Southern Baptist leaders coated up sex abuse, explosive report says

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

The findings of almost 300 pages include stunning new particulars about specific abuse instances and shine a light on how denominational leaders for many years actively resisted calls for abuse prevention and reform. Evidence in the report suggests leaders also lied to Southern Baptists over whether or not they may preserve a database of offenders to stop extra abuse when high leaders have been secretly protecting a personal record for years.

The report — the primary investigation of its type in a massive Protestant denomination just like the SBC — is anticipated to ship shock waves throughout a conservative Christian community that has had intense internal battles over methods to handle sex abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, together with different spiritual establishments in america, has struggled with declining membership for the past 15 years. Its leaders have lengthy resisted comparisons between its sexual abuse crisis and that of the Catholic Church, saying the entire variety of abuse circumstances amongst 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 Conference’s administrative arm to report alleged youngster molesters and different accused abusers who have been within the pulpit or employed as church workers members. Many of the cases referred to within the report were considered outdoors the statute of limitations, the time survivors can report intercourse abuse, so it’s unclear how many abusers were criminally charged.

The report, compiled by a corporation referred to 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 once more, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who had been involved extra with protecting the institution from liability than from defending Southern Baptists from additional abuse.

“Whereas stories of abuse were minimized, and survivors had been ignored and 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 got here forward, it additionally states that a main Southern Baptist leader was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a girl 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 vice chairman on the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a woman throughout a Panama City Seashore, Fla., vacation in 2010.

The report states that Hunt, in an interview with investigators, denied any bodily contact with the lady but acknowledged that he had interactions with her. After the report was launched, 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've by no means abused anyone.”

Hunt resigned on Could 13 from the North American Mission Board, in line with an announcement by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell said that before Might 13, he was not conscious of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Usually, he called the details of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

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Intercourse abuse survivors, many of whom have been sharing their stories for years, anticipated Sunday’s release would confirm the facts around most of the stories they've already shared, but many had been still surprised to see the sample of coverups by the best levels of management.

“I knew it was rotten, but it surely’s astonishing and infuriating,” said 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. “It is a denomination that's by way of and through about energy. It's misappropriated energy. It does not in any approach replicate the Jesus I see within the scriptures. I am 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 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 Executive Committee, which handles financial and administrative duties. Although Southern Baptist churches operate independently from one another, the Nashville-based Executive Committee distributes more than $190 million cooperative program in its annual price range that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For decades, the findings show, Southern Baptists were instructed the denomination couldn't put collectively a registry of sex offenders as a result of it might go towards the denomination’s polity — or the way it capabilities. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained a listing of offenders while keeping it a secret to avoid the possibility of getting sued. The report additionally contains private emails showing how longtime leaders equivalent to August Boto were dismissive about sexual abuse concerns, calling them “a satanic scheme to completely distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 email, the conference’s attorney despatched Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database may very well be carried out consistent with SBC polity, saying “it might match our polity and current ministries to assist churches in this space of kid abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he recommended “rapid action to sign the Conference’s want that the [executive committee] and the entities start a extra aggressive effort in this area.” That very same year, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a movement for a database, Boto rejected the thought.

For a denomination designed to give extra democratic power 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, including 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, said he had not learn the report but. Makes an attempt to reach Boto on Sunday were unsuccessful.

“The report is going to validate a lot about how they really blindly chose to remain on the identical path all these years,” stated 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 carry the burden.”

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

The controversy over waiving privilege upset a big swath of Southern Baptists, inflicting 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 Government Committee’s head, Ronnie Floyd, who also once served as SBC president and was on President Donald Trump’s evangelical advisory council. The choice 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 told SBC leaders in a 2019 e mail that he had obtained “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “growing concern about all the emphasis on the sexual abuse disaster.” He then stated: “Our priority can't be the most recent cultural disaster.” Floyd didn't immediately return a request for comment.

Christa Brown, who informed SBC leaders that she was abused by a youth pastor who went on to serve in other Southern Baptist churches in a number of 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 Government Committee “turned his back to her during her speech and another chortled.”

“The Govt Committee betrayed not only survivors who worked exhausting to attempt to make one thing occur, however betrayed the whole Southern Baptist Convention,” stated Brown, who is a retired appellate attorney in Colorado. “They’ve made their own religion right into a complicit partner for their own determination to choose institutional safety over the safety of youngsters and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists during its last annual assembly, comes just weeks before its next gathering in Anaheim, Calif., where members are anticipated talk about subsequent steps. Suggestions by Guidepost embody offering devoted survivor advocacy help and a survivor compensation fund.

“We should be able to take meaningful steps to change our culture as it pertains 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 were reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have published lists of priests they say have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to forestall the switch of abusers to different church buildings. Unlike the Catholic Church, the SBC has a non-hierarchical construction.

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, according to the report. He expressed his considerations that SBC leaders could be falling into a number of the similar patterns as Catholic leaders in not dealing with clergy intercourse abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists should be taught from Catholic errors and take motion early on to implement structural reforms so as to make kids safer.

The report states that Frank Web page, who was main the Government Committee at the time, responded to Doyle in a short letter that “Southern Baptist leaders truly haven't any authority over local churches” however that they would try to make use of their “affect” to supply protections. In an article, Page accused a survivor group of having a hidden agenda of establishing the nation’s largest Protestant physique for lawsuits. Web page later resigned from his position in 2018 over having a “morally inappropriate relationship.” Page did not 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 task force on the problem and mentioned that the report exhibits a need for establishments like the SBC to seek outdoors expertise on sex abuse.

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

The issue of intercourse abuse was a outstanding theme in leaked non-public letters written by Russell Moore, who left his position in 2021 as head of the SBC’s coverage arm, the Ethics & Religious Liberty Fee. Moore stated he expects Southern Baptists to receive Sunday’s report in an analogous 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. “Individuals will say, ‘This isn't all Southern Baptists, look at all the good we do.’ The report demonstrates a sample of stonewalling, coverup, intimidation and retaliation.”

Moore stated he hopes the SBC will think about changing a statue of evangelist Billy Graham, which was moved from Nashville to Graham’s house state in 2016, with a statue of Christa Brown, the abuse survivor who spent the previous two decades preventing for reform.