
Buono is on house arrest after posting $50,000 bail and being placed on a GPS tracking device.
Inga Bernstein, Buono’s lawyer, said Connors’s decision should stand. “We think he got it right,” she said.
In court papers, prosecutors argued they don’t need independent evidence to corroborate Forbes’s story because they say the case falls within the statute of limitations. The approximately 30 years that Buono lived outside Massachusetts doesn’t count toward the time cap, prosecutors said.
In her response filed Friday, Bernstein wrote the requirement for independent corroboration can’t be set aside because Buono left the state. “Such an action would require the Court to usurp the role of the Legislature and re-write the plain language of the statute. The invitation to do this should be soundly rejected,” she wrote.
Milton Academy fired Buono in 1987 after he admitted to sexually assaulting a different student and moved to Southeast Asia shortly thereafter, court papers said.
After the Globe Spotlight Team published a report in May 2016 about sexual misconduct in private schools, Todd B. Bland, Milton Academy’s head of school, invited people to contact him with concerns about sex abuse.
Cabot said he called Forbes and asked if he’d considered telling his story. After reflection, Forbes said he called the school and met with Bland in his office for about two hours.
“One of the first things he did was apologize to me for the pain that I had endured,” Forbes said.
In April 2017, Forbes met with police and Buono was indicted five months later, court records show. Buono appeared for the first time in a US courtroom on June 27, 2018.
Forbes said he was at a family gathering on Cape Cod when he got word that Buono was under arrest. In a cruel twist, news that the indictments had been dismissed reached Forbes while he was traveling in Thailand, the country where Buono had been arrested. Forbes was there to visit his 18-year-old daughter who is traveling during a gap year.
“It was not lost on me,” Forbes said.
In an e-mail, Forbes’s wife, Alison, said she wished it would be easier for survivors to tell their stories. “It’s so challenging for them to feel it will be worth the emotional strain and risk that they will not be successful,” she said. “It’s never too late to speak out or to heal. As a culture, we have a long way to go to prevent abuse.”
Forbes’s experience in reporting his abuse persuaded him to pursue a new project, Hadley Rock Advisors which helps schools navigate sexual misconduct investigations and support survivors. Milton Academy was his first client, said Forbes, who also advises people and companies on philanthropy through a separate business.
In a statement, Bland said Forbes has helped support former students who were sexually abused by Buono. “Jamie’s perspective is invaluable to our continuing efforts to maintain a victim-centered approach to this work,” Bland said.
Forbes’s mother, who worked at Milton Academy for about 10 years, said she’s proud of what her son has done to protect children from the kind of abuse he endured. “Jamie has found a personal strength and power that I haven’t seen since he was abused,” Tally Forbes said in an e-mail.
Forbes said he plans to press ahead, assisting prosecutors however he can and continuing his work with Hadley Rock, which has led to collaborations with more than a dozen schools.
The venture is named for a rock submerged at the end of a treacherous waterway off Falmouth where Forbes has sailed and fished his entire life.
When you reach that spot, Forbes said, you’re in safe waters.
Pastor’s child sex abuse trial begins in Texas
By TXK TODAY
A man who was affiliated with a church in Fresno, Calif., as a pastor at the time he was charged with rape in Miller County, Ark., and who once served as a guest pastor at a Baptist church in the Texarkana area is on trial this week for allegedly abusing a young female relative years ago.
Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Connie Mitchell told the jury of seven men and five women in opening statements that despite telling at least four people beginning when the alleged victim was in high school, law enforcement was not contacted because of concern for what it would do to a large extended family and the accused, “a man of God.”
Fayetteville, Ark., attorney Brandon Pickett argued that the alleged victim is motivated to make false allegations because of jealousy and family drama.
The alleged victim, now 28, testified that she often was dropped off during the summer months at Keener’s house while her parents were working and that her family and Keener’s family spent many Sundays together between morning and evening services at a Baptist Church in Nash, Texas, near Texarkana.
The alleged victim testified that when she was 9, she was sleeping on the floor of Keener’s bedroom with two other girls when Keener told her she could sleep in the bed. She said she heard Keener whisper, “Don’t tell anybody what I’m about to do to you,” before he sodomized her for the first of countless times. The alleged victim said she blacked out and that during future encounters she would “hold my breath or bury my face in the pillow,” to deal with the immense pain she felt.
The alleged victim testified under questioning from Mitchell that Keener began preaching at their church when he was 17 or 18 and that he was actively preaching at the time the alleged sexual abuse began. The alleged victim said she was afraid as a child that she would get in trouble if anyone learned of the abuse and that later she feared exposing Keener would tear her family apart.
She said she was also warned by a female youth minister who she told to “shut your mouth, you can’t tell anybody about that because he is a man of God.”
The alleged victim told a high school boyfriend about the abuse when she was approximately 16, she testified. The former boyfriend testified under questioning by Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Kristian Robertson that he encouraged the girl to tell her parents but that she agreed to tell an older female family member instead.
The older family member testified that the alleged victim called her in tears and told her in general terms that Keener had sexually abused her. She said she urged the then teen girl to tell her mother and that when the alleged victim said she could not, they agreed the older relative would.
The alleged victim’s mother said she waited a few days after learning of the allegations before asking her daughter about them in approximately 2006. She said they did not tell her father or others because of fear of what it would do to the family.
The alleged victim said she began to suffer from severe, debilitating depression as the years went by and sought counseling in late 2016. She said that she developed the courage to come forward and contacted the Texarkana, Ark., Police Department in March 2018 with the support of her counselor.
Pickett questioned how the abuse could have occurred as many times as alleged without anyone in the house suspecting.
Testimony is expected to continue Tuesday morning before Circuit Judge Kirk Johnson at the Miller County courthouse. Keener is charged with three counts of rape involving a child under age 14. If found guilty, Keener faces 25 to 40 years or life in prison on each count.
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