Southern Baptist leaders covered up intercourse abuse, explosive report says

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

The findings of practically 300 pages include surprising new details about specific abuse cases and shine a lightweight 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 could keep a database of offenders to forestall more abuse when top leaders were secretly protecting a non-public checklist for years.

The report — the primary investigation of its form in a large Protestant denomination like the SBC — is expected to ship shock waves all through a conservative Christian community that has had intense inner battles over handle intercourse 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 entire variety of abuse instances amongst 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 Conference’s administrative arm to report alleged youngster molesters and other accused abusers who were within the pulpit or employed as church staff members. Many of the cases referred to in the report were thought of outside the statute of limitations, the time survivors can report sex abuse, so it’s unclear what number of abusers had 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 have been “only to be met, time and time again, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who were concerned extra with defending the institution from liability than from defending Southern Baptists from additional abuse.

“Whereas stories of abuse had been minimized, and survivors have been ignored and even vilified, revelations got here to gentle 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 dealt with abuse points when survivors got here ahead, it also states that a major Southern Baptist leader was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a lady only 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 vice chairman on the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a lady during a Panama City Seaside, Fla., trip 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 together with her. After the report was released, 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 never abused anyone.”

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

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

Sex abuse survivors, lots of whom have been sharing their tales for years, anticipated Sunday’s release would affirm the details around lots of the tales they've already shared, however many had been nonetheless shocked to see the sample of coverups by the best levels of leadership.

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

The report additionally names a number of senior SBC leaders who protected and even supported alleged abusers, together with three past presidents of the conference, a former vice chairman 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 Govt Committee distributes more than $190 million cooperative program in its annual finances that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For many years, the findings show, Southern Baptists were told the denomination could not put together a registry of intercourse offenders because it might go towards the denomination’s polity — or the way it capabilities. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained a listing of offenders while conserving it a secret to avoid the potential of getting sued. The report also consists of non-public emails exhibiting how longtime leaders similar to August Boto have been dismissive about sexual abuse considerations, calling them “a satanic scheme to fully distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 electronic mail, the convention’s attorney sent Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database might be carried out in line with SBC polity, saying “it would match our polity and current ministries to help church buildings in this area of child abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he advisable “rapid action to signal the Convention’s want that the [executive committee] and the entities start a more aggressive effort on this area.” 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 give extra democratic power to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to commission the third-party investigation, the report reveals how lay Southern Baptists allowed a few key leaders, together with Boto and the convention’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to manage the nationwide institutional response to sex abuse for many years. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, mentioned he had not read the report yet. Makes an attempt to achieve Boto on Sunday were 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 within the report. “It buoys what we’ve been saying all alongside. Now Southern Baptists have to hold the burden.”

Throughout Executive Committee conferences in 2021, some members argued in opposition to waiving attorney-client privilege, which would give investigators access to records of conversations on legal issues among the committee’s members and staffers. They stated doing so went towards the recommendation of conference lawyers and will bankrupt the SBC by exposing it to lawsuits.

The talk over waiving privilege upset a large swath of Southern Baptists, inflicting some to believe 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 Executive Committee’s head, Ronnie Floyd, who additionally as soon as 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 are named all through the report.

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In line with the report, Floyd informed 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 crisis.” He then acknowledged: “Our precedence can't be the most recent cultural crisis.” 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 church buildings 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 Executive Committee “turned his again to her during her speech and another chortled.”

“The Govt Committee betrayed not only survivors who worked onerous to try to make one thing happen, but betrayed the entire Southern Baptist Convention,” mentioned Brown, who is a retired appellate lawyer in Colorado. “They’ve made their own religion right into a complicit associate for their very own determination to choose institutional safety over the protection of kids and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists during its last annual assembly, comes simply weeks before its next gathering in Anaheim, Calif., the place members are anticipated talk about subsequent steps. Suggestions by Guidepost include offering devoted survivor advocacy help and a survivor compensation fund.

“We should be able to take meaningful steps to vary our tradition because it relates to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the current SBC president, mentioned in a press release.

Since decades of sex abuse and coverups within the Catholic Church had been reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have published lists of monks they say have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to prevent the transfer of abusers to different church buildings. Unlike 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 crisis, wrote to the SBC and Government Committee presidents, based on the report. He expressed his considerations that SBC leaders might be falling into a number of the same 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 youngsters safer.

The report states that Frank Web page, who was main the Govt Committee on the time, responded to Doyle in a short letter that “Southern Baptist leaders really haven't any authority over native churches” but that they might attempt to use their “affect” to supply protections. In an article, Page accused a survivor group of getting a hidden agenda of organising 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 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 power on the issue and said that the report shows a necessity for establishments like the SBC to hunt outside experience on intercourse abuse.

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

The difficulty of intercourse abuse was a distinguished 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 & Religious Liberty Commission. Moore said he expects Southern Baptists to obtain Sunday’s report in the same 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 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 said he hopes the SBC will consider replacing 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 previous 20 years fighting for reform.