Southern Baptist leaders coated up intercourse abuse, explosive report says

Leaders in the Southern Baptist Conference on Sunday released a serious third-party investigation that found 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 nearly 300 pages embrace surprising new particulars about specific abuse instances and shine a light on how denominational leaders for many years actively resisted requires abuse prevention and reform. Evidence within the report suggests leaders also lied to Southern Baptists over whether they may keep a database of offenders to stop extra abuse when prime leaders were secretly holding a personal checklist for years.

The report — the primary investigation of its variety in a massive Protestant denomination like the SBC — is anticipated to ship shock waves all through a conservative Christian group that has had intense inside battles over easy methods to handle intercourse abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, along with different religious institutions in the USA, has struggled with declining membership for the previous 15 years. Its leaders have long resisted comparisons between its sexual abuse disaster and that of the Catholic Church, saying the total variety of abuse cases amongst Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for almost twenty years, survivors of abuse and different concerned Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Conference’s administrative arm to report alleged child molesters and different accused abusers who had been in the pulpit or employed as church workers members. Lots of the cases referred to in the report were considered exterior the statute of limitations, the time survivors can report intercourse abuse, so it’s unclear how many abusers have been criminally charged.

The report, compiled by an organization 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 again, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who were involved more with defending the institution from legal responsibility than from protecting Southern Baptists from further abuse.

“Whereas stories of abuse have been minimized, and survivors have been ignored and even vilified, revelations came to mild in recent years that some senior SBC leaders had protected and even supported alleged abusers, the report states.

Whereas the report focuses primarily on how leaders dealt with abuse issues when survivors came ahead, it also states that a main 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 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 girl throughout a Panama City 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 a statement on Twitter, saying, “I vigorously deny the circumstances and characterizations set forth in the Guidepost report. I have by no means abused anyone.”

Hunt resigned on May 13 from the North American Mission Board, based on a statement by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell said that before Might 13, he was not aware of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Typically, he known as the small print of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

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Sex abuse survivors, lots of whom have been sharing their stories for years, anticipated Sunday’s launch would verify the details around many of the stories they've already shared, however many were still shocked to see the sample of coverups by the highest ranges 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 government on the SBC and whose story of sexual abuse at a Southern Baptist seminary is detailed within the report. “This can be a denomination that's by and thru about energy. It's misappropriated power. It does not in any means 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, together with 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 focused on actions by the SBC’s Govt Committee, which handles financial and administrative duties. Although Southern Baptist church buildings function independently from each other, the Nashville-based Executive Committee distributes greater than $190 million cooperative program in its annual budget that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For many years, the findings show, Southern Baptists had been advised the denomination could not put collectively a registry of sex offenders as a result of it might go towards the denomination’s polity — or the way it functions. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained a listing of offenders while retaining it a secret to keep away from the potential for getting sued. The report also contains private emails displaying how longtime leaders similar to August Boto had been dismissive about sexual abuse issues, calling them “a satanic scheme to utterly 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 keeping with SBC polity, saying “it might fit our polity and present ministries to assist church buildings on this area of child abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he beneficial “rapid motion to sign the Conference’s want that the [executive committee] and the entities start a more aggressive effort on this area.” That same year, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a movement for a database, Boto rejected the concept.

For a denomination designed to present extra democratic energy to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to commission the third-party investigation, the report reveals how lay Southern Baptists allowed a couple of key leaders, including Boto and the convention’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to control the nationwide institutional response to sex abuse for decades. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, stated he had not read the report but. Attempts to achieve Boto on Sunday were unsuccessful.

“The report goes to validate a lot about how they really blindly chose to stay on the same 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 hold the burden.”

Throughout Executive Committee meetings in 2021, some members argued towards waiving attorney-client privilege, which might give investigators entry to information of conversations on legal issues among the many committee’s members and staffers. They mentioned doing so went against the recommendation of conference lawyers and will bankrupt the SBC by exposing it to lawsuits.

The talk over waiving privilege upset a large swath of Southern Baptists, causing some to consider 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 also led to the resignation of the Executive 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 also led to the resignation of the conference’s attorneys, who are named all through the report.

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According to the report, Floyd informed SBC leaders in a 2019 e-mail that he had obtained “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 cannot be the newest cultural crisis.” Floyd did not instantly 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 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 Govt Committee “turned his back to her during her speech and one other chortled.”

“The Govt Committee betrayed not solely survivors who worked laborious to attempt to make one thing occur, however betrayed the entire Southern Baptist Convention,” mentioned Brown, who's a retired appellate lawyer in Colorado. “They’ve made their own faith right into a complicit associate for their own resolution to choose institutional safety over the safety of youngsters and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists during its final annual meeting, comes just weeks before its subsequent gathering in Anaheim, Calif., the place members are anticipated focus on next steps. Recommendations by Guidepost embrace providing devoted survivor advocacy assist and a survivor compensation fund.

“We must be able to take meaningful steps to change our culture as it pertains to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the current SBC president, said in a press release.

Since decades of intercourse abuse and coverups in the Catholic Church had been reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have printed lists of monks they are saying have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to forestall the switch of abusers to different churches. In contrast to 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 sex abuse crisis, wrote to the SBC and Executive Committee presidents, in response to the report. He expressed his issues that SBC leaders may very well be falling into some of the similar patterns as Catholic leaders in not dealing with clergy intercourse abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists ought to study from Catholic errors and take action early on to implement structural reforms so as to make children safer.

The report states that Frank Web page, who was leading the Govt Committee at the time, responded to Doyle in a brief letter that “Southern Baptist leaders truly don't have any authority over native churches” but that they would try to use their “affect” to provide 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 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 task power on the problem and mentioned that the report shows a necessity for establishments like the SBC to seek outside expertise on sex abuse.

“It exhibits 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 harm,” Denhollander mentioned. “The question Southern Baptists should ask is, ‘How could this happen?’”

The problem of intercourse abuse was a prominent theme in leaked non-public 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 mentioned he expects Southern Baptists to obtain Sunday’s report in a similar 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 in this report are breathtaking,” Moore mentioned. “Individuals will say, ‘This is not all Southern Baptists, have a look at all the great we do.’ The report demonstrates a sample of stonewalling, coverup, intimidation and retaliation.”

Moore said 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 two decades fighting for reform.