Southern Baptist leaders lined up sex abuse, explosive report says

Leaders within the Southern Baptist Convention on Sunday launched a significant third-party investigation that found that sex abuse survivors had been often ignored, minimized and “even vilified” by prime clergy in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

The findings of almost 300 pages embrace surprising new details about particular abuse circumstances and shine a light on how denominational leaders for many years actively resisted calls for abuse prevention and reform. Proof within the report suggests leaders also lied to Southern Baptists over whether or not they may keep a database of offenders to forestall more abuse when top leaders were secretly retaining a personal record for years.

The report — the first investigation of its variety in an enormous Protestant denomination like the SBC — is anticipated to send shock waves all through a conservative Christian community that has had intense inner battles over how to deal with sex abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, together with different religious institutions in america, has struggled with declining membership for the past 15 years. Its leaders have long resisted comparisons between its sexual abuse disaster and that of the Catholic Church, saying the entire number of abuse instances among Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for nearly two decades, survivors of abuse and other involved Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Convention’s administrative arm to report alleged baby molesters and different accused abusers who have been within the pulpit or employed as church staff members. Lots of the cases referred to within the report were thought of outdoors the statute of limitations, the time survivors can report sex abuse, so it’s unclear how many abusers were criminally charged.

The report, compiled by a corporation known as Guidepost Solutions on the request of Southern Baptists, states that abuse survivors’ calls and emails had been “only to be met, time and time once more, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who had been concerned more with protecting the establishment from liability than from protecting Southern Baptists from additional abuse.

“While stories of abuse were minimized, and survivors have been ignored and even vilified, revelations got here to gentle lately that some senior SBC leaders had protected and even supported alleged abusers, the report states.

While the report focuses totally on how leaders dealt with abuse issues when survivors came forward, it additionally states that a main Southern Baptist chief was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a lady just one month after he completed his two-year tenure as president of the convention. The report finds that Johnny Hunt, a beloved Georgia-based Southern Baptist pastor who has been a senior vp at the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a lady during a Panama Metropolis Beach, Fla., vacation in 2010.

The report states that Hunt, in an interview with investigators, denied any physical contact with the girl but acknowledged that he had interactions together with her. After the report was launched, Hunt, who has not been charged over the alleged incident, posted an announcement on Twitter, saying, “I vigorously deny the circumstances and characterizations set forth in the Guidepost report. I have never abused anyone.”

Hunt resigned on May 13 from the North American Mission Board, in accordance with an announcement by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell mentioned that before Could 13, he was not conscious of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Typically, he referred to as the main points of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

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Intercourse abuse survivors, a lot of whom have been sharing their tales for years, anticipated Sunday’s launch would verify the information around lots of the stories they have already shared, but many had been still stunned to see the pattern of coverups by the very best levels of management.

“I knew it was rotten, but it’s astonishing and infuriating,” stated Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was as soon as the highest-paid female government on the SBC and whose story of sexual abuse at a Southern Baptist seminary is detailed in the report. “This is a denomination that is through and thru about power. It's misappropriated energy. It doesn't in any approach reflect the Jesus I see within the scriptures. I'm so gutted.”

The report additionally names several senior SBC leaders who protected and even supported alleged abusers, together with three previous presidents of the conference, a former vice chairman and the previous head of the SBC’s administrative arm.

The third-party investigation into actions between 2000 and 2021 targeted on actions by the SBC’s Government Committee, which handles financial and administrative duties. Although Southern Baptist churches function independently from each other, the Nashville-based Executive Committee distributes more than $190 million cooperative program in its annual budget that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For many years, the findings present, Southern Baptists were told the denomination couldn't put together a registry of sex offenders as a result of it would go in opposition to the denomination’s polity — or the way it capabilities. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained an inventory of offenders while maintaining it a secret to avoid the potential of getting sued. The report additionally consists of non-public emails showing how longtime leaders reminiscent of August Boto have been dismissive about sexual abuse concerns, calling them “a satanic scheme to utterly distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 electronic mail, the convention’s lawyer sent Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database could possibly be implemented in keeping with SBC polity, saying “it could match our polity and current ministries to help churches in this area of kid abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he really helpful “speedy action to sign the Conference’s need that the [executive committee] and the entities start a extra aggressive effort on this area.” That same year, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a motion for a database, Boto rejected the concept.

For a denomination designed to give more democratic energy to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to fee the third-party investigation, the report reveals how lay Southern Baptists allowed a number of key leaders, together with Boto and the conference’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to manage the nationwide institutional response to intercourse abuse for many years. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, mentioned he had not learn the report yet. Makes an attempt to achieve Boto on Sunday had been unsuccessful.

