Sam Currin indicted fin tax fraud case

Posted: 5/02/06

Sam Currin indicted in tax fraud case

By Robert Marus

Associated Baptist Press

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (ABP)—One of the men instrumental in the Southern Baptist Convention’s 1990 move to defund its historic public-affairs agency faces federal charges.

Sam Currin, who served as a member of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty’s board of directors for eight years in the 1980s and early ’90s, reportedly was indicted by a North Carolina federal grand jury April 18. The Raleigh lawyer has been charged with being part of a conspiracy to help clients avoid federal taxes by setting up trusts, bank accounts and credit cards in various foreign locales in the Caribbean Ocean.

Currin served on the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina’s board of directors prior to the indictment. State convention spokesman Norman Jameson said April 28 that Currin had resigned from that post. Convention records list him as being a member of Hayes Barton Baptist Church in Raleigh.

Currin also has served as chairman of the North Carolina Republican Party, a federal prosecutor, a judge and a staffer for retired Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.).

He played a lead role in one of the main skirmishes of the decade-long war between fundamentalists and moderates in the Southern Baptist Convention during the 1980s. James Dunn, retired executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee, Currin as one of several board members sent by SBC fundamentalists to try to move the public-affairs agency to the right.

Unable to win other members of the BJC’s board—made up of representatives from most of the nation’s Baptist denominations—to their cause, SBC conservatives eventually decided to yank the denomination’s funding for the agency. The convention began removing BJC funding from the SBC budget in 1990, cutting it out completely the next year.

“It is absolutely true and indisputable that they (Currin and others) were put on the Baptist Joint Committee to turn it from its historic position—or destroy it,” Dunn said.

Currin and other SBC conservatives complained that the agency, which historically had advocated for strict separation of church and state and religious freedom, leaned too far to the political left. They attempted to get the BJC to support causes popular among political conservatives.

“They were trying to get us to approve (government-sanctioned) school prayer—an amendment that would approve school prayer,” Dunn said.

Currin and his ideological allies tried to get the organization to endorse Robert Bork when President Ronald Reagan nominated him for a seat on the Supreme Court in 1987, Dunn added. The Senate defeated the nomination after opposition groups highlighted Bork’s controversial views on abortion rights, civil rights, church-state separation and other issues.

More recently, Currin played a role in supporting conservatives in another organization in which he is active—the Sons of Confederate Veterans. The Raleigh Independent reported Currin was appointed in 2004 as the Confederate group’s chief legal officer after a group opposed to modernizing the organization solidified their control over it.