Southern Baptist leaders lined up intercourse abuse, explosive report says

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

The findings of practically 300 pages embody shocking new details about specific abuse instances and shine a lightweight on how denominational leaders for many years actively resisted calls for abuse prevention and reform. Proof in the report suggests leaders also lied to Southern Baptists over whether or not they might preserve a database of offenders to forestall extra abuse when top leaders had been secretly retaining a non-public listing for years.

The report — the primary investigation of its kind in an enormous Protestant denomination like the SBC — is predicted to send shock waves all through a conservative Christian neighborhood that has had intense internal battles over the way to deal with intercourse abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, along with other religious establishments in the US, 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 entire number of abuse circumstances amongst Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for almost two decades, survivors of abuse and different involved Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Convention’s administrative arm to report alleged baby molesters and different accused abusers who have been in the pulpit or employed as church workers members. Many of the instances referred to in the report have been considered 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 known as Guidepost Solutions on the request of Southern Baptists, states that abuse survivors’ calls and emails had been “solely to be met, time and time again, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who have been involved extra with protecting the establishment from liability than from protecting Southern Baptists from additional abuse.

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

Whereas the report focuses totally on how leaders handled abuse points when survivors got here forward, it additionally states that a main Southern Baptist chief was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a woman 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 chairman on the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a lady during a Panama City Beach, 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 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 within the Guidepost report. I have never abused anyone.”

Hunt resigned on May 13 from the North American Mission Board, according to an announcement by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell said that before Might 13, he was not conscious of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Usually, he known as the main points 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 verify the facts around lots of the stories they've already shared, but many were nonetheless shocked to see the pattern of coverups by the best levels of management.

“I knew it was rotten, however it’s astonishing and infuriating,” mentioned Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was as soon as the highest-paid female govt at the SBC and whose story of sexual abuse at a Southern Baptist seminary is detailed in the report. “This can be a denomination that's by way of and through about power. It is misappropriated energy. It doesn't in any way mirror 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, including three past presidents of the convention, a former vice president and the previous head of the SBC’s administrative arm.

The third-party investigation into actions between 2000 and 2021 centered on actions by the SBC’s Executive Committee, which handles monetary and administrative duties. Though Southern Baptist church buildings operate independently from each other, the Nashville-based Govt Committee distributes more than $190 million cooperative program in its annual funds that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For many years, the findings show, Southern Baptists were advised the denomination couldn't put together a registry of sex offenders because it would go in opposition to the denomination’s polity — or how it functions. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained a listing of offenders whereas holding it a secret to keep away from the opportunity of getting sued. The report also consists of non-public emails displaying how longtime leaders reminiscent of August Boto had been dismissive about sexual abuse issues, calling them “a satanic scheme to fully distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 email, the conference’s lawyer despatched Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database may very well be carried out in keeping with SBC polity, saying “it could fit our polity and current ministries to assist churches in this space of kid abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he beneficial “speedy motion to sign the Convention’s want that the [executive committee] and the entities begin a more aggressive effort on this space.” That same yr, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a movement for a database, Boto rejected the idea.

For a denomination designed to give more democratic energy to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to commission the third-party investigation, the report shows how lay Southern Baptists allowed a few key leaders, together with Boto and the conference’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to control the national institutional response to intercourse abuse for decades. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, said he had not read the report but. 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 same 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 alongside. Now Southern Baptists have to carry the weight.”

Throughout Govt Committee meetings in 2021, some members argued towards waiving attorney-client privilege, which might give investigators entry to information of conversations on authorized issues among the committee’s members and staffers. They said doing so went in opposition to the recommendation of conference lawyers and could bankrupt the SBC by exposing it to lawsuits.

The controversy over waiving privilege upset a large swath of Southern Baptists, inflicting 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 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 are named all through the report.

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Based on the report, Floyd told SBC leaders in a 2019 electronic mail that he had obtained “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “rising concern about all the emphasis on the sexual abuse crisis.” He then acknowledged: “Our precedence cannot be the latest cultural crisis.” Floyd didn't instantly 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 other Southern Baptist church buildings in a number of 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 again to her during her speech and one other chortled.”

“The Govt Committee betrayed not solely survivors who labored onerous to attempt to make one thing occur, however betrayed the entire Southern Baptist Convention,” said Brown, who's a retired appellate legal professional in Colorado. “They’ve made their own faith into a complicit accomplice for their own decision to choose institutional safety over the safety of youngsters and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists during its final annual meeting, comes simply weeks earlier than its next gathering in Anaheim, Calif., where members are anticipated discuss subsequent steps. Suggestions by Guidepost embrace providing dedicated survivor advocacy assist and a survivor compensation fund.

“We must be ready to take significant steps to change our tradition because it pertains to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the present SBC president, stated in a statement.

Since decades of intercourse abuse and coverups within the Catholic Church have been reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have published lists of clergymen they say have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to forestall the transfer of abusers to other churches. 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 sex abuse disaster, wrote to the SBC and Executive Committee presidents, based on the report. He expressed his considerations that SBC leaders could possibly be falling into among the same patterns as Catholic leaders in not dealing with clergy intercourse abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists ought to be taught 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 at the time, responded to Doyle in a brief letter that “Southern Baptist leaders truly have no authority over native churches” but that they'd try to use their “affect” to supply protections. In an article, Page accused a survivor group of getting a hidden agenda of establishing the nation’s largest Protestant body for lawsuits. Page later resigned from his place in 2018 over having a “morally inappropriate relationship.” 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 task drive on the problem and said that the report shows a necessity for institutions like the SBC to seek outdoors experience on sex abuse.

“It exhibits a level 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 might this occur?’”

The issue of sex abuse was a prominent theme in leaked personal letters written by Russell Moore, who left his position in 2021 as head of the SBC’s coverage arm, the Ethics & Spiritual Liberty Fee. Moore mentioned he expects Southern Baptists to obtain Sunday’s report in an analogous approach 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 said. “Individuals will say, ‘This is not all Southern Baptists, look at all the great we do.’ The report demonstrates a sample of stonewalling, coverup, intimidation and retaliation.”

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