How The SBC Got Played

[distant noise] [distant noise] Phil, this is my deposition, you're so good. So it's July 23rd, 2019. I'm working for Founders Ministry and we release our first trailer for the documentary by Woodstand. In that trailer, there's one image that appears for just a bit over a second. Twice, it's blurred, and it's of a woman who's sitting on a panel. Nine days later, three board members resign, not over a scandal. It was because they did not want to be associated with questioning that woman. Her name was Rachel Den Hollander, attorney, abuse survivor, the face of #MeToo Evangelicalism. Four years later, court documents would prove the trailer was right. Massive conflicts of interest, a compromised investigation, over a million dollars to recline. And 13 million drained from the largest conservative Protestant denomination in America. But by then, it was too late. Most people think that the abuse crisis in the SBC was straight forward. There was just predators and pulpit, a denomination that looked the other way, and survivors who just finally got justice. But that's not the story. That's the story you've heard, but that's not what happened. [distant noise] In 1996, an economist named Gary North wrote a book called Cross Fingers. How the Liberals Captured the Presbyterian Church. He documented a five-phase playbook over how you take over a denomination from the inside. Not with theology, but with procedure. Phase one, you exploit the moral vulnerability that the other side can defend. Phase two. Read and find who the real threat is. Phase three. For some procedural change, your opponents can't survive. Phase four. Fill the empty seats. Phase five. Inherit everything. And the Southern Baptist Convention, they followed the script almost step by step. And we're going to show you how they did it. Phase one. Exploit the moral vulnerability. The Southern Baptist Convention is wrapped up a summit on racism in America. The denomination is hoping to bring healing by confronting its past support for slavery and segregation. The Southern Baptist were already getting played before any of this started. In 2011, the group did declare racism as sin and renewed efforts to reach out to Latinos, African-Americans and others. For years, the denomination had been caving on social justice issues. The problem is a lot worse than we think. What I mean by that is both individually. I am a racist. And I'm going to struggle with racism and white supremacy until the day I die and get my glorified body. Southern Baptist took a stand against racism at their annual meeting this week. They formally passed a resolution condemning, quote, "every form of racism including all right white supremacy." Each apology was training them to accept guilt on someone else's terms. You think we as believers have owned that history of sin in the past and our inability to reconcile this racist? Do you think we've already owned that? Well, I think we have to constantly be reminded of it. By the time the abuse crisis hit, the SBC was already trained and primed for manipulation. And they're about to find out what that training was for. Leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention are gathered in Alabama this week addressing the sex abuse crisis in their church. The nation's largest Protestant denomination. It culminated in February 2019, the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express, published a joint investigation. Found more than 700 people had been sexually assaulted by nearly 400 Southern Baptist Church leaders and volunteers over the past 20 years. Headlines said. Suppressed, ignored and stone-walled sexual abuse allegations. Covered by leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention. Covered up and lied about. Resistance, stone-walling and even outright hostility. For nearly two decades. The SBC was protecting abusers. Ascading new report commissioned by the Southern Baptist Convention describes extensive cover-ups by senior leaders who were, quote, "singularly focused on avoiding liability." Former executive committee member Rod Martin says this was part of something bigger. We had a growing number of activists coming after the SBC about sex abuse at that 20, leading up to that 2019 convention. By June 2019, the SBC passes a constitutional amendment. Churches that harbor abusers can be disfellowshipped from the SBC. An abuse complaint committee also got created. On the surface, it's totally reasonable. But here's the question nobody asked. Was the SBC really saying that for 175 years they'd been fine with churches harboring abusers? Of course not. But when the moral framework is protecting children, who's going to argue with that? And that was the point. And the people running this playbook knew exactly what they were doing. Then comes COVID. COVID killed the 2020 convention. No vote. No floor debate. No accountability. And in that vacuum, the pressure kept building. Because most of the time when they speak up, they are trampled on. In fact, there is a very prominent survivor, a precious friend of mine, that this happened to just a year ago. Most of you know Jen Lyell. The Jennifer Lyell case became the pressure point. 