U.S. Justice Department Rejects Russell Moore’s Slanderous SBC “Criminal Conspiracy” Claim

Now, messengers must reject and replace the failed SBC leaders who took the bait.

Mar 16, 2025

NOTE: I am deeply gratified by the outpouring of support this week, on social media and in person, for my stand on this debacle. Much of that has taken the form of “a lot of people owe Mike Stone, Ronnie Floyd, and Rod Martin an apology.” I’m grateful for that. But now we have to put out the fire these arsonists set. — RDM

by Jon Whitehead
March 16, 2025

Earlier today, Baptist Press reported that the U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) investigation into the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) and its entities is now closed—with no sexual abuse-related charges filed.

This outcome stands as a clear rebuke to the false prophets who’ve spent years slandering SBC conservatives.

As Denny Burk put it, “here’s bottom line on the SBC abuse ‘crisis.’ There wasn’t one. A federal investigation closed after making one arrest—not for abuse but for making false statements under oath. An independent investigation by Guidepost Solutions found no systemic problem with abuse at the SBC Executive Committee. We have spent about 14 million dollars in legal fees as a result of investigations that uncovered no systemic problems with abuse.”

Indeed, there was no “crisis.” But there were plenty of crisis merchants and fearmongerers who used this lie to destroy good men (like Mike Stone) in their quest for political power.

If it wasn’t clear yet, it is now: No one should remain in SBC leadership who pushed this false narrative.

Russell Moore, in his infamous “leaked” letters, peddled a narrative of systemic corruption and cover-up within the SBC Executive Committee (EC). This was demagoguery of the worst sort. It was a tale steeped in half-truths and self-righteousness, meant to whip messengers into a frenzy.

As I warned the Executive Committee in 2021, Moore planned a letter to be released before the 2020 Convention, which was cancelled due to COVID. He deceptively hid the letters and claims for a year before “leaking” a similar letter in 2021.

At the time, I told the EC that his letters “were written and leaked to shake messenger trust and confidence at an SBC annual meeting. The leak avoided disclosure to fiduciaries and a dispassionate investigation because the goal was to deprive the Convention of confidence in its entire fiduciary system.”

On the Center for Baptist Leadership podcast (above), I further explained that:

“The first step to understanding the crisis of leadership is to understand that two letters from Russell Moore were published just before the 2021 SBC Annual Meeting. They were dated more than a year apart.
“And the best explanation of the facts is that they show a plan—a plan not to put victims first, not to be a fiduciary, not to protect the weak, not to do justice. They show a months-long plan to hurt the Southern Baptist Convention as much as he could. To whip up messengers using old fashioned southern demogogery so they would lose trust in the Convention and pick up their torches and pitchforks, metaphorically, at the annual meeting.
“For more than a year, then, the letters show there wasn’t a little angel in the driver’s seat for Dr. Moore. In the driver’s seat was cold-blooded premeditated revenge against his enemies in the SBC.
“Once you understand the context of the letters, you begin to understand the magnitude of the leadership crisis we have in the SBC.”

The “magnitude” was made abundantly apparent when the Biden administration’s DOJ opened this investigation based on Moore’s allegations and the disastrous Guidepost Solutions report.

And the decision to drop the investigation without charges reveals there was no “there” there. It was a house of cards that collapsed under the weight of its own emptiness.

Moore’s accusations—amplified by a complicit secular media and parroted by activists with axes to grind—claimed the EC was a den of rape, molestation, and bigotry, covering up a vast conspiracy of abuse. He exited to Christianity Today, where he claimed, “I cannot help but wonder what else this can be called but a criminal conspiracy.”

Yet, after over two years of relentless scrutiny, from the costly Guidepost investigation to the DOJ’s probe under a Biden administration hardly sympathetic to conservative Christians, not one charge of sexual abuse emerges from the Executive Committee. Zero. Nada. Nothing.

There was no lone wolf, let alone a conspiracy.

The only charge emerging was not at the Executive Committee but against SWBTS Provost Matt Queen, who foolishly made up some notes related to a 2022 campus sex assault after Moore’s allegations dropped. Queen will pay a $2,000 fine, as he should. But the Guidepost report, despite its $14 million price tag draining SBC coffers, found no evidence of a coordinated cover-up.

The DOJ’s closure seals it: Moore’s crusade was built on sand.

Let’s not mince words—this was a hit job. Moore and his allies (including Phillip Bethancourt, J.D. Greear, Jared Wellman, Grant Gaines, and others) weaponized emotionalism and vague insinuations to smear faithful leaders because they wanted applause from the secular world.

Rod Martin rightly calls this what it is: A lie unraveling before our eyes. The SBC has been bled dry, both financially, with perhaps $20 million of legal fees, and spiritually, with trust fractured by those who’d rather signal virtue than stand for truth. The leaders who ascended on Moore’s fiction should admit they were accomplices, whether knowingly or not, and resign.

Don’t be fooled. This doesn’t mean sin is absent from every corner of the SBC. Local churches must remain vigilant; God hates sexual abuse. We should support SBC churches who report sexual abuse to authorities and care for victims of such crimes. I have laid out the path for real reform on the issue here: “The Path Forward on Abuse Reform in the SBC: Baptist Accountability.”

But the narrative of a national “abuse crisis” orchestrated at the SBC Executive Committee? It was false. The idea that SBC churches are especially dangerous? It was an argument made to help lawyers win verdicts.

We’ve weathered the storm of false witness. Now is the time to clear the rubble and rebuild.

Reject those who would spend your church’s missions dollars building their own reputation on this lie.

Rally around leaders who saw through the demagoguery.

And let’s get back to preaching the Gospel, unbowed and unashamed. The world’s watching—let them see a Convention that stands on the truth, not the shifting sands of whatever passes for progressive Christianity today elsewhere.

— Jon Whitehead is a lifelong Southern Baptist and the founding attorney of the Law Offices of Jonathan R. Whitehead LLC, located in Missouri. He is a trustee at the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the SBC and serves on the Advisory Board for the The Center of Baptist Leadership, where this article originally appeared.