"The SBC contacted their lawyers to see if they had a duty to report it to the police — and concluded they didn’t."

Their lawyers. They called their lawyers. They called their lawyers to find out if they needed to do anything about a girl being raped.

You know, leaders affiliated with the SBC took obvious delight criticizing the Catholic Church over doing exactly the same thing. Will the SBC's reputation become as besmearched as the reputation of the Catholic hierarchy?

I first got wind of the report's publication a little more than 24 hours ago when the Washington Post broke the news, and at first I wasn't sure whether the results were more or less damaging for the SBC than expected.

But every hour that passes, every victims group that speaks up, every analyst who kicks in makes it obvious that it's not just more damaging than expected but much more damaging.

The Evangelical movement in general and the SBC in particular have made their bones on moral superiority, on holding themselves and their traditional (read: regressive) values out as refuges, solutions to the nation's problems. On offering up their moral goodness to be emulated.

Can the movement survive this cold splash of reality? Probably, but everything just got much harder for them.