I grew up Baptist, and still have family members who belong to churches that are part of the Southern Baptist Convention. Southern Baptist congregations, it must be said, really are independent. For someone who belongs to a hierarchical church, that may be hard to grasp, but it's not theory ... it's practice and on-the-ground fact.

I know very few Southern Baptists who would tolerate the least bit of interference in how they run their local churches. Belonging to the Conference is more about what they put on the sign out front than what they do inside the doors.

They call themselves Southern Baptist because they like the brand. It also influences what missionaries they support and perhaps what hymnals they buy, but even that's not a sure thing.

So the Conference is never going to be able to set mandatory policies binding congregations. If a congregation doesn't like it, they'll just leave, in a heartbeat. That happens all the time anyway. Congregations come and go fairly fluidly. As far as most Baptists in the South are concerned, a Baptist is a Baptist. Conference affiliation isn't all that critical.

But that doesn't mean I'm defending Conference leaders, far from it. Just because they don't have authority to set policy doesn't mean they were morally right to sit on those reports and keep them from people who needed to know that pastors were dangerous to women and children.

The fact that Conference leaders considered institutional interests over morality and Christian principles is damning in the extreme. They had information about pastors and other church leaders who were actively harming people, and they sat on that information when they could have released it to people at risk and to people who could have done something to stop it.

That they did so, that they put people at risk of harm, in order to protect the interests of the Conference, which most Southern Baptists don't care all that much about anyway, is incredibly damning.

It calls into question the very purpose of the Conference. If it's just going to wash its hands of everything, is there even a reason for it to exist?

You can bet your boots that lots of Southern Baptists in small congregations, meaning most Southern Baptists, are asking themselves that right now.

Most of them don't give a damn about branding. They're more interested in how their 300 or 400 person congregation can pay the mortgage and the pastor. So you know they're thinking about changing that sign out front. Thinking pretty hard, probably.