12 years of alleged abuse by seminary professor David Sills. He said it was a consensual affair. She said it was assault. There were no criminal charges ever filed. No witnesses to the alleged abuse. The Rachel Denhollandr was involved as Lyell's attorney. And that detail changes everything. So when she came forward and said that the entire relationship from start to finish 12 years was always an ever abuse that it was never consensual. That story just didn't make sense to me. And so then I started to just ask questions like, what's the abuse that's being alleged here? Because that would help. Are we in the realm of you're saying you were emotionally abused or emotionally controlled in some way, some sort of psychological manipulation? Or you saying you were physically held down? What are we talking about? And the immediate reaction to me asking that, even that question was how dare you? How dare you question these allegations? How dare you not believe a survivor? And when it comes to Rachel, in fact, I started kind of looking through her social media going, well, what has her response to this been? Surely someone at some point has answered some of these questions. And what I would find was things like when someone would really mildly ask, well, what is this man? This best or alleged who have done? Rachel would come back very strongly and say, you know, I am in a turn, I am Miss Liles attorney. This is her other attorney. It has been investigated and confirmed to be criminal assault, which is impossible because it was never referred to the police. So no one could have investigated it and no one could have determined that it was criminal assault. And yet this was what was being disseminated among Southern Baptist. And we were told that this is not a position you can question. The biblical standard is clear to her three witnesses. In this case, zero witnesses, zero charges. But Den Hollander and Russell Moore, for that matter, made this the centerpiece of the pressure campaign on the executive committee. And they used it like a battery ran. Rachel Den Hollander with Russell Moore then went to the ERLC's conference and from the stage on the platform declared that the executive committee, which was running Baptist press, had had deeply abused and scarred Jennifer Lyle because they weren't willing to print as a fact that she had been abused. She trusted the SPC to protect her and to handle her story well. And instead of doing that, the Baptist free press changed the article after she saw it. They used the same language to describe her abuse that is used for consensual affairs and a survivor of horrific predatory abuse instead of being surrounded with love and care and support was cast away as someone involved in a consensual affair. That happened last year to one of your own by one of your own, including members of your executive committee leading into the 2021 convention, conservative back mic stone to president. But when crisis is needed, crisis can be found. And while we were there, there was a new abuse victim. Supposedly, we don't know because all the police reports say that nothing was ever done to her. All the police reports, all the invaders. investigations find nothing, but Hannah Kate Williams, they trought her out. I would like to see leaders taking the recommendations of outside experts, not as attacks on their beliefs, but as tools to protect those in their care. They have her approach stone the night before the election. She has a perfectly, utterly friendly conversation with Mike Stone. This is all captured on surveillance video and a bunch of witnesses, a bunch of eye witnesses, and within 30 minutes, she has it all over the media that Mike Stone had a costed her and just verbally used her right there at the convention, the night before his election, which of course is exactly what everybody does when they want to get elected president of the denomination. Of course, you know, that makes sense. By the way, the powers that me, the new people running the executive committee have still refused to release the surveillance video I'm telling you about. But we know it exists. It's several of us have seen it. It absolutely exonerates stone and the lawyers for the EC admitted this. They just wouldn't release it because it would be too embarrassing to people like grand games and others who use to this girl as a prop. And if you don't believe they use her as a prop, ask her because she proceeded to decide she had been used as a prop and started talking about that on Twitter, much to their horror since they are leading pastors and men of God. In any case, all of this was coordinated to torpedo stones candidacy, but they didn't just want rid of stone. They wanted rid of the conservatives who were in leadership in as much of the denomination as possible, but certainly the executive committee. So stone lost and the winning side passed the motion that changed everything, a sexual abuse task force to investigate the SBC's own executive committee. The executive committee they managed SBC's finances, properties and their legal matters. 