Southern Baptist leaders covered up intercourse abuse, explosive report says

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

The findings of practically 300 pages embrace surprising new details about particular abuse cases and shine a light on how denominational leaders for many years actively resisted calls for abuse prevention and reform. Proof in the report suggests leaders also lied to Southern Baptists over whether they might preserve a database of offenders to prevent extra abuse when prime leaders have been secretly preserving a non-public listing for years.

The report — the primary investigation of its variety in a large Protestant denomination like the SBC — is predicted to send shock waves throughout a conservative Christian neighborhood that has had intense inner battles over learn how to handle intercourse abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, along with other spiritual institutions in the US, 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 number of abuse cases among Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for almost twenty years, survivors of abuse and other involved Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Conference’s administrative arm to report alleged child molesters and other accused abusers who have been in the pulpit or employed as church employees members. Lots of the circumstances referred to in the report had been considered outdoors 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 known as Guidepost Solutions at the request of Southern Baptists, states that abuse survivors’ calls and emails were “only to be met, time and time again, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who have been involved extra with protecting the institution from liability than from protecting Southern Baptists from additional abuse.

“While stories of abuse had been minimized, and survivors were ignored or 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 totally on how leaders handled abuse points when survivors got here 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 on the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a girl during a Panama City Seaside, Fla., vacation in 2010.

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

Hunt resigned on Might 13 from the North American Mission Board, in response to a press release by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell said that before Could 13, he was not aware of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Usually, he known as the details of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

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Sex abuse survivors, lots of whom have been sharing their tales for years, anticipated Sunday’s launch would confirm the info round lots of the stories they have already shared, however many have been still shocked to see the pattern of coverups by the very best levels of management.

“I knew it was rotten, however it’s astonishing and infuriating,” said 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 in the report. “It is a denomination that's by way of and through about power. It is misappropriated energy. It doesn't in any method mirror the Jesus I see in the scriptures. I'm so gutted.”

The report also names several senior SBC leaders who protected and even supported alleged abusers, together with three past presidents of the convention, a former vice chairman 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 Government Committee, which handles monetary and administrative duties. Although Southern Baptist churches operate independently from one another, the Nashville-based Executive Committee distributes greater than $190 million cooperative program in its annual finances that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For decades, the findings present, Southern Baptists have been informed the denomination could not put collectively a registry of intercourse offenders because it will go towards the denomination’s polity — or how it functions. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained an inventory of offenders while retaining it a secret to keep away from the potential of getting sued. The report additionally 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 utterly distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 electronic mail, the conference’s lawyer sent Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database may very well be carried out consistent with SBC polity, saying “it could fit our polity and current ministries to assist church buildings in this area of kid abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he beneficial “fast action to signal the Conference’s want that the [executive committee] and the entities begin a more aggressive effort in this space.” That same 12 months, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a movement for a database, Boto rejected the idea.

For a denomination designed to present more democratic energy to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to commission the third-party investigation, the report exhibits how lay Southern Baptists allowed a number of key leaders, including 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, mentioned he had not learn the report but. Attempts to achieve Boto on Sunday had been unsuccessful.

“The report goes to validate a lot about how they really 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 load.”

During Executive Committee meetings in 2021, some members argued towards waiving attorney-client privilege, which would give investigators entry to records of conversations on authorized issues among the many committee’s members and staffers. They said doing so went against the recommendation of conference attorneys and could bankrupt the SBC by exposing it to lawsuits.

The debate over waiving privilege upset a big swath of Southern Baptists, inflicting some to consider 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 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 convention’s attorneys, who are named all through the report.

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In response to the report, Floyd told SBC leaders in a 2019 e mail that he had received “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “growing concern about all the emphasis on the sexual abuse crisis.” He then stated: “Our precedence can't be the latest cultural disaster.” Floyd didn't immediately return a request for remark.

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 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 Executive Committee “turned his again to her during her speech and another chortled.”

“The Govt Committee betrayed not only survivors who worked hard to try to make something happen, but betrayed the entire Southern Baptist Conference,” mentioned Brown, who's a retired appellate lawyer in Colorado. “They’ve made their own faith into a complicit associate for their own resolution to choose institutional protection over the protection 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., the place members are expected focus on subsequent steps. Suggestions by Guidepost embrace offering devoted survivor advocacy help and a survivor compensation fund.

“We should be able to take significant steps to alter our culture because it pertains to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the present SBC president, said in an announcement.

Since a long time of sex abuse and coverups within the Catholic Church were reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have printed lists of priests they are saying have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to forestall the transfer of abusers to other church buildings. 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 Govt Committee presidents, based on the report. He expressed his considerations that SBC leaders could possibly be falling into a few 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 errors and take motion 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 on the time, responded to Doyle in a short letter that “Southern Baptist leaders actually don't have any authority over local church buildings” but that they would try to use their “affect” to supply protections. In an article, Web 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 didn't 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 drive on the problem and said that the report reveals a necessity for institutions just like the SBC to hunt exterior experience on intercourse abuse.

“It reveals a degree of coverup and harassment and resistance to reforms on an institutional stage that has led to a long time of survivors being victimized and damage,” Denhollander mentioned. “The question Southern Baptists need to ask is, ‘How might this occur?’”

The problem of sex abuse was a prominent 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 & Non secular Liberty Fee. Moore mentioned he expects Southern Baptists to obtain Sunday’s report in a similar approach 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. “People will say, ‘This isn't all Southern Baptists, have a look at all the nice we do.’ The report demonstrates a pattern 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 home state in 2016, with a statue of Christa Brown, the abuse survivor who spent the past two decades fighting for reform.