Southern Baptist leaders covered up sex abuse, explosive report says

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

The findings of nearly 300 pages embrace surprising new details about particular abuse circumstances and shine a lightweight on how denominational leaders for many years actively resisted calls for abuse prevention and reform. Evidence within the report suggests leaders also lied to Southern Baptists over whether they may preserve a database of offenders to prevent extra abuse when prime leaders had been secretly maintaining a non-public record for years.

The report — the first investigation of its kind in an enormous Protestant denomination just like the SBC — is expected to ship shock waves throughout a conservative Christian group that has had intense inside battles over how you can deal with sex abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, along with other religious institutions in america, has struggled with declining membership for the past 15 years. Its leaders have lengthy resisted comparisons between its sexual abuse disaster and that of the Catholic Church, saying the total number of abuse circumstances among Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for almost twenty years, 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 workers members. Many of the instances referred to within the report have been thought-about outside the statute of limitations, the time survivors can report intercourse abuse, so it’s unclear how many abusers had been criminally charged.

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

“Whereas tales of abuse have been minimized, and survivors were ignored or even vilified, revelations got here to gentle in recent years that some senior SBC leaders had protected and even supported alleged abusers, the report states.

While the report focuses primarily on how leaders dealt with abuse issues when survivors came ahead, it also states that a major Southern Baptist chief was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a lady just one month after he accomplished 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 on the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a woman throughout a Panama Metropolis Seashore, Fla., trip in 2010.

The report states that Hunt, in an interview with investigators, denied any physical contact with the lady 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 anybody.”

Hunt resigned on Could 13 from the North American Mission Board, based on a statement by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell mentioned that earlier than Might 13, he was not aware of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Typically, he called 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 stories for years, anticipated Sunday’s launch would affirm the information around many of the stories they've already shared, however many had been nonetheless shocked to see the sample of coverups by the best ranges of management.

“I knew it was rotten, but it’s astonishing and infuriating,” stated Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was once the highest-paid feminine govt on the SBC and whose story of sexual abuse at a Southern Baptist seminary is detailed in the report. “It is a denomination that's through and thru about energy. It is misappropriated power. It does not in any manner replicate the Jesus I see within the scriptures. I'm so gutted.”

The report additionally names a number of senior SBC leaders who protected and even supported alleged abusers, including three past presidents of the conference, a former vice president 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 financial and administrative duties. Although Southern Baptist churches function independently from each other, the Nashville-based Govt Committee distributes greater than $190 million cooperative program in its annual finances that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For many years, the findings show, Southern Baptists had been advised the denomination could not put together a registry of sex offenders as a result of it will go against the denomination’s polity — or how it capabilities. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained a listing of offenders while conserving it a secret to avoid the opportunity of getting sued. The report also contains private emails exhibiting how longtime leaders such as August Boto were dismissive about sexual abuse considerations, calling them “a satanic scheme to completely distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 email, the convention’s attorney despatched Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database might be carried out in step with SBC polity, saying “it might fit our polity and current ministries to assist church buildings in this area of kid abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he beneficial “instant action to signal the Conference’s want that the [executive committee] and the entities start a more aggressive effort in this area.” That very same 12 months, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a movement for a database, Boto rejected the thought.

For a denomination designed to present more democratic power to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to fee the third-party investigation, the report shows how lay Southern Baptists allowed a couple of key leaders, including Boto and the conference’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to control the nationwide institutional response to intercourse abuse for decades. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, stated he had not learn the report yet. Makes an attempt to succeed in Boto on Sunday have been unsuccessful.

“The report goes to validate so much about how they really blindly chose 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 alongside. Now Southern Baptists have to carry the burden.”

During Govt Committee meetings in 2021, some members argued in opposition to waiving attorney-client privilege, which might give investigators entry to data of conversations on legal issues among the committee’s members and staffers. They mentioned doing so went against the recommendation of convention attorneys and could bankrupt the SBC by exposing it to lawsuits.

The talk over waiving privilege upset a large swath of Southern Baptists, causing some to believe the Government 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 Executive 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 are named throughout the report.

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Based on the report, Floyd advised 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 said: “Our priority cannot be the latest cultural crisis.” Floyd didn't 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 church buildings in a number of 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 again to her throughout her speech and one other chortled.”

“The Executive Committee betrayed not only survivors who labored onerous to try to make one thing occur, but betrayed the whole Southern Baptist Convention,” stated Brown, who's a retired appellate legal professional in Colorado. “They’ve made their own faith into a complicit accomplice for their own choice to choose institutional safety over the safety of children and congregants.”

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

“We have to be able to take meaningful steps to change our tradition because it pertains to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the present SBC president, said in an announcement.

Since many years of sex abuse and coverups in the Catholic Church had been reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have published lists of monks they say have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to forestall the switch of abusers to different churches. 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 sex abuse crisis, wrote to the SBC and Govt Committee presidents, in response to 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 intercourse abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists should study from Catholic errors and take action early on to implement structural reforms in order to make kids safer.

The report states that Frank Web page, who was leading the Executive Committee on the time, responded to Doyle in a brief letter that “Southern Baptist leaders truly have no authority over native church buildings” but that they would try to make use of their “affect” to offer protections. In an article, Page accused a survivor group of getting a hidden agenda of establishing the nation’s largest Protestant physique for lawsuits. Page later resigned from his place in 2018 over having a “morally inappropriate relationship.” Page did not 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 process pressure on the difficulty and stated that the report shows a need for establishments just like the SBC to seek outdoors experience on intercourse abuse.

“It shows a level of coverup and harassment and resistance to reforms on an institutional stage that has led to a long time of survivors being victimized and hurt,” Denhollander mentioned. “The query Southern Baptists need to ask is, ‘How could this happen?’”

The problem of sex abuse was a distinguished theme in leaked private letters written by Russell Moore, who left his position in 2021 as head of the SBC’s policy arm, the Ethics & Spiritual Liberty Fee. Moore said 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 said. “Individuals will say, ‘This is not all Southern Baptists, take a look at all the great we do.’ The report demonstrates a pattern of stonewalling, coverup, intimidation and retaliation.”

Moore said he hopes the SBC will take into account replacing 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.