86 members and the motion had one unprecedented requirement. The motion included that the executive committee show wave attorney client privilege, surrender your legal shield for transparency. Was anybody concerned about what that shield was there to protect? Remember the old saying don't remove a fence without knowing first why it's there? Whatever it takes to look innocent, protecting women and children. What a perfect lever. Phase two, redefine the threat. Gary North says the next phase is use moral language to make surrender sound righteous. After the motion passed, a pressure campaign began six former SBC presidents called for the waiver over a thousand pastors, abuse survivors, the message from every corner of the denomination is if you have nothing to hide, then prove it. But the heaviest pressure came from the top on September 29th, 2021, Albert Moore, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, the SBC flagship institution released a public statement directed at the executive committee. He wrote that the convention would long remember those who helped this task force do its work and those who sought to obstruct it. He said the only real decision was how to comply with the mandate, not weather. And then he added time has run out. That's not a pastor offering counsel. That's the most powerful man in the SBC telling the executive committee, surrender or be remembered as the people who protected abusers. Every seminary president followed Albert Mueller's lead. Every denominational lead they piled on as well. And the executive committee members, those 86 people responsible for the SBC's finances, properties, legal protections, they were all being told by their leadership that defending fiduciary duty was the same as defending abuse. They wanted us to waive attorney client privilege, because we have nothing to hide. Well, but that's not why you have such a thing as attorney client privilege attorney client privilege is a fiduciary duty. And it is a legal ethical requirement necessary to allow clients to be able to speak honestly with their legal representation. If you don't have that, then every single discussion is discoverable. They can't talk to their lawyer meaningfully. And it's just absurd. It's so absurd that at the same time, the Biden Justice Department instructed US attorneys that they may not ever ask anybody they're prosecuting to waive attorney client privilege. That's how unethical this was. fiduciary duty isn't a technicality. It's a covenant bond. This applies to attorney client privilege, doctor, patient, privilege, husband, wife, privilege, remove that protection and the people who need it most lose everything. But notice the frame anyone who defends fiduciary duty is protecting the abuser. The institution's own legal safeguards became evidence of guilt defending procedure becomes proof you have something to hide. That's a lose lose situation. This is the actual genius of phase two. You don't have to prove anyone is guilty of anything. You just have to make defending the institution look like defending abuse. And once that frame is locked in, the real damages begin. Phase three force the procedural surrender. So the pressure is enormous, a thousand pastors, six seminary presidents, every survivor advocate in the country, all saying the same thing, waive the privilege for your complicit. On October 5th, 2021, the executive committee voted 44 in favor, 31 against 17 members resigned in protest. Six were attorneys or financial professionals, they understood exactly what was happening. Maybe the most stunning resignation of all Jim Gunther, age 87, he had been general counsel for the SPC executive committee since 1966, 55 years had never lost a case in his resignation letter. He said this, we simply do not know how to advise a client when the client indicated a willingness to forgo this universally accepted principle of confidentiality. 55 years, unblemished record, and an 87 year old man walked away because he would not participate in what he knew was wrong. 24 people are gone. They're all opponents of the leftists, JD Greer, Russell Moore, Rachel Den Hollander, Grant Gaines, you know, the rest of them, and above all, probably Jared Welman on the executive committee. And because they were all gone, it's an 86 member committee. So JD Greer was able to fill all those seeds with people to his liking, and they carried out their coup. They completely transferred power to their own faction over the period of those two years. And that's what it was all about. The 44 men who voted yes, were like the three men that resigned from founders. They feared the backlash more than the breach itself. They thought that waving the privilege would prove that they were the good guys. They had no idea what they had just made possible. They didn't realize that they just handed their opponents the weapons to destroy them. Attorney client privilege doesn't exist to hide guilt. It exists to protect the institution from those who weaponize the process. And that's exactly what happened next. You just watched 44 men surrender the legal protections of the largest Protestant denomination in America because they were afraid of what people would think. How you handle your money is not a neutral act. Everything you have is under Christ's authority. Dominion wealth strategists helps Christian families think biblically and act wisely budgeting debt management, state planning, multi generational vision. They're not just selling products. They're helping you make decisions consistent with your convictions. And unlike the men you just watched full, dominion takes their fiduciary duty to you. Seriously, they won't wave it. Not for pressure, not for optics, not for anybody reformed that money book your free consultation a day, let them know the cross politics sent you partners like dominion are the reason that we can bring you stories like this one right here. And that's a trade that blesses everybody. Now, the SPC handed over its shield and the people who demanded that surrender were just getting started phase four, use the surrendered weapons. So the old guard is gone. The legal shield is down and now the investigation begins. And this This is where it gets much worse than anyone actually realized because the investigation itself was rigged from the start. In May 2022, Guy Post Solutions released a 288-page report. The media calls