Southern Baptist leaders coated up sex abuse, explosive report says

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

The findings of almost 300 pages embrace stunning new particulars about particular abuse circumstances and shine a light on how denominational leaders for many years actively resisted requires abuse prevention and reform. Evidence within the report suggests leaders also lied to Southern Baptists over whether or not they might preserve a database of offenders to stop more abuse when prime leaders were secretly keeping a private listing for years.

The report — the first investigation of its sort in a large Protestant denomination like the SBC — is anticipated to send shock waves throughout a conservative Christian neighborhood that has had intense inside battles over tips on how to deal with sex abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, together with other religious establishments in the United States, has struggled with declining membership for the previous 15 years. Its leaders have long resisted comparisons between its sexual abuse crisis and that of the Catholic Church, saying the overall variety of abuse instances 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 other accused abusers who were within the pulpit or employed as church workers members. Many of the instances referred to in the report have been considered 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 a corporation known as Guidepost Solutions at the request of Southern Baptists, states that abuse survivors’ calls and emails had been “only to be met, time and time again, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who had been involved more with protecting the institution from liability than from protecting Southern Baptists from further abuse.

“While tales of abuse were minimized, and survivors have been ignored and even vilified, revelations got here to gentle lately 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 chief was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a woman just 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 on the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a lady throughout a Panama Metropolis Seashore, Fla., vacation in 2010.

The report states that Hunt, in an interview with investigators, denied any physical contact with the woman however acknowledged that he had interactions along 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 have by no means abused anybody.”

Hunt resigned on May 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. Typically, he known as the details of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

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Sex abuse survivors, many of whom have been sharing their stories for years, anticipated Sunday’s release would affirm the facts around many of the tales they've already shared, however many have been nonetheless surprised to see the sample of coverups by the highest ranges of management.

“I knew it was rotten, but it’s astonishing and infuriating,” stated Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was once the highest-paid female govt on the SBC and whose story of sexual abuse at a Southern Baptist seminary is detailed within the report. “This is a denomination that's through and through about power. It's misappropriated energy. It does not in any approach mirror the Jesus I see in 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 previous 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 focused on actions by the SBC’s Govt Committee, which handles financial and administrative duties. Though Southern Baptist church buildings function independently from each other, 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 present, Southern Baptists had been told the denomination could not put collectively a registry of sex offenders because it will go towards the denomination’s polity — or the way it functions. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained an inventory of offenders while keeping it a secret to avoid the potential for getting sued. The report also includes non-public emails showing how longtime leaders similar to August Boto have been dismissive about sexual abuse issues, calling them “a satanic scheme to completely distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 electronic mail, the convention’s lawyer sent Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database could be applied according to SBC polity, saying “it will match our polity and present ministries to assist churches on this area of child abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he really useful “speedy motion to signal the Convention’s want that the [executive committee] and the entities start a more aggressive effort in this space.” That very same yr, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a motion for a database, Boto rejected the thought.

For a denomination designed to present 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 a number of key leaders, including Boto and the conference’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to control the national institutional response to sex abuse for many years. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, stated he had not read the report yet. Attempts to succeed in Boto on Sunday have been unsuccessful.

“The report goes to validate a lot about how they actually 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 within the report. “It buoys what we’ve been saying all along. Now Southern Baptists have to carry the weight.”

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

The talk over waiving privilege upset a large swath of Southern Baptists, inflicting some to consider 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 also led to the resignation of the Executive 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 choice over attorney-client privilege also led to the resignation of the convention’s attorneys, who're named all through the report.

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According to the report, Floyd advised SBC leaders in a 2019 electronic mail that he had obtained “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “rising concern about all of the emphasis on the sexual abuse crisis.” He then acknowledged: “Our priority can't be the latest cultural crisis.” Floyd didn't instantly return a request for comment.

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 multiple 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 Govt Committee “turned his again to her during her speech and one other chortled.”

“The Executive Committee betrayed not only survivors who worked exhausting to try to make one thing occur, but betrayed the entire Southern Baptist Conference,” said Brown, who is a retired appellate lawyer in Colorado. “They’ve made their own faith right into a complicit companion for their very own decision to decide on institutional safety over the protection of youngsters and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists throughout its last annual meeting, comes just weeks before its subsequent gathering in Anaheim, Calif., the place members are expected discuss next steps. Recommendations by Guidepost embrace offering devoted survivor advocacy help and a survivor compensation fund.

“We must be ready to take meaningful steps to change our tradition because it pertains to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the present SBC president, said in a press release.

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 published lists of clergymen they are saying have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to forestall the transfer of abusers to different 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 crisis, wrote to the SBC and Government Committee presidents, in response to the report. He expressed his considerations that SBC leaders may very well be falling into some of the similar patterns as Catholic leaders in not dealing with clergy intercourse abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists ought to learn from Catholic errors and take action early on to implement structural reforms so as to make children safer.

The report states that Frank Web page, who was leading the Govt Committee on the time, responded to Doyle in a short letter that “Southern Baptist leaders actually haven't any authority over local 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 setting up 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 remark.

Rachael Denhollander, a former USA gymnast who outed Larry Nassar’s serial sexual assaults, is an adviser on a Southern Baptist process drive on the problem and said that the report reveals a necessity for establishments like the SBC to seek outdoors experience on sex abuse.

“It shows 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 mentioned. “The question Southern Baptists have to ask is, ‘How might this occur?’”

The difficulty of intercourse 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 coverage arm, the Ethics & Spiritual Liberty Commission. 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 in this report are breathtaking,” Moore stated. “Folks will say, ‘This isn't all Southern Baptists, have a 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 take into account changing 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 combating for reform.