Southern Baptist leaders lined up sex abuse, explosive report says

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

The findings of practically 300 pages embrace stunning new details about specific abuse instances and shine a light on how denominational leaders for many years actively resisted requires abuse prevention and reform. Evidence in the report suggests leaders also lied to Southern Baptists over whether or not they may maintain a database of offenders to prevent more abuse when top leaders have been secretly retaining a personal record for years.

The report — the first investigation of its type in a large Protestant denomination just like the SBC — is predicted to send shock waves all through a conservative Christian community that has had intense inside battles over tips on how to handle intercourse abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, together with other religious institutions in america, 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 overall variety of abuse circumstances 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 little one molesters and different accused abusers who had been in the pulpit or employed as church staff members. Lots of the instances referred to in the report were thought-about 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 corporation known as Guidepost Options on the request of Southern Baptists, states that abuse survivors’ calls and emails were “solely to be met, time and time once more, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who had been concerned more with defending the institution from legal responsibility than from defending Southern Baptists from additional abuse.

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

While the report focuses totally on how leaders handled abuse issues when survivors came forward, it additionally states that a main Southern Baptist leader was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a girl 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 vice president on the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a lady during a Panama Metropolis 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 together with her. After the report was launched, Hunt, who has not been charged over the alleged incident, posted a press release on Twitter, saying, “I vigorously deny the circumstances and characterizations set forth in the Guidepost report. I have never abused anybody.”

Hunt resigned on Might 13 from the North American Mission Board, in line with a press release by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell stated that earlier than 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.”

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Sex abuse survivors, a lot of whom have been sharing their stories for years, anticipated Sunday’s launch would verify the info round many of the stories they have already shared, but many had been nonetheless stunned to see the sample of coverups by the highest ranges of leadership.

“I knew it was rotten, nevertheless it’s astonishing and infuriating,” mentioned Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was once the highest-paid female govt at the SBC and whose story of sexual abuse at a Southern Baptist seminary is detailed in the report. “It is a denomination that is by and through about power. It's misappropriated energy. It doesn't in any manner reflect the Jesus I see in the scriptures. I'm so gutted.”

The report additionally names a number of senior SBC leaders who protected and even supported alleged abusers, together with three previous presidents of the convention, a former vice president and the former 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 financial and administrative duties. Although Southern Baptist church buildings operate independently from each other, the Nashville-based Executive Committee distributes more than $190 million cooperative program in its annual budget that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For decades, the findings show, Southern Baptists had been informed the denomination could not put together a registry of sex offenders as a result of it will go against the denomination’s polity — or the way it features. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained an inventory of offenders whereas retaining it a secret to keep away from the opportunity of getting sued. The report also contains personal emails showing how longtime leaders such as August Boto have been dismissive about sexual abuse concerns, calling them “a satanic scheme to utterly distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 email, the conference’s lawyer despatched Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database might be applied consistent with SBC polity, saying “it will fit our polity and present ministries to help church buildings on this area of kid abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he recommended “fast motion to sign the Conference’s need that the [executive committee] and the entities begin a extra aggressive effort on this area.” That same year, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a motion for a database, Boto rejected the thought.

For a denomination designed to provide more democratic power to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to fee the third-party investigation, the report reveals how lay Southern Baptists allowed just a few key leaders, including Boto and the convention’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to regulate the national institutional response to sex abuse for many years. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, stated he had not learn the report yet. Makes an attempt to achieve Boto on Sunday were unsuccessful.

“The report is going to validate a lot about how they really blindly selected to stay on the identical 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 load.”

During Executive Committee meetings in 2021, some members argued against waiving attorney-client privilege, which might give investigators access to data of conversations on legal matters among the committee’s members and staffers. They said doing so went against the advice of convention attorneys 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 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 Government 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're named all through the report.

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In response to the report, Floyd told SBC leaders in a 2019 electronic mail that he had acquired “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “rising concern about all the emphasis on the sexual abuse crisis.” He then stated: “Our priority cannot be the newest cultural crisis.” 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 different 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 another chortled.”

“The Executive Committee betrayed not only survivors who worked exhausting to attempt to make something happen, but betrayed the entire Southern Baptist Convention,” stated Brown, who's a retired appellate lawyer in Colorado. “They’ve made their own religion right into a complicit accomplice for their own choice to choose institutional protection over the safety of kids and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists throughout its last annual assembly, comes just weeks earlier than its subsequent gathering in Anaheim, Calif., the place members are anticipated focus on subsequent steps. Suggestions by Guidepost include offering devoted survivor advocacy assist and a survivor compensation fund.

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

Since a long time of intercourse 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 say have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to stop the transfer of abusers to different church buildings. 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 crisis, wrote to the SBC and Executive Committee presidents, according to the report. He expressed his considerations that SBC leaders might be falling into a number of the similar patterns as Catholic leaders in not dealing with clergy intercourse abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists ought to be taught from Catholic mistakes and take motion early on to implement structural reforms in order to make children safer.

The report states that Frank Page, who was main the Government Committee at the time, responded to Doyle in a brief letter that “Southern Baptist leaders actually have no authority over native churches” but that they might try to make use of their “affect” to provide protections. In an article, Page accused a survivor group of having 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.” Page did not immediately 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 job drive on the difficulty and mentioned that the report exhibits a necessity for establishments like the SBC to seek outdoors expertise on intercourse abuse.

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

The issue of intercourse abuse was a distinguished theme in leaked non-public letters written by Russell Moore, who left his position in 2021 as head of the SBC’s coverage arm, the Ethics & Spiritual Liberty Commission. Moore stated he expects Southern Baptists to obtain Sunday’s report in an analogous solution 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 isn't all Southern Baptists, look at all the nice we do.’ The report demonstrates a pattern of stonewalling, coverup, intimidation and retaliation.”

Moore mentioned he hopes the SBC will take into account replacing 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 previous two decades fighting for reform.