“The report goes to validate a lot about how they really blindly selected to stay on the same path all these years,” said Tiffany Thigpen, whose story of sexual abuse in a Southern Baptist church is detailed in the report. “It buoys what we’ve been saying all alongside. Now Southern Baptists have to hold the burden.”

Throughout Govt Committee meetings in 2021, some members argued in opposition to waiving attorney-client privilege, which would give investigators access to data of conversations on authorized matters among the many committee’s members and staffers. They said doing so went towards the recommendation of conference legal professionals and will bankrupt the SBC by exposing it to lawsuits.

The controversy over waiving privilege upset a big swath of Southern Baptists, causing some to imagine the Executive Committee was not doing the “will of the messengers,” or following the lead of lay leaders who had already voted in favor of doing so. It also led to the resignation of the Govt Committee’s head, Ronnie Floyd, who additionally as soon as served as SBC president and was on President Donald Trump’s evangelical advisory council. The decision over attorney-client privilege additionally led to the resignation of the conference’s attorneys, who're named all through the report.

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In line with the report, Floyd told SBC leaders in a 2019 e mail that he had acquired “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “rising concern about all of the emphasis on the sexual abuse crisis.” He then acknowledged: “Our precedence can't be the newest cultural crisis.” Floyd did not instantly return a request for comment.

Christa Brown, who told SBC leaders that she was abused by a youth pastor who went on to serve in different Southern Baptist church buildings in multiple states, has long advocated a churchwide database and was met with hostility. The report states that when she met with SBC leaders in 2007, a member of the Executive Committee “turned his back to her throughout her speech and one other chortled.”

“The Government Committee betrayed not solely survivors who labored onerous to attempt to make something occur, however betrayed the entire Southern Baptist Conference,” said Brown, who's a retired appellate attorney in Colorado. “They’ve made their very own faith right into a complicit partner for their own determination to choose institutional protection over the protection of children and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists throughout its final annual meeting, comes simply weeks earlier than its next gathering in Anaheim, Calif., where members are expected discuss next steps. Suggestions by Guidepost include offering devoted survivor advocacy assist and a survivor compensation fund.

“We should be ready to take significant steps to change our culture because it relates to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the current SBC president, mentioned in a statement.

Since a long time of sex abuse and coverups in the Catholic Church had been reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have printed lists of monks they are saying have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to stop the transfer of abusers to other church buildings. In contrast to the Catholic Church, the SBC has a non-hierarchical structure.

In March 2007, the Rev. Thomas Doyle, a priest and canon lawyer who first warned of the looming Catholic sex abuse disaster, wrote to the SBC and Government Committee presidents, in keeping with the report. He expressed his considerations that SBC leaders may very well be falling into a number of the identical patterns as Catholic leaders in not coping with clergy sex abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists should study from Catholic mistakes and take motion early on to implement structural reforms in order to make youngsters safer.

The report states that Frank Page, who was leading the Executive Committee on the time, responded to Doyle in a short letter that “Southern Baptist leaders actually haven't any authority over native church buildings” but that they might try to use their “influence” to supply protections. In an article, Page accused a survivor group of getting a hidden agenda of setting up the nation’s largest Protestant physique for lawsuits. Web page later resigned from his place in 2018 over having a “morally inappropriate relationship.” Web page didn't instantly return a request for remark.

Rachael Denhollander, a former USA gymnast who outed Larry Nassar’s serial sexual assaults, is an adviser on a Southern Baptist task force on the difficulty and said that the report exhibits a need for establishments like the SBC to seek exterior expertise on sex abuse.

“It reveals a level of coverup and harassment and resistance to reforms on an institutional level that has led to decades of survivors being victimized and damage,” Denhollander mentioned. “The query Southern Baptists need to ask is, ‘How could this occur?’”

The problem of intercourse abuse was a prominent theme in leaked personal letters written by Russell Moore, who left his position in 2021 as head of the SBC’s policy arm, the Ethics & Non secular Liberty Commission. Moore stated he expects Southern Baptists to obtain Sunday’s report in the same method to how Nikita Khrushchev shocked the Soviet Union when he detailed Joseph Stalin’s crimes in a speech in 1956.

“The depths of wickedness and inhumanity in this report are breathtaking,” Moore mentioned. “Folks will say, ‘This is not all Southern Baptists, look at all the nice we do.’ The report demonstrates a sample of stonewalling, coverup, intimidation and retaliation.”

Moore mentioned he hopes the SBC will think about changing a statue of evangelist Billy Graham, which was moved from Nashville to Graham’s dwelling state in 2016, with a statue of Christa Brown, the abuse survivor who spent the previous twenty years fighting for reform.