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 found that intercourse abuse survivors had been usually ignored, minimized and “even vilified” by high clergy within the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

The findings of nearly 300 pages embrace stunning new details about particular abuse instances and shine a light-weight on how denominational leaders for many years actively resisted requires abuse prevention and reform. Proof in the report suggests leaders also lied to Southern Baptists over whether or not they might maintain a database of offenders to forestall more abuse when high leaders were secretly retaining a personal listing for years.

The report — the first investigation of its sort in a massive Protestant denomination like the SBC — is predicted to ship shock waves all through a conservative Christian community that has had intense internal battles over methods to deal with sex abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, along with different religious establishments in america, 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 total number of abuse circumstances among Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for almost twenty years, survivors of abuse and different involved Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Convention’s administrative arm to report alleged child molesters and different accused abusers who have been in the pulpit or employed as church employees members. Lots of the cases referred to in the report had been considered outside the statute of limitations, the time survivors can report sex abuse, so it’s unclear what number of abusers have been criminally charged.

The report, compiled by a company known as Guidepost Options at 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 have been concerned more with defending the institution from legal responsibility than from protecting Southern Baptists from additional abuse.

“Whereas tales of abuse have been minimized, and survivors were ignored or even vilified, revelations got here to light lately 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 got here forward, it also states that a major Southern Baptist chief was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a girl just 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 vice chairman on the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a girl throughout a Panama Metropolis Seaside, Fla., vacation in 2010.

The report states that Hunt, in an interview with investigators, denied any bodily contact with the girl 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 have never abused anybody.”

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

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Intercourse abuse survivors, many of whom have been sharing their stories for years, anticipated Sunday’s launch would confirm the information around most of the stories they have already shared, however many had been still surprised to see the sample of coverups by the very best levels of management.

“I knew it was rotten, nevertheless it’s astonishing and infuriating,” mentioned Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was as soon as the highest-paid feminine 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's by means of and thru about energy. It's misappropriated energy. It doesn't in any method replicate 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 convention, a former vp and the former head of the SBC’s administrative arm.

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

For decades, the findings present, Southern Baptists had been informed the denomination couldn't put collectively a registry of intercourse offenders as a result of it would go against the denomination’s polity — or how it capabilities. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained a list of offenders while holding it a secret to avoid the potential of getting sued. The report also includes personal emails showing how longtime leaders equivalent 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 e mail, the conference’s attorney despatched Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database might be carried out in line with SBC polity, saying “it could fit our polity and present ministries to help church buildings in this space of child abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he advisable “immediate motion to signal the Conference’s want that the [executive committee] and the entities start a more aggressive effort in this space.” That very same year, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a motion for a database, Boto rejected the concept.

For a denomination designed to give extra democratic power to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to fee the third-party investigation, the report shows how lay Southern Baptists allowed a few key leaders, together with Boto and the convention’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to regulate the nationwide institutional response to intercourse abuse for many years. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, stated he had not read the report but. Makes an attempt to achieve Boto on Sunday have been unsuccessful.

“The report is going to validate a lot about how they really blindly chose 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 along. Now Southern Baptists have to carry the burden.”

During Government Committee meetings in 2021, some members argued against waiving attorney-client privilege, which might give investigators entry to information of conversations on authorized matters among the many committee’s members and staffers. They stated doing so went towards the advice of convention lawyers and could bankrupt the SBC by exposing it to lawsuits.

The debate over waiving privilege upset a big swath of Southern Baptists, causing some to believe 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 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 decision over attorney-client privilege also led to the resignation of the conference’s attorneys, who're named throughout the report.

Newly leaked letter particulars allegations that Southern Baptist leaders mishandled intercourse abuse claims

Based on the report, Floyd instructed SBC leaders in a 2019 email 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 said: “Our priority cannot be the newest cultural crisis.” Floyd did not immediately 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 churches in multiple 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 Government Committee “turned his back to her during her speech and one other chortled.”

“The Executive Committee betrayed not solely survivors who worked onerous to attempt to make something occur, however betrayed the whole Southern Baptist Convention,” stated Brown, who's a retired appellate legal professional in Colorado. “They’ve made their very own faith right into a complicit companion for their own determination to choose institutional safety over the protection of youngsters and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists throughout its final annual assembly, comes just weeks before its subsequent gathering in Anaheim, Calif., where members are anticipated focus on next steps. Recommendations by Guidepost include offering dedicated survivor advocacy assist and a survivor compensation fund.

“We have to be able to take meaningful steps to change our tradition because it pertains to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the present SBC president, stated in an announcement.

Since decades of sex abuse and coverups in 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 disaster, wrote to the SBC and Executive Committee presidents, according to the report. He expressed his concerns that SBC leaders may very well be falling into some of the same patterns as Catholic leaders in not coping with clergy sex abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists ought to study from Catholic errors and take motion early on to implement structural reforms in order to make kids safer.

The report states that Frank Page, who was main the Govt Committee on the time, responded to Doyle in a brief letter that “Southern Baptist leaders really have no authority over native churches” however that they would try to make use of their “influence” to supply protections. In an article, Page accused a survivor group of getting a hidden agenda of organising the nation’s largest Protestant physique for lawsuits. Web page later resigned from his position in 2018 over having a “morally inappropriate relationship.” Web page did not 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 drive on the difficulty and stated that the report reveals a necessity for institutions just like the SBC to hunt outside experience on intercourse abuse.

“It reveals a degree of coverup and harassment and resistance to reforms on an institutional level that has led to decades of survivors being victimized and harm,” Denhollander said. “The question Southern Baptists have to ask is, ‘How could this occur?’”

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 & Non secular Liberty Commission. Moore mentioned he expects Southern Baptists to receive Sunday’s report in a similar 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 stated. “Folks will say, ‘This is not all Southern Baptists, look at all the great we do.’ The report demonstrates a pattern of stonewalling, coverup, intimidation and retaliation.”

Moore stated he hopes the SBC will contemplate replacing a statue of evangelist Billy Graham, which was moved from Nashville to Graham’s house state in 2016, with a statue of Christa Brown, the abuse survivor who spent the past 20 years preventing for reform.