it a devastating blow. A bombshell. The most salacious finding that they had, that the executive committee kept a private list of accused ministers. The narrative? They were hiding musics. But in December 2025, court documents blew the whole thing open. An independent compliance expert named Amy McDougall, a former Air Force attorney and certified compliance professional, was retained to audit the Guy Post investigation against professional standards. Her findings were actually what was devastating. Not for the SPC, but for Guy Post. First, Guy Post had no legal authority to conduct the investigation. Tennessee law requires a private investigator's license. Guy Post doesn't have one of those. Not in Tennessee, not in New York, where their headquarters. Guy Post's own president, Krista Tonguey, testified under oath that she had no idea whether the firm was licensed to investigate in any jurisdiction. Being an unlicensed investigation in Tennessee is a class A misdemeanor. But the licensing problem was just the beginning. Secondly, under oath, Guy Post had to admit they had never investigated anything. They did not investigate the sales case. They did not try to contact David Sills at all and even asked him for his version of events. They corroborated, meaning they took the accuser's word and asked around to see if other people had heard the same story. Oh, McDougal writes that it appears Guy Post relied on misdynhalenders, assurances, as a trusted business partner that misliels allegations of abuse had been substantiated. Or in the alternative, did not need to be substantiated. Dynhalender with the corroborating source. They interviewed three to four hundred people about Jennifer Lyle's allegations. But they never interviewed the accused, David Sills. They never interviewed Albert Moller, the seminary president who first received the disclosure. They never interviewed Eric Geiger. The supervisor Lyle told first the three people with firsthand knowledge never contacted. And that's still not the worst of it. Third, and this is the kill shot. Rachel Dynhalender was wearing four hats simultaneously. Number one, she was the attorney for Jennifer Lyle, fighting for maximum settlement against the SBC. Two, advisor to the sexual abuse task force, overseeing the investigation. Three, advocate operating the abuse hotline, funneling survivors into the investigation. And number four, editor of the Guy Post report, shaping the findings. This is completely unethical. She's an attorney. She doesn't get to do those things. And moreover, she got called out by people like Christa Brown, who is possibly the longest term sex abuse advocate in the Southern Baptist Convention. And certainly Rachel's strongest supporter for ages and ages. And even Christa wrote an op-ed, a public article calling Rachel Dynhalender out for her unethical behavior and conflicts of interest. She's driving this process. That alone should have disqualified the entire investigation. But the paper trail keeps going further. She advised the investigators. She represented the lead witness. She set on the committee overseeing the investigation. And she edited the final report in the Reg violation of Guy Post's own engagement letter, which explicitly prohibited the task force members from editing the report before publication. The compliance audit found her edit requests from May 17, 2022, in them. Dynhalender confirmed that she was the driving force behind the investigation, in her words. This would absolutely not be happening if Lyles case had not happened. This has been the topic of conversation and the linchpin for why we are here. She then wrote exactly what she wanted Guy Post to include. Guy Post's response? I'm okay with this if you want to modify the language. I've always felt we didn't add enough about the settlement. The person who engineered the investigation edited the report about her own client. The woman suing the SPC was telling the investigators what to write. In the financial web, well, it goes even deeper. Dynhalender had referred Guy Post to at least three prior engagements. She referred them to Southern Seminary just months before the SPC investigation began. After the report published, Guy Post was awarded the survivor hotline contract. Then they bid on a multi-million dollar database contract. Meducle's conclusion? Guy Post departed from many recognizable professional investigative standards by permitting conflicts of interest. The investigation lacked defined terms, a standard of proof, and due process. Note that. Biblical due process. It was in her professional opinion, not an independent investigation. It was a public relations campaign masquerading has won. And in the biggest, probably most salacious thing that came out of it were these emails from Jennifer Lyle to David Sills, where she talks about how much she misses him. And she talks about how she can't go a month or two months without seeing him. It's too long and how much she longs to be with him. And really just all of this documentation demonstrating that this looks very much like a consensual, adulterous relationship. The result? Jennifer Lyle's attorney profited. The SPC was weakened, biblical law abandoned, and real victims are still waiting for justice. We'd had any victims, I would have been the first one to say, let's hang the guy who did this, and let's pay out whatever we've got. Phase five. Inherit everything. So what do we know? Well, we know the investigation wasn't legal. It was compromised. And it was edited by the woman who engineered it for her own