Southern Baptist leaders covered up intercourse abuse, explosive report says

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

The findings of practically 300 pages embrace stunning new details about particular abuse instances and shine a light on how denominational leaders for decades actively resisted calls for abuse prevention and reform. Evidence in the report suggests leaders also lied to Southern Baptists over whether they may keep a database of offenders to forestall more abuse when high leaders were secretly preserving a non-public listing for years.

The report — the primary investigation of its variety in a massive Protestant denomination like the SBC — is anticipated to send shock waves all through a conservative Christian group that has had intense internal battles over tips on how to handle sex abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, along with other spiritual establishments in the USA, 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 overall number of abuse circumstances amongst Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for nearly two decades, survivors of abuse and other concerned Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Convention’s administrative arm to report alleged child molesters and other accused abusers who were within the pulpit or employed as church workers members. Many of the cases referred to within the report had been thought-about 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 referred to as Guidepost Options at the request of Southern Baptists, states that abuse survivors’ calls and emails had been “solely to be met, time and time again, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who were involved more with protecting the institution from legal responsibility than from protecting Southern Baptists from additional abuse.

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

Whereas the report focuses primarily on how leaders handled abuse issues when survivors came forward, it also states that a major Southern Baptist chief was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a woman only one month after he accomplished 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 on the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a lady throughout a Panama City Beach, Fla., trip in 2010.

The report states that Hunt, in an interview with investigators, denied any bodily 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 an announcement on Twitter, saying, “I vigorously deny the circumstances and characterizations set forth within the Guidepost report. I've 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 stated that before May 13, he was not conscious of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Generally, he referred to as the details of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

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Sex abuse survivors, lots of whom have been sharing their tales for years, anticipated Sunday’s release would confirm the information round most of the stories they have already shared, but many were nonetheless stunned to see the pattern of coverups by the very best levels of leadership.

“I knew it was rotten, but it’s astonishing and infuriating,” mentioned Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was once the highest-paid feminine govt at the SBC and whose story of sexual abuse at a Southern Baptist seminary is detailed within the report. “This is a denomination that's by means of and through about energy. It is misappropriated power. It doesn't in any way mirror the Jesus I see in the scriptures. I am so gutted.”

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

The third-party investigation into actions between 2000 and 2021 focused on actions by the SBC’s Government Committee, which handles financial and administrative duties. Although Southern Baptist churches function independently from one another, 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 show, Southern Baptists were instructed the denomination couldn't put collectively a registry of intercourse offenders because it could go towards 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 keep away from the opportunity of getting sued. The report additionally consists of non-public emails showing how longtime leaders corresponding to August Boto have been dismissive about sexual abuse considerations, calling them “a satanic scheme to fully distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 electronic mail, the conference’s legal professional despatched Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database may very well be implemented in keeping with SBC polity, saying “it would match our polity and current ministries to help church buildings in this area of kid abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he advisable “rapid motion to sign the Convention’s desire that the [executive committee] and the entities start a more aggressive effort in this space.” That same year, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a movement for a database, Boto rejected the idea.

For a denomination designed to offer more democratic energy to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to commission the third-party investigation, the report exhibits how lay Southern Baptists allowed a couple of key leaders, together with Boto and the conference’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to regulate the nationwide institutional response to intercourse abuse for decades. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, mentioned he had not read the report but. Attempts to achieve Boto on Sunday were unsuccessful.

“The report is going to validate so much about how they really blindly selected to stay 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 carry the weight.”

Throughout Govt Committee conferences in 2021, some members argued towards waiving attorney-client privilege, which would give investigators entry to data of conversations on legal issues among the committee’s members and staffers. They stated doing so went against the recommendation of convention attorneys and will bankrupt the SBC by exposing it to lawsuits.

The debate over waiving privilege upset a large swath of Southern Baptists, inflicting 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 additionally led to the resignation of the Government Committee’s head, Ronnie Floyd, who also once 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 throughout the report.

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In keeping with the report, Floyd advised SBC leaders in a 2019 email that he had acquired “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “rising concern about all the emphasis on the sexual abuse disaster.” He then stated: “Our precedence can't be the newest cultural crisis.” Floyd didn't immediately return a request for remark.

Christa Brown, who told SBC leaders that she was abused by a youth pastor who went on to serve in other Southern Baptist church buildings 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 Government Committee “turned his back to her throughout her speech and another chortled.”

“The Govt Committee betrayed not solely survivors who labored hard to try to make one thing occur, but betrayed the whole Southern Baptist Convention,” mentioned Brown, who is a retired appellate legal professional in Colorado. “They’ve made their own religion right into a complicit accomplice for their own determination to decide on institutional protection over the protection of youngsters and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists throughout its last annual assembly, comes just weeks earlier than its next gathering in Anaheim, Calif., the place members are expected discuss subsequent steps. Suggestions by Guidepost embrace offering devoted survivor advocacy help and a survivor compensation fund.

“We have to be able to take meaningful steps to vary our tradition as it pertains to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the present SBC president, stated in a statement.

Since many years of intercourse abuse and coverups in the Catholic Church were reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have published lists of priests they are saying have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to prevent the switch of abusers to other churches. 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 intercourse abuse crisis, wrote to the SBC and Government Committee presidents, in line with the report. He expressed his considerations that SBC leaders could be falling into a number of the same patterns as Catholic leaders in not coping with clergy sex abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists ought to learn from Catholic mistakes and take motion early on to implement structural reforms so as to make youngsters safer.

The report states that Frank Page, who was main the Executive Committee on the time, responded to Doyle in a brief letter that “Southern Baptist leaders actually don't have any authority over native church buildings” however that they would attempt to use their “affect” to offer protections. In an article, Page accused a survivor group of having a hidden agenda of establishing the nation’s largest Protestant body for lawsuits. Page later resigned from his position in 2018 over having a “morally inappropriate relationship.” Page didn't instantly 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 activity force on the problem and stated that the report shows a need for institutions like the SBC to seek exterior expertise on sex abuse.

“It reveals a degree of coverup and harassment and resistance to reforms on an institutional stage that has led to many years of survivors being victimized and damage,” Denhollander mentioned. “The question Southern Baptists need to ask is, ‘How may this happen?’”

The problem of intercourse abuse was a outstanding theme in leaked personal letters written by Russell Moore, who left his place in 2021 as head of the SBC’s coverage arm, the Ethics & Non secular Liberty Commission. Moore stated he expects Southern Baptists to obtain Sunday’s report in an identical 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 on this report are breathtaking,” Moore stated. “Individuals will say, ‘This is not all Southern Baptists, take a 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 consider replacing 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 20 years fighting for reform.