The pattern is agency diffusion. Responsibility is blurred by describing events without naming who acted, decided, or failed. “Mistakes were made.” The verb has no owner. The harm is described. The person who caused it is not. The sentence is built so the verb has no subject.
The pattern is not partisan property. It works the same way in a church denomination and an intelligence community. Two rooms, same machinery.
Room one: the denomination
In 2019, the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News published “Abuse of Faith,” a six-month investigation documenting that since the 1990s, at least 30 Southern Baptist Convention churches were aware that a pastor, employee, or volunteer had faced allegations of sexual misconduct and hired them anyway or allowed them to continue serving. The investigation identified more than 700 people, most of them children, who had been sexually abused by Southern Baptist pastors, church employees, or volunteers over two decades.
The denomination had a secret list. The Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee maintained a private list of hundreds of abusive pastors. The list was kept secret from most of the denomination’s own leaders. Survivors and advocates had spent more than 15 years asking the denomination to act. The men who controlled the Executive Committee chose to protect the denomination from lawsuits rather than protect the people in their churches.
The 2022 Guidepost Solutions investigation, commissioned by the denomination itself, found that Executive Committee general counsel Augie Boto and longtime attorney Jim Guenther advised three successive EC presidents that taking action on abuse would pose a risk to SBC liability. The lawyers advised silence. The presidents complied. The abuse continued.
In June 2022, the Southern Baptist Convention approved a resolution of “lament and repentance.” The resolution stated that Southern Baptists “publicly apologize to and ask forgiveness from survivors of sexual abuse for our failure to care well for survivors, for our failure to hold perpetrators of sexual abuse adequately accountable in our churches and institutions, for our institutional responses which have prioritized the reputation of our institutions over protection and justice for survivors.”
Read the sentences. “Our failure to care well.” “Our failure to hold perpetrators adequately accountable.” “Institutional responses which have prioritized the reputation of our institutions.” The harm is described. The people who made the decisions are not. Augie Boto is not named in the resolution. Jim Guenther is not named. The three EC presidents who followed the lawyers’ advice are not named. The actors who chose to protect the denomination from lawsuits rather than protect children from predators are absent from the sentences.
The resolution uses “our failure” as a collective noun that dissolves the specific decision-makers into the membership. The denomination apologizes. The people who made the decisions remain in place. The leverage the survivors held is spent on a resolution the institution controls.
That is agency diffusion. The harm is acknowledged. The actor disappears. The passive voice is not a style choice. It is a structural erasure of accountability.
Room two: the intelligence community
In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq on the basis of intelligence assessments claiming Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. The assessments were wrong. No WMDs were found. The Iraq Survey Group, led by Charles Duelfer, issued its final report in September 2004 confirming that Iraq had no active WMD programs at the time of the invasion.
The institutional response used the same grammar as the denomination’s resolution. “Intelligence was flawed.” “Assessments were incorrect.” “Mistakes were made.” The intelligence was treated as a thing that went wrong on its own, not as a product shaped by specific officials who made specific decisions to present uncertain evidence as certain.
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s 2004 report on prewar intelligence assessments documented that the intelligence community’s case was built on sources of varying reliability, including a source code-named Curveball whose claims about Iraqi mobile biological weapons laboratories were doubted by the only U.S. intelligence officer who had actually questioned him. The case was shaped. The dissent was suppressed. The uncertainty was removed before the intelligence reached the public. Specific officials made those decisions. Their names largely disappeared from the accountability sentences.
No senior official was fired for the WMD intelligence failure. George Tenet, the Director of Central Intelligence who told President Bush the WMD case was a “slam dunk,” received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The officials who shaped the intelligence, who pressured analysts, who presented the case to the public with false certainty, remained in place or retired with honors. The intelligence was flawed. Nobody did it.
The pattern is the same. Active voice for achievements: “we delivered,” “we achieved,” “we liberated.” Passive voice for failures: “intelligence was flawed,” “assessments were incorrect,” “mistakes were made.” The asymmetry is the tell.
What is the same
The mechanism is agency diffusion. In both rooms, the harm is described in detail. The actor is described in nothing. In both rooms, the passive voice makes the harm sound like weather, an event that happened without an author. In both rooms, the apology or the acknowledgment is real. The accountability is not. In both rooms, the people who made the decisions remain in place or depart with their reputations intact.
The test is simple. Rewrite the sentence in active voice. If the actor’s identity changes the meaning, the passive was doing political work. “Mistakes were made in the approval process” becomes “Augie Boto and Jim Guenther advised the Executive Committee to do nothing about abusive pastors to protect the denomination from lawsuits.” The second sentence is harder to issue. The first sentence is the one the institution chose. “Intelligence was flawed” becomes “Specific intelligence officials suppressed dissent from the Energy Department and presented uncertain evidence as certain to build the public case for war.” The second sentence is harder to issue. The first sentence is the one the institution chose.
The passive voice is the architecture. The institution admits the harm while making the author of the harm structurally unreachable. The apology is real. The accountability is not.
What is different
The harm is not the same. The SBC case involves hundreds of abused children and a denomination that protected itself from liability while predators remained in pulpits. The Iraq case involves a war built on false intelligence that killed hundreds of thousands of people and destabilized a region for decades. Different scales. Same grammatical erasure.
The SBC case involves a religious institution that claimed moral authority over its members while protecting predators within its ranks. The Iraq case involves a government that claimed national security authority while presenting false intelligence as fact to justify an invasion. Different institutions. Same pattern. The actor disappears. The harm is acknowledged. The accountability is not.
The question
The sentence has no subject. The harm has no author. The apology was issued. The people who made the decisions are still in place, or retired with honors, or serving on other boards. The question is who made the decision, and who is still in the room.