Southern Baptist leaders covered up intercourse abuse, explosive report says

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

The findings of practically 300 pages embody surprising new details about specific abuse cases and shine a lightweight on how denominational leaders for many years actively resisted calls for abuse prevention and reform. Evidence in the report suggests leaders additionally lied to Southern Baptists over whether or not they might maintain a database of offenders to forestall extra abuse when top leaders were secretly protecting a private record for years.

The report — the primary investigation of its type in a massive Protestant denomination just like the SBC — is predicted to ship shock waves all through a conservative Christian community that has had intense inner battles over easy methods to handle sex abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, together with other religious establishments in america, has struggled with declining membership for the previous 15 years. Its leaders have lengthy resisted comparisons between its sexual abuse crisis and that of the Catholic Church, saying the entire number of abuse circumstances among Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for nearly twenty years, survivors of abuse and other involved Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Convention’s administrative arm to report alleged youngster molesters and other accused abusers who have been within the pulpit or employed as church staff members. Many of the instances referred to within the report have been thought of outdoors the statute of limitations, the time survivors can report intercourse abuse, so it’s unclear what number of abusers had been criminally charged.

The report, compiled by a company called Guidepost Options on the request of Southern Baptists, states that abuse survivors’ calls and emails had been “only to be met, time and time once more, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who were concerned extra with protecting the institution from liability than from defending Southern Baptists from further abuse.

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

While the report focuses totally on how leaders dealt with abuse issues when survivors came forward, it additionally states that a main Southern Baptist chief was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a woman 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 vp on the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a girl during a Panama City Beach, 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 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 within the Guidepost report. I've never abused anybody.”

Hunt resigned on Might 13 from the North American Mission Board, in keeping with an announcement by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell said that before May 13, he was not aware of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Generally, he known as the main points of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

Southern Baptists have been immersed in their very own sex abuse scandals. Now, they’re debating their response.

Intercourse abuse survivors, a lot of whom have been sharing their tales for years, anticipated Sunday’s launch would confirm the information round most of the stories they've already shared, but many have been nonetheless stunned to see the pattern of coverups by the best levels of management.

“I knew it was rotten, however it’s astonishing and infuriating,” said Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was as soon as the highest-paid feminine government at 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 via and through about energy. It's misappropriated energy. It does not in any method mirror the Jesus I see within the scriptures. I'm 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 targeted 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 greater than $190 million cooperative program in its annual finances that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For many years, the findings present, Southern Baptists have been advised the denomination could not put collectively a registry of intercourse offenders as a result of it will go towards the denomination’s polity — or how it features. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained an inventory of offenders whereas protecting it a secret to avoid the possibility of getting sued. The report also contains personal emails displaying how longtime leaders resembling August Boto had been dismissive about sexual abuse issues, calling them “a satanic scheme to completely distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 e mail, the convention’s lawyer sent Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database might be carried out according to SBC polity, saying “it might fit our polity and present ministries to help churches on this area of child abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he recommended “quick action to sign the Convention’s desire that the [executive committee] and the entities begin a more aggressive effort on this space.” That very same yr, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a motion for a database, Boto rejected the idea.

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

“The report goes to validate a lot about how they actually 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 carry the load.”

During Government Committee conferences in 2021, some members argued against waiving attorney-client privilege, which might give investigators access to data of conversations on authorized issues among the committee’s members and staffers. They said doing so went towards the advice of convention 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 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 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 conference’s attorneys, who are named all through the report.

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In line with the report, Floyd advised SBC leaders in a 2019 email that he had obtained “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “rising concern about all of the emphasis on the sexual abuse disaster.” He then said: “Our priority can't be the most recent cultural disaster.” Floyd did not 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 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 Govt Committee “turned his again to her throughout her speech and another chortled.”

“The Executive Committee betrayed not solely survivors who labored hard to try to make something happen, however betrayed the whole Southern Baptist Conference,” stated Brown, who's a retired appellate legal professional in Colorado. “They’ve made their very own faith into a complicit partner for their very own choice to decide on institutional protection over the protection of youngsters and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists throughout its last annual assembly, comes simply weeks earlier than its next gathering in Anaheim, Calif., the place members are anticipated focus on next steps. Suggestions by Guidepost embrace providing dedicated survivor advocacy support and a survivor compensation fund.

“We have to be able to take meaningful steps to vary our tradition as 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 had been reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have revealed lists of clergymen they are saying have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to stop the transfer of abusers to different church buildings. 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 disaster, wrote to the SBC and Government Committee presidents, in response to the report. He expressed his issues that SBC leaders could be falling into a few of the similar patterns as Catholic leaders in not coping with clergy sex abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists should learn 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 leading the Government 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'd attempt to make use of 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.” Web 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 force on the difficulty and said that the report exhibits a necessity for establishments like the SBC to hunt outside expertise on intercourse abuse.

“It reveals a stage 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 should ask is, ‘How might this happen?’”

The difficulty of intercourse 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 Commission. Moore stated he expects Southern Baptists to receive Sunday’s report in the same 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 on this report are breathtaking,” Moore mentioned. “Individuals will say, ‘This isn't all Southern Baptists, look at all the good we do.’ The report demonstrates a pattern of stonewalling, coverup, intimidation and retaliation.”

Moore said he hopes the SBC will think about 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 20 years combating for reform.