Southern Baptist leaders coated up sex abuse, explosive report says

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

The findings of practically 300 pages embrace 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. Evidence in the report suggests leaders also lied to Southern Baptists over whether or not they might maintain a database of offenders to stop extra abuse when high leaders had been secretly retaining a non-public record for years.

The report — the primary investigation of its form in a massive Protestant denomination like the SBC — is anticipated to send shock waves throughout a conservative Christian group that has had intense internal battles over find out how to deal with intercourse abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, along with different non secular institutions in the USA, 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 whole variety of abuse circumstances among Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for nearly 20 years, survivors of abuse and other concerned Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Conference’s administrative arm to report alleged child molesters and other accused abusers who had been in the pulpit or employed as church workers members. Lots of the cases referred to in the report had been thought of exterior 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 a company called Guidepost Solutions on the request of Southern Baptists, states that abuse survivors’ calls and emails were “only to be met, time and time once more, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who had been involved more with defending the institution from legal responsibility than from protecting Southern Baptists from additional abuse.

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

Whereas the report focuses totally on how leaders handled abuse issues when survivors came ahead, 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 vp at the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a lady throughout a Panama Metropolis Seashore, Fla., vacation in 2010.

The report states that Hunt, in an interview with investigators, denied any physical contact with the girl 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've by no means abused anyone.”

Hunt resigned on Could 13 from the North American Mission Board, based on a statement by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell stated that before May 13, he was not conscious 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, lots of whom have been sharing their stories for years, anticipated Sunday’s launch would affirm the details round most of the tales they have already shared, however many had been nonetheless surprised to see the sample of coverups by the very best levels of management.

“I knew it was rotten, but it’s astonishing and infuriating,” mentioned Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was once the highest-paid female executive at the SBC and whose story of sexual abuse at a Southern Baptist seminary is detailed within the report. “This is a denomination that is by means of and thru about energy. It is misappropriated energy. It does not in any manner reflect the Jesus I see within the scriptures. I am so gutted.”

The report additionally names several senior SBC leaders who protected and even supported alleged abusers, together with three previous presidents of the conference, a former vice chairman and the previous head of the SBC’s administrative arm.

The third-party investigation into actions between 2000 and 2021 centered on actions by the SBC’s Government Committee, which handles monetary and administrative duties. Though Southern Baptist churches operate independently from one another, the Nashville-based Govt Committee distributes more than $190 million cooperative program in its annual budget that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For many years, the findings show, Southern Baptists have been informed the denomination could not put together a registry of intercourse offenders because it could go in opposition to the denomination’s polity — or how it functions. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained an inventory of offenders whereas conserving it a secret to avoid the opportunity of getting sued. The report also consists of personal emails exhibiting how longtime leaders akin to August Boto have been dismissive about sexual abuse concerns, calling them “a satanic scheme to completely distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 electronic mail, the conference’s lawyer despatched Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database could be applied per SBC polity, saying “it might match our polity and present ministries to assist churches in this area of kid abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he really useful “immediate motion to sign the Convention’s want that the [executive committee] and the entities start a extra aggressive effort on this space.” 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 provide extra democratic energy 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, together with 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, said he had not learn the report yet. Attempts to succeed in Boto on Sunday have been unsuccessful.

“The report goes to validate a lot about how they actually blindly selected 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 along. 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 entry to information of conversations on legal issues among the committee’s members and staffers. They mentioned doing so went towards the recommendation of conference lawyers and will bankrupt the SBC by exposing it to lawsuits.

The debate over waiving privilege upset a large swath of Southern Baptists, inflicting some to imagine 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 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 decision over attorney-client privilege additionally led to the resignation of the convention’s attorneys, who are named all through the report.

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According to the report, Floyd advised 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 said: “Our priority can't be the newest cultural crisis.” 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 Executive Committee “turned his back to her during her speech and another chortled.”

“The Govt Committee betrayed not only survivors who labored onerous to try to make something occur, however betrayed the whole Southern Baptist Convention,” said Brown, who is a retired appellate attorney in Colorado. “They’ve made their own faith right into a complicit associate for their own decision to choose institutional protection over the protection of kids and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists during its final annual assembly, comes simply weeks before its subsequent gathering in Anaheim, Calif., the place members are expected focus on subsequent steps. Recommendations by Guidepost embody providing devoted survivor advocacy support and a survivor compensation fund.

“We should be ready to take meaningful steps to change our tradition as it pertains to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the current SBC president, stated in a press release.

Since decades of sex abuse and coverups within the Catholic Church have been reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have published lists of clergymen they are saying have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to prevent the transfer of abusers to different churches. In contrast to 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 intercourse abuse disaster, wrote to the SBC and Government Committee presidents, in accordance with the report. He expressed his concerns that SBC leaders could be falling into a few of the same patterns as Catholic leaders in not coping with clergy sex abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists ought to be taught from Catholic errors and take action early on to implement structural reforms so as to make youngsters safer.

The report states that Frank Page, who was main the Government Committee on the time, responded to Doyle in a brief letter that “Southern Baptist leaders actually have no authority over native churches” however that they'd attempt to make use of their “affect” to offer protections. In an article, Page accused a survivor group of having a hidden agenda of setting up the nation’s largest Protestant body for lawsuits. Page later resigned from his place 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 process pressure on the problem and said that the report shows a necessity for establishments like the SBC to hunt outdoors expertise on sex abuse.

“It shows a degree of coverup and harassment and resistance to reforms on an institutional level that has led to many years of survivors being victimized and hurt,” Denhollander said. “The question Southern Baptists should ask is, ‘How could this happen?’”

The problem of intercourse abuse was a outstanding theme in leaked private letters written by Russell Moore, who left his place in 2021 as head of the SBC’s policy arm, the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. Moore stated he expects Southern Baptists to obtain Sunday’s report in an analogous 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. “Folks will say, ‘This isn't all Southern Baptists, take a look at all the nice we do.’ The report demonstrates a sample of stonewalling, coverup, intimidation and retaliation.”

Moore stated he hopes the SBC will consider changing 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 past 20 years preventing for reform.