client. What did it actually accomplish? Biden's DOJ opened its own investigation in August 2022, 31 months, 2 million in legal fees, and then March 2025, Biden's administration closed the investigation. We get the investigation back. It was a nothing murder. Charges for sexual abuse? Charges for cover-up? Charges for conspiracy? There was one charge. They found one guy who lied to a federal agent about something nonsense, and so he got in trouble. But he didn't abuse anybody. He didn't cover up abuse of anybody. $2,000 fine, six months, house arrest. That was the devastating bombshell. Total cost of the SPC? $13 million. Legal fees, investigations, lawsuits. They sold their national headquarters, depleted reserves from $13 million down to $4 million. This isn't an ordinary $13 million. We're talking about $13 million in tides. The generous gifts of Sunday school classes, widows giving their might, special offerings for missionaries, work, evangelism, mercy ministry, it all came to pay off a completely unsubstantiated claim in accusation. The denomination was $17 million members, 47,000 churches, the largest conservative, Protestant denomination in America, gutted from the inside. When you look at all of the pieces of this and how it played out over years, I mean, you have things like Russell Moore's Chief of Staff, Philip Bethincourt, years before recording private meetings. And that's bizarre, right? When you go to a meeting with colleagues to work out some difference of opinion, do you record all the meetings? I don't do that. So I thought that was very strange. The leaking of Russell Moore's letters and the timing, that seemed pretty obviously orchestrated. He wrote these letters. They're almost comical in the way that he is giving information to the recipient, that the recipient, which certainly already know, indicating that his real intended audience for the letter is the public. So he would do things like, say, as you and I know, JD Greer, you and I have witnessed over years how Ronnie Floyd and this person have been incredibly negligent. You know, I'm paraphrasing. I'm barely scratching the surface here. It's unreal. It's just unreal. It won't shock you that the people who wanted this whole nightmare. Were the people pushing critical race theory? Were the people pushing what they called soft complementarianism, which is just women in the pulpit? It's just leftists masquerading as conservatives and since they can't argue about what they actually believe, they decided to demonize their opponents. That's what happened and now the truth is out. The more court rulings we get as we got in the page Patterson case, the more sworn testimony that is released from these lawsuits, particularly the one involving David and Mary Sills and Southern Seminary and Junfer Lyle. The more we learn the worse it gets, not because there was abuse but because there was out. Phase five complete, inherit everything. And if you think this was a one-time event, you haven't been paying attention. This isn't new and it's not unique to the SPC either. Harvard, Yale, Princeton Seminary, all were founded to train Christian ministers and they all lost liberalism. The PCUSA started ordaining women deacons in the 1950s and by the 1980s anyone who opposed women ordination was pushed out. Thirty years from that first compromise, the total capture. And now the PCA is considering female deacons when I bet what comes next. Same pattern, same plain book every time. And the pattern works every time because the same weakness. The Bible identifies it in the third chapter of Genesis. Adam was there during the temptation. Silent, passive, staining by. He abdicated his responsibility. And when God confronted him, he blamed me. God's verdict because you listened to the voice of your wife. God held Adam responsible for that institutional failure. For a failure to remain faithful to his fiduciary duty. The entire false abuse narrative in the SPC developed from men who were unwilling to stand up to women and a particular woman. They did not want to defy Rachel Den Hollander. And part of the reason I pinpoint that as the cause is because when you go back to the sort of the very beginning of how she became the abuse activist within the church, you have to remember that initially a few of them did stand against her when it came to CJ Mahaney and his organization. So, you know, the Al Mollers and some of the others did say, "Well, wait a minute. We think she's mischaracterizing or what what what happened with CJ Mahaney, his handling of abuse claims. We feel that she is not representing those truthfully." And she blasted everyone. And my sense is that that experience is what made all of these men go, "I will never cross her again." I think they felt like they came away from that disagreement, tarnished reputationally and that they were putting, you know, possibly their own positions at risk. And so I think you have a lot of men who were really committed to never crossing her again. And what that meant was that you couldn't cross any of these other women who she was speaking for in terms of church too. So, if all of them were saying, "I'm traumatized." And this was abuse because I didn't realize that I was in the sway of this other person's power than all that none of these men are going to respond to that. And that's what happened in the SBC. Man refused to stand up to women. They chose reputation over principle. They chose the fear of man over the fear of God and they surrendered institutional protection to avoid being called names. It's not