Southern Baptist leaders lined up intercourse abuse, explosive report says

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

The findings of practically 300 pages embrace stunning new details about particular abuse instances and shine a light-weight on how denominational leaders for decades actively resisted requires abuse prevention and reform. Proof in the report suggests leaders additionally lied to Southern Baptists over whether they might preserve a database of offenders to prevent extra abuse when top leaders were secretly keeping a private record for years.

The report — the first investigation of its form in a large Protestant denomination like the SBC — is anticipated to send shock waves all through a conservative Christian group that has had intense inside battles over learn how to handle intercourse abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, together with other religious institutions in the United States, has struggled with declining membership for the previous 15 years. Its leaders have lengthy resisted comparisons between its sexual abuse disaster and that of the Catholic Church, saying the full variety of abuse instances among Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for nearly twenty years, survivors of abuse and different involved Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Convention’s administrative arm to report alleged little one molesters and other accused abusers who were in the pulpit or employed as church staff members. Most of the instances referred to within the report were considered outdoors the statute of limitations, the time survivors can report intercourse abuse, so it’s unclear what number of abusers have been criminally charged.

The report, compiled by a company known as Guidepost Solutions at the request of Southern Baptists, states that abuse survivors’ calls and emails have been “only to be met, time and time again, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who had been involved extra with protecting the institution from legal responsibility than from protecting Southern Baptists from further abuse.

“Whereas stories of abuse were minimized, and survivors were ignored or even vilified, revelations came to light lately that some senior SBC leaders had protected or even supported alleged abusers, the report states.

Whereas the report focuses primarily 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 woman only one month after he completed his two-year tenure as president of the conference. The report finds that Johnny Hunt, a beloved Georgia-based Southern Baptist pastor who has been a senior vice chairman at the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a woman throughout a Panama Metropolis Beach, Fla., trip in 2010.

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

Hunt resigned on Could 13 from the North American Mission Board, in response to a statement by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell mentioned that before Might 13, he was not conscious of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Usually, he known as the small print of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

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Intercourse abuse survivors, lots of whom have been sharing their stories for years, anticipated Sunday’s launch would affirm the info around lots of the stories they've already shared, however many have been still shocked to see the pattern of coverups by the best ranges of leadership.

“I knew it was rotten, but it surely’s astonishing and infuriating,” mentioned Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was as soon as the highest-paid female govt at the SBC and whose story of sexual abuse at a Southern Baptist seminary is detailed within the report. “It is a denomination that is by way of and through about energy. It's misappropriated energy. It does not in any method mirror the Jesus I see in the scriptures. I'm so gutted.”

The report also names several senior SBC leaders who protected and even supported alleged abusers, including three previous presidents of the conference, a former vp and the former 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 monetary and administrative duties. Though Southern Baptist church buildings function independently from each other, the Nashville-based Govt Committee distributes more than $190 million cooperative program in its annual price range that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For many years, the findings present, Southern Baptists have been informed the denomination could not put collectively a registry of sex offenders as a result of it will go in opposition to the denomination’s polity — or how it capabilities. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained a list of offenders whereas protecting it a secret to avoid the potential for getting sued. The report also contains non-public emails displaying how longtime leaders such as August Boto have been dismissive about sexual abuse issues, calling them “a satanic scheme to fully distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 email, the conference’s legal professional despatched Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database could possibly be implemented per SBC polity, saying “it might fit our polity and present ministries to help church buildings in this space of kid abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he really helpful “rapid motion to sign the Convention’s need that the [executive committee] and the entities begin a more aggressive effort on this space.” That very same yr, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a movement for a database, Boto rejected the idea.

For a denomination designed to present extra 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 couple of key leaders, including Boto and the conference’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to manage the nationwide institutional response to intercourse abuse for decades. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, said he had not read the report but. Attempts to succeed in Boto on Sunday have been unsuccessful.

