When #MeToo became #ChurchToo, though, that was the beginning of the end. In a remarkably short period, the narrative changed. No longer was sexual abuse and exploitation a Hollywood problem or a secular problem; it was also an evangelical problem, and it was a problem in many of the most important institutions of the church.
The Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, faced a sexual abuse apocalypse, a series of scandals that my friend Russell Moore, a former head of the S.B.C.’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, called “a reality far more evil and systemic than I imagined it could be.”
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