Southern Baptist leaders lined up sex abuse, explosive report says

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

The findings of almost 300 pages embody shocking new details about particular abuse cases and shine a light-weight on how denominational leaders for decades actively resisted requires abuse prevention and reform. Proof within the report suggests leaders also lied to Southern Baptists over whether or not they may preserve a database of offenders to prevent extra abuse when top leaders have been secretly maintaining a non-public listing for years.

The report — the primary investigation of its kind in an enormous Protestant denomination like the SBC — is predicted to ship shock waves all through a conservative Christian group that has had intense inner battles over the best way to handle sex abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, together with other religious institutions in the US, has struggled with declining membership for the past 15 years. Its leaders have long resisted comparisons between its sexual abuse disaster 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 baby molesters and other accused abusers who had been within the pulpit or employed as church workers members. Lots of the instances referred to within the report had been considered outside the statute of limitations, the time survivors can report intercourse abuse, so it’s unclear what number of abusers were criminally charged.

The report, compiled by an organization known as Guidepost Options on the request of Southern Baptists, states that abuse survivors’ calls and emails had been “solely to be met, time and time once more, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who have been involved extra with defending the establishment from liability than from protecting Southern Baptists from additional abuse.

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

Whereas the report focuses primarily on how leaders handled abuse issues when survivors got here forward, it also states that a major Southern Baptist chief was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a girl 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 vp on the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a girl throughout a Panama City Seashore, Fla., vacation 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 along 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 in the Guidepost report. I have never abused anybody.”

Hunt resigned on May 13 from the North American Mission Board, in line with a statement by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell mentioned that earlier than Could 13, he was not conscious of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Generally, he known as the details 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 release would affirm the info round lots of the stories they've already shared, however many have been nonetheless stunned to see the pattern of coverups by the highest levels of management.

“I knew it was rotten, however it’s astonishing and infuriating,” mentioned Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was as soon as the highest-paid feminine executive on the SBC and whose story of sexual abuse at a Southern Baptist seminary is detailed in the report. “This can be a denomination that is by means of and thru about power. It's misappropriated power. It does not in any means mirror the Jesus I see in the scriptures. I'm so gutted.”

The report additionally names several 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 focused on actions by the SBC’s Govt Committee, which handles financial and administrative duties. Although Southern Baptist churches operate independently from one another, the Nashville-based Government Committee distributes greater than $190 million cooperative program in its annual price range that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For many years, the findings present, Southern Baptists had been instructed the denomination couldn't put collectively a registry of intercourse offenders because it will go towards the denomination’s polity — or how it capabilities. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained a list of offenders whereas retaining it a secret to keep away from the possibility of getting sued. The report also consists of private emails displaying how longtime leaders equivalent to August Boto have been dismissive about sexual abuse considerations, calling them “a satanic scheme to completely distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 e-mail, the convention’s legal professional despatched Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database could possibly be carried out according to SBC polity, saying “it will match our polity and current ministries to help churches on this space of kid abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he advisable “immediate motion to sign the Convention’s want that the [executive committee] and the entities begin a extra aggressive effort in this area.” That same yr, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a motion for a database, Boto rejected the concept.

For a denomination designed to offer extra democratic power to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to commission the third-party investigation, the report exhibits how lay Southern Baptists allowed a few key leaders, together with Boto and the convention’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to regulate the national institutional response to sex abuse for decades. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, stated he had not learn the report yet. Makes an attempt to reach Boto on Sunday were unsuccessful.

“The report goes to validate a lot about how they actually blindly selected to remain on the identical path all these years,” mentioned 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 weight.”

During Executive Committee conferences in 2021, some members argued in opposition to waiving attorney-client privilege, which would give investigators entry to information of conversations on authorized issues among the committee’s members and staffers. They stated doing so went in opposition to the advice of conference lawyers and could 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 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 also led to the resignation of the Government Committee’s head, Ronnie Floyd, who additionally once served as SBC president and was on President Donald Trump’s evangelical advisory council. The choice over attorney-client privilege also 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 acknowledged: “Our precedence cannot be the latest cultural crisis.” Floyd didn't immediately return a request for comment.

Christa Brown, who told SBC leaders that she was abused by a youth pastor who went on to serve in other Southern Baptist churches 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 again to her throughout her speech and another chortled.”

“The Government Committee betrayed not only survivors who worked laborious to try to make something happen, but betrayed the entire Southern Baptist Convention,” said Brown, who's a retired appellate attorney in Colorado. “They’ve made their own faith into a complicit associate for their very own determination to choose institutional safety over the safety of children and congregants.”

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

“We must be ready to take significant steps to vary our culture as it pertains to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the present SBC president, stated in an announcement.

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 printed lists of monks they are saying 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 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, in keeping with the report. He expressed his issues that SBC leaders may very well be falling into some of the identical patterns as Catholic leaders in not dealing with clergy intercourse abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists should be taught from Catholic mistakes and take motion early on to implement structural reforms in order to make children safer.

The report states that Frank Web page, who was leading the Govt Committee on the time, responded to Doyle in a brief letter that “Southern Baptist leaders actually haven't any authority over native churches” however that they'd attempt to make use of their “influence” to provide protections. In an article, Web page accused a survivor group of having a hidden agenda of setting up the nation’s largest Protestant body for lawsuits. Web page later resigned from his place in 2018 over having a “morally inappropriate relationship.” Page did not 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 activity pressure on the issue and said that the report reveals a necessity for establishments just like the SBC to hunt outdoors expertise on intercourse abuse.

“It exhibits a degree of coverup and harassment and resistance to reforms on an institutional stage that has led to decades of survivors being victimized and hurt,” Denhollander mentioned. “The question Southern Baptists should ask is, ‘How could this occur?’”

The problem of intercourse abuse was a prominent 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 receive 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 on this report are breathtaking,” Moore mentioned. “People will say, ‘This isn't 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 think about 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 past two decades combating for reform.