LOS ANGELES — More than 8,000 Southern Baptists will descend on Anaheim next week for the annual meeting of the largest Protestant denomination in the United States — the first time in 41 years that the two-day meeting has been held in California.
The gathering comes just weeks after the release of an explosive 288-page report commissioned by the Southern Baptist Convention that found allegations of sexual abuse were ignored or covered up for nearly 20 years by senior members of the SBC's executive committee.
In painstaking detail, the third-party investigators at Guidepost Solutions describe how leaders minimized or disregarded survivors' reports of abuse, appeared more concerned with protecting abusers than victims, denigrated survivors as "opportunists" or worse, and made avoiding any risk of legal liability for the SBC the top priority.
