Southern Baptist leaders coated up intercourse abuse, explosive report says

Leaders in the Southern Baptist Convention on Sunday released a major third-party investigation that discovered that sex abuse survivors have been typically ignored, minimized and “even vilified” by prime clergy in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

The findings of nearly 300 pages embody surprising new details about particular abuse instances and shine a light on how denominational leaders for decades actively resisted requires abuse prevention and reform. Proof in the report suggests leaders also lied to Southern Baptists over whether they may keep a database of offenders to prevent extra abuse when high leaders were secretly protecting a private list for years.

The report — the primary investigation of its sort in an enormous Protestant denomination just like the SBC — is anticipated to send shock waves throughout a conservative Christian group that has had intense inner battles over easy methods to deal with intercourse abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, together with other non secular institutions in the USA, has struggled with declining membership for the previous 15 years. Its leaders have lengthy resisted comparisons between its sexual abuse disaster and that of the Catholic Church, saying the overall variety of abuse cases among Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for nearly two decades, survivors of abuse and different concerned Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Convention’s administrative arm to report alleged youngster molesters and different accused abusers who were within the pulpit or employed as church workers members. Most of the instances referred to in the report were thought of outdoors the statute of limitations, the time survivors can report sex abuse, so it’s unclear how many abusers have been criminally charged.

The report, compiled by a corporation called Guidepost Solutions at the request of Southern Baptists, states that abuse survivors’ calls and emails had been “solely to be met, time and time once more, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who had been involved extra with protecting the establishment from liability than from defending Southern Baptists from further abuse.

“Whereas tales of abuse had been minimized, and survivors had been ignored or even vilified, revelations came to light 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 issues when survivors came forward, it additionally states that a main Southern Baptist leader was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a lady only one month after he completed 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 at the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a lady during a Panama Metropolis Seaside, Fla., trip in 2010.

The report states that Hunt, in an interview with investigators, denied any physical contact with the woman but acknowledged that he had interactions 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'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 stated that earlier than Could 13, he was not aware of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Typically, he called the details of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

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Intercourse abuse survivors, a lot of whom have been sharing their tales for years, anticipated Sunday’s launch would confirm the details around lots of the stories they have already shared, but many were still shocked to see the sample of coverups by the very best levels of leadership.

“I knew it was rotten, however it’s astonishing and infuriating,” stated Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was as soon as the highest-paid feminine 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 thru about energy. It is misappropriated energy. It doesn't in any manner replicate 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, including 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. Though Southern Baptist church buildings function independently from each other, the Nashville-based Executive Committee distributes greater than $190 million cooperative program in its annual price range that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For many years, the findings present, Southern Baptists were informed the denomination could not put collectively 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 a list of offenders whereas protecting it a secret to keep away from the possibility of getting sued. The report additionally includes personal emails showing how longtime leaders comparable to August Boto were dismissive about sexual abuse issues, calling them “a satanic scheme to completely distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 e mail, the conference’s attorney despatched Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database could be applied according to SBC polity, saying “it could fit our polity and current ministries to help church buildings in this space of child abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he advisable “rapid action to sign the Conference’s need that the [executive committee] and the entities start a more aggressive effort in this space.” That same year, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a motion for a database, Boto rejected the thought.

For a denomination designed to give extra democratic energy to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to fee the third-party investigation, the report shows how lay Southern Baptists allowed a couple of key leaders, including Boto and the convention’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to regulate the nationwide institutional response to intercourse abuse for decades. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, said he had not read the report yet. Attempts to reach Boto on Sunday were unsuccessful.

“The report is going to validate a lot about how they actually blindly chose to remain on the same path all these years,” stated 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 burden.”

During Executive Committee meetings in 2021, some members argued against waiving attorney-client privilege, which would give investigators entry to records of conversations on legal issues among the many committee’s members and staffers. They said doing so went in opposition to the recommendation 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, causing some to imagine 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 additionally led to the resignation of the Executive Committee’s head, Ronnie Floyd, who additionally once served as SBC president and was on President Donald Trump’s evangelical advisory council. The choice over attorney-client privilege additionally led to the resignation of the convention’s attorneys, who're named throughout the report.

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

Christa Brown, who told SBC leaders that she was abused by a youth pastor who went on to serve in different Southern Baptist churches in a number of 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 Government Committee “turned his again to her throughout her speech and another chortled.”

“The Executive Committee betrayed not solely survivors who labored exhausting to attempt to make something occur, however betrayed the whole Southern Baptist Conference,” stated Brown, who is a retired appellate lawyer in Colorado. “They’ve made their very own religion right into a complicit companion for their own determination to decide on 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 earlier than its subsequent gathering in Anaheim, Calif., where members are expected discuss next steps. Suggestions by Guidepost include offering dedicated survivor advocacy assist and a survivor compensation fund.

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

Since many years of intercourse abuse and coverups within the Catholic Church were reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have published lists of clergymen they are saying have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to prevent the switch of abusers to different churches. Not like 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, in response to the report. He expressed his considerations that SBC leaders could be falling into among the identical patterns as Catholic leaders in not coping with clergy sex abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists should study from Catholic mistakes and take motion early on to implement structural reforms in order to make youngsters safer.

The report states that Frank Web page, who was main the Executive Committee at the time, responded to Doyle in a brief letter that “Southern Baptist leaders actually don't have any authority over local church buildings” however that they'd try 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 place in 2018 over having a “morally inappropriate relationship.” Web page did not immediately 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 pressure on the problem and stated that the report exhibits a necessity for institutions just like the SBC to hunt outdoors expertise on intercourse abuse.

“It exhibits a degree of coverup and harassment and resistance to reforms on an institutional degree that has led to decades of survivors being victimized and harm,” Denhollander mentioned. “The question Southern Baptists need to ask is, ‘How might this happen?’”

The problem of sex abuse was a distinguished 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 & Spiritual Liberty Fee. Moore mentioned he expects Southern Baptists to receive Sunday’s report in the same 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 mentioned. “People will say, ‘This isn't all Southern Baptists, look at all the nice we do.’ The report demonstrates a sample 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 residence state in 2016, with a statue of Christa Brown, the abuse survivor who spent the past twenty years fighting for reform.