“The report is going to validate so much about how they really blindly chose to remain on the identical path all these years,” said Tiffany Thigpen, whose story of sexual abuse in a Southern Baptist church is detailed within the report. “It buoys what we’ve been saying all along. Now Southern Baptists have to hold the load.”

During Government Committee conferences in 2021, some members argued towards waiving attorney-client privilege, which would give investigators entry to information of conversations on legal issues among the committee’s members and staffers. They mentioned doing so went in opposition to the recommendation of convention lawyers and could bankrupt the SBC by exposing it to lawsuits.

The controversy over waiving privilege upset a big swath of Southern Baptists, inflicting some to imagine the Govt 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 additionally led to the resignation of the Government 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 choice over attorney-client privilege also led to the resignation of the conference’s attorneys, who're named throughout the report.

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According to the report, Floyd advised SBC leaders in a 2019 electronic mail that he had received “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “rising concern about all of the emphasis on the sexual abuse disaster.” He then said: “Our precedence can't be the newest cultural disaster.” Floyd did not instantly return a request for comment.

Christa Brown, who advised SBC leaders that she was abused by a youth pastor who went on to serve in different Southern Baptist churches in multiple states, has lengthy 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 Govt Committee “turned his back to her during her speech and another chortled.”

“The Government Committee betrayed not solely survivors who labored exhausting to try to make something occur, but betrayed the whole Southern Baptist Conference,” said Brown, who is a retired appellate legal professional in Colorado. “They’ve made their own faith right into a complicit associate for their very own choice to choose institutional safety over the protection of youngsters and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists throughout its last annual meeting, comes simply weeks before its subsequent gathering in Anaheim, Calif., the place members are expected talk about next steps. Recommendations by Guidepost embody offering devoted survivor advocacy help and a survivor compensation fund.

“We should be ready to take significant steps to vary our tradition as it pertains to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the present SBC president, said in a statement.

Since a long time of sex abuse and coverups in the Catholic Church have been reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have published lists of clergymen they are saying have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to stop the transfer of abusers to other church buildings. Not like 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 intercourse abuse crisis, wrote to the SBC and Govt Committee presidents, in keeping with the report. He expressed his issues that SBC leaders might be falling into a few of the similar patterns as Catholic leaders in not coping with clergy intercourse abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists should study from Catholic errors and take motion early on to implement structural reforms in order to make children safer.

The report states that Frank Page, who was leading the Govt Committee at the time, responded to Doyle in a short letter that “Southern Baptist leaders actually have no authority over native church buildings” however that they might attempt to make use of their “influence” to supply protections. In an article, Page accused a survivor group of getting a hidden agenda of establishing the nation’s largest Protestant body for lawsuits. Page later resigned from his place in 2018 over having a “morally inappropriate relationship.” Web page didn't immediately return a request for comment.

Rachael Denhollander, a former USA gymnast who outed Larry Nassar’s serial sexual assaults, is an adviser on a Southern Baptist process pressure on the difficulty and stated that the report reveals a need for institutions like the SBC to hunt outside experience on intercourse abuse.

“It shows a degree of coverup and harassment and resistance to reforms on an institutional level that has led to a long time of survivors being victimized and hurt,” Denhollander stated. “The question Southern Baptists have to ask is, ‘How may this happen?’”

The issue of sex abuse was a prominent theme in leaked personal letters written by Russell Moore, who left his place in 2021 as head of the SBC’s policy arm, the Ethics & Spiritual Liberty Commission. Moore stated he expects Southern Baptists to obtain Sunday’s report in a similar way 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 stated. “Folks will say, ‘This is not all Southern Baptists, look at all the great we do.’ The report demonstrates a sample of stonewalling, coverup, intimidation and retaliation.”

Moore stated he hopes the SBC will consider changing a statue of evangelist Billy Graham, which was moved from Nashville to Graham’s residence state in 2016, with a statue of Christa Brown, the abuse survivor who spent the previous 20 years fighting for reform.