Jonathan Howe: ‘Online survivor folks just want to burn things to the ground. They just have to be ignored.’
Vice President of the Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee Jonathan Howe insulted the online sex abuse survivor community in emails released as part of the Sex Abuse Task Force report. The report released Sunday by Guidestone contained several stunning revelations ranging from an accusation of sexual abuse involving a former President of the Southern Baptist Convention. However, we should not ignore how current SBC employees respond to outside criticism. Howe attack sex abuse survivors and advocates—which fits in with a long history of incompetence and partisanship.
According to the Guidestone report, “The VP of Communications, Jonathan Howe, replied with an observation on the survivor community’s responses to Ms. Lyell’s tweets: ‘The ‘survivor community’ is all up in arms about things they have no clue about,’ adding later, ‘online survivor folks, they just want to burn things to the ground. They just have to be ignored. They don’t reason; they don’t listen.’ The VP added in his response to Dr. Floyd that ‘Obviously, I don’t know what happened with that email and that entire string – who saw it, what Augie or Sing advised, how much they ever shared with you, or even if you actually wrote that. But that section is the critical part to her . . . because of the way [Ms. Lyell] was treated by those before you got here, she was out of grace and understanding.’”
Notice the smugness in this email. Howe says the survivor community is “up in arms about things they have no clue about.” That’s Caring Well!
And then notice that Howe attributes the worst possible motive to sex abuse survivors and advocates—they just want to burn things to the ground.
That makes them sound like revolutionary Bolsheviks and not people entitled to compassion and understanding. Yet, this is just how SBC Elites do things—they say one thing in public and something very different in private.
Isn’t there a word for people like Jonathan Howe? Oh yes, I remember, Hypocrite. Jonathan Howe’s email shows Howe to be a giant hypocrite.
And of course, he is also incompetent.
He was instrumental in the Baptist Press lie that denied George Soros’s involvement in funding the start of the Evangelical Immigration Table through the Soros funded National Immigration Forum. In fact, Howe and Baptist Press were so incompetent in that story that they quoted an employee of the National Immigration Forum who penned blog posts for Soros’s Open Society Foundation—the subject of those blog posts? Galvanizing American Christians to support the immigration plans of the Soros foundation.
It would be a comical level of incompetence were it not funded by church tithes and offerings sent to the Southern Baptist Convention by your local SBC church as part of the Cooperative Program.
And Howe has a long history with a number of questionable persons in the SBC Elite—like for example the Whitfields. Keith Whitfield is engulfed in the Buck blackmail case—and refuses to help Tom Buck expose the blackmailers. Is this why Baptist Press and Howe have not penned any stories about the evil attack on Tom and Jennifer Buck?
Ultimately, Howe doesn’t care about survivors. Howe should be fired for that. However, there are also a host of other reasons including incompetence. Baptist Press needs new leadership. The SBC Executive Committee must hold staffers accountable who write such evil things about sex abuse survivors.