biblical to say that adult women do not have moral agency. It's not biblical to redefine justice with psychological categories when God's word tells us clearly how to adjudicate claims. Look, it's not biblical. It's not to say that an adult woman, let's take the Johnny Hunt case, has some sort of sexual encounter with an adult man. And then 10 years later says, "In therapy, I realized that it wasn't consensual." I think if it's not consensual, you know it at the time if you're an adult woman. And so that was the part that I always had a problem with was that, you know, we were using these psychological definitions and not biblical definitions because the Bible tells us that if a woman is being sexually assaulted, she has an obligation to cry out, right? She has an obligation to alert someone. And that was not only not happening. We had women coming out 10 years later and saying, "Well, after working with my therapist, even though I was a middle-aged mom of five, I didn't realize that it was abuse and that I wasn't, you know, consensually participating until many years later. I just don't think that's biblical." For Lyle, the highest ranking female employee of the entire Southern Baptist Convention, for her having been sex abused by a professor she had once or twice years earlier and then conducted an affair with him across state lines for 12 years, going to his home considered part of his family by his wife and kids for over a decade while she was actually his boss, not directly but because she had control of whether his book's got published or not. And then when I don't know exactly what happened, something triggered something and all of a sudden she wants to make it into power dynamics and she was abused. Well, okay, this affair started when you were 26. Do we just not have agency? Is there just absolutely no sin nature in women? Can a woman not actually take responsibility for what's obviously adultery that's going on in the home of the wife they're cheating on? The question ultimately comes down to obedience. Obedience to God's clear word. Adam knew God's word but he listened to the voice of his wife. God's word clearly says that the first person to tell their story sounds compelling until the other side comes and tells their side of the story. That's basic Proverbs 1817. That's basic biblical justice. Biblical justice requires due process, careful evaluation of all sides and at least two or three witnesses. But the Me Too movement insisted that the biblical justice, it wasn't sufficient and it demanded that women always be believed while trying to shame Christians who pointed the biblical passage about the sins of women. Let's bring it back to the book and how does scripture tell us to deal with these issues? Because I think you know things like saying that women can knowingly seduce powerful men, that is something that we see in scripture. You see sinful women deliberately seducing powerful men and I also think you know what you will hear from a lot of those critics is they want to make certain passages hands off like how dare you? Like if you try to bring up Proverbs that warn young men away from seducing women, they will say how dare you or you are not allowed to bring up Potiphar's wife. Well I'm not going to play that game. I mean you know look all of the Bible is is open and available for us to reference. So if you are telling me no no no no because of you know these new psychology these new psychological boundaries that you have we can't bring up certain parts of the Bible that is a you problem because you are the one who are who is coordinating off certain parts of the word of God and saying you can apply those to our lives right now. July 23, 2019 just over a second of the blurred silhouette. Three board members resigned rather than be associated with questioning one woman. Four years later court documents proved the questioning was absolutely justified. Massive conflict of interest and illegal investigation 1.05 million dollars to her client 13 million dollars cost the denomination not missions not evangelism empty activism dead and investigations. Gary North documented exactly how the Christian Church keeps getting played. Phase by phase. Compromised by compromise the same five steps he warned that any conservative institution that didn't understand this playbook. conservative Christians keep caving to the emotional pleas of well-meaning people often women asking men to surrender their duties before God. Ultimately what makes men vulnerable to manipulation is guilt. Guilty people are insecure. But forgiven Christians know they are righteous before God. The accusations will come racism, misogyny protecting abusers all these accusations. If you are repented if you are walking in the Lord you will not be a soft target like those who are guilty. But guilty men are soft targets. Forgiven men are not. It's hard to fight sin and institutions when they're sin in you. So where are you? Where are you soft on set? Where are you vulnerable? Where do you need to confess real sins so you can't be manipulated by emotional demands? The SPC couldn't shake a guilty conscience over slavery, and it was vulnerable to the manipulative accusations of women. This stands as a warning for every conservative institution in America. It's not whether the playbook is coming for your institution. It is. The question is whether your man will stand. Those who fear the mob, more than they fear God, will serve the mob. The fear of man lays a snare, but whoever trusts in the Lord is safe. The problem is 29/25. [MUSIC]