Southern Baptist leaders coated up sex abuse, explosive report says

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

The findings of almost 300 pages include stunning new details about specific abuse cases and shine a light-weight on how denominational leaders for many years actively resisted calls for abuse prevention and reform. Proof in the report suggests leaders additionally lied to Southern Baptists over whether or not they may maintain a database of offenders to stop extra abuse when high leaders had been secretly protecting a personal list for years.

The report — the first investigation of its kind in a massive Protestant denomination like the SBC — is expected to send shock waves throughout a conservative Christian group that has had intense internal battles over easy methods to handle sex abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, along with other religious institutions in america, 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 whole variety of abuse instances amongst Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for almost twenty years, survivors of abuse and other concerned Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Convention’s administrative arm to report alleged little one molesters and different accused abusers who were in the pulpit or employed as church workers members. Most of the cases referred to in the report were thought-about outdoors the statute of limitations, the time survivors can report sex abuse, so it’s unclear what number of abusers had been criminally charged.

The report, compiled by a company called Guidepost Options at the request of Southern Baptists, states that abuse survivors’ calls and emails had been “only to be met, time and time again, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who were concerned extra with defending the institution from liability than from protecting Southern Baptists from additional abuse.

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

While the report focuses primarily on how leaders dealt with abuse points when survivors came forward, it additionally states that a main Southern Baptist chief was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a lady only 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 vice chairman at the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a woman during a Panama City Seashore, Fla., vacation 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 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 within the Guidepost report. I have by no means abused anyone.”

Hunt resigned on Might 13 from the North American Mission Board, based on a press release by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell stated that earlier than May 13, he was not aware of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Usually, he referred to as the main points of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

Southern Baptists have been immersed in their very own sex abuse scandals. Now, they’re debating their response.

Sex abuse survivors, lots of whom have been sharing their tales for years, anticipated Sunday’s launch would verify the details round many of the tales they have already shared, but many have been nonetheless shocked to see the sample of coverups by the very best levels of management.

“I knew it was rotten, but it’s astonishing and infuriating,” said 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. “It is a denomination that is by and through about energy. It is misappropriated power. It does not in any manner replicate 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, including three previous presidents of the convention, a former vice chairman 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 Executive Committee, which handles monetary and administrative duties. Though Southern Baptist church buildings function independently from each other, the Nashville-based Executive Committee distributes greater than $190 million cooperative program in its annual funds that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For many years, the findings show, Southern Baptists have been instructed the denomination couldn't put collectively a registry of intercourse offenders as a result of it could go against the denomination’s polity — or how it capabilities. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained a list of offenders whereas maintaining it a secret to keep away from the opportunity of getting sued. The report also contains non-public emails exhibiting how longtime leaders such as August Boto had been dismissive about sexual abuse considerations, calling them “a satanic scheme to utterly distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 email, the conference’s attorney sent Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database may very well be implemented consistent with SBC polity, saying “it might match our polity and current ministries to help churches on this area of child abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he recommended “instant action to sign the Convention’s need that the [executive committee] and the entities begin a more aggressive effort on this space.” That same yr, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a movement for a database, Boto rejected the idea.

For a denomination designed to provide extra democratic energy 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 convention’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to regulate the national institutional response to intercourse abuse for decades. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, mentioned he had not read the report yet. Attempts to reach Boto on Sunday have been unsuccessful.

“The report is going to validate a lot about how they actually blindly selected to stay on the identical path all these years,” stated 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 load.”

During Government Committee meetings in 2021, some members argued in opposition to waiving attorney-client privilege, which might give investigators access to data of conversations on legal matters among the committee’s members and staffers. They said doing so went in opposition to the advice of convention legal professionals and will bankrupt the SBC by exposing it to lawsuits.

The controversy over waiving privilege upset a large swath of Southern Baptists, causing some to believe 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 Govt Committee’s head, Ronnie Floyd, who also 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 all through the report.

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In keeping with the report, Floyd told 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 crisis.” He then acknowledged: “Our priority can't be the newest cultural disaster.” Floyd did not immediately 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 other 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 another chortled.”

“The Govt Committee betrayed not only survivors who worked hard to attempt to make one thing occur, but betrayed the whole Southern Baptist Conference,” mentioned Brown, who is a retired appellate lawyer in Colorado. “They’ve made their own faith into a complicit partner for their own resolution to decide on institutional protection over the safety of kids and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists throughout its last annual assembly, comes just weeks before its subsequent gathering in Anaheim, Calif., where members are anticipated discuss next steps. Recommendations by Guidepost include providing devoted survivor advocacy help and a survivor compensation fund.

“We have to be ready to take meaningful steps to alter our tradition because it pertains to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the present SBC president, said in a statement.

Since a long time of sex abuse and coverups within the Catholic Church have been reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have revealed lists of clergymen they are saying have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to forestall the switch of abusers to other 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 disaster, wrote to the SBC and Government Committee presidents, in accordance with the report. He expressed his concerns that SBC leaders might be falling into a few of the similar patterns as Catholic leaders in not dealing with clergy sex abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists should be taught from Catholic mistakes and take action early on to implement structural reforms so as to make youngsters safer.

The report states that Frank Page, who was leading the Executive Committee at the time, responded to Doyle in a short letter that “Southern Baptist leaders actually haven't any authority over native churches” however that they would try 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 physique for lawsuits. Page later resigned from his position in 2018 over having a “morally inappropriate relationship.” 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 task drive on the issue and said that the report exhibits a need for establishments like the SBC to seek outside expertise on intercourse abuse.

“It reveals a level of coverup and harassment and resistance to reforms on an institutional degree that has led to decades of survivors being victimized and hurt,” Denhollander said. “The query Southern Baptists must ask is, ‘How might this happen?’”

The difficulty 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 Commission. Moore mentioned he expects Southern Baptists to receive Sunday’s report in a similar option 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 said. “Individuals will say, ‘This is not all Southern Baptists, have a look at all the good we do.’ The report demonstrates a sample of stonewalling, coverup, intimidation and retaliation.”

Moore mentioned he hopes the SBC will consider 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 20 years fighting for reform.