Southern Baptist leaders covered up sex abuse, explosive report says

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

The findings of nearly 300 pages embody shocking new details about particular abuse instances and shine a light-weight on how denominational leaders for many years actively resisted calls for abuse prevention and reform. Evidence within the report suggests leaders additionally lied to Southern Baptists over whether or not they might keep a database of offenders to forestall more abuse when prime leaders have been secretly preserving a personal checklist for years.

The report — the primary investigation of its kind in an enormous Protestant denomination like the SBC — is predicted to ship shock waves all through a conservative Christian group that has had intense inside battles over find out how to handle sex abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, together with other spiritual establishments in the United States, has struggled with declining membership for the past 15 years. Its leaders have lengthy resisted comparisons between its sexual abuse disaster and that of the Catholic Church, saying the total variety of abuse circumstances among Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for almost two decades, survivors of abuse and different concerned Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Conference’s administrative arm to report alleged baby molesters and different accused abusers who were within the pulpit or employed as church workers members. Many of the cases referred to in the report have been considered outdoors the statute of limitations, the time survivors can report intercourse abuse, so it’s unclear what number of abusers had been criminally charged.

The report, compiled by a company known as Guidepost Solutions on the request of Southern Baptists, states that abuse survivors’ calls and emails were “only to be met, time and time again, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who had been concerned extra with defending the institution from legal responsibility than from defending Southern Baptists from further abuse.

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

While the report focuses primarily on how leaders dealt with abuse issues when survivors came ahead, it additionally states that a major Southern Baptist chief was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a lady 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 woman 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 lady but 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 statement on Twitter, saying, “I vigorously deny the circumstances and characterizations set forth in the Guidepost report. I've by no means abused anyone.”

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

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Sex abuse survivors, lots of whom have been sharing their stories for years, anticipated Sunday’s release would affirm the facts round many of the tales they have already shared, however many were still surprised to see the sample of coverups by the highest ranges of leadership.

“I knew it was rotten, however it’s astonishing and infuriating,” said Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was as soon as 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 is via and through about power. It's misappropriated power. It does not in any method 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 vp 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 churches operate independently from each other, the Nashville-based Government Committee distributes more than $190 million cooperative program in its annual price range that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For decades, the findings present, Southern Baptists have been advised the denomination could not put collectively a registry of sex offenders as a result of it could go in opposition to the denomination’s polity — or how it capabilities. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained a listing of offenders while maintaining it a secret to keep away from the potential of getting sued. The report additionally includes private emails exhibiting how longtime leaders equivalent to August Boto were dismissive about sexual abuse issues, calling them “a satanic scheme to fully distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 email, the conference’s legal professional sent Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database could be applied according to SBC polity, saying “it could fit our polity and present ministries to assist church buildings on this space of kid abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he recommended “immediate action to sign the Convention’s need that the [executive committee] and the entities begin a extra aggressive effort in this area.” That very same year, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a movement for a database, Boto rejected the thought.

For a denomination designed to provide extra 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 couple of key leaders, together with Boto and the conference’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to manage the nationwide institutional response to sex abuse for decades. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, said he had not read the report yet. Makes an attempt to succeed in Boto on Sunday were unsuccessful.

“The report goes to validate a lot about how they really blindly selected 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 hold the burden.”

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

The debate over waiving privilege upset a big 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 also led to the resignation of the Govt 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 also 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 electronic mail that he had acquired “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “rising concern about all of the emphasis on the sexual abuse crisis.” He then stated: “Our precedence can't be the latest cultural crisis.” Floyd did not immediately return a request for comment.

Christa Brown, who informed SBC leaders that she was abused by a youth pastor who went on to serve in other 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 Executive Committee “turned his again to her throughout her speech and another chortled.”

“The Govt Committee betrayed not solely survivors who labored onerous to attempt to make one thing happen, however betrayed the whole Southern Baptist Conference,” mentioned Brown, who's a retired appellate lawyer in Colorado. “They’ve made their own faith into a complicit associate for their own choice to decide on institutional protection over the protection of kids 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 anticipated discuss subsequent steps. Recommendations by Guidepost embrace offering dedicated survivor advocacy assist and a survivor compensation fund.

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

Since a long time of sex 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 church buildings. 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 Govt Committee presidents, according to the report. He expressed his considerations that SBC leaders could be falling into among the similar patterns as Catholic leaders in not coping with clergy intercourse abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists should learn from Catholic errors and take action early on to implement structural reforms in order to make youngsters safer.

The report states that Frank Web page, who was leading the Executive Committee on the time, responded to Doyle in a short letter that “Southern Baptist leaders truly have no authority over native churches” but that they would attempt to use their “influence” to offer protections. In an article, Page accused a survivor group of having a hidden agenda of organising the nation’s largest Protestant body for lawsuits. Page later resigned from his place in 2018 over having a “morally inappropriate relationship.” Page didn't 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 difficulty and said that the report reveals a need for establishments just like the SBC to hunt exterior experience on sex abuse.

“It exhibits a stage of coverup and harassment and resistance to reforms on an institutional degree that has led to a long time of survivors being victimized and damage,” Denhollander said. “The question Southern Baptists should ask is, ‘How may this happen?’”

The issue of intercourse abuse was a distinguished theme in leaked non-public 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 stated 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 mentioned. “Individuals will say, ‘This is not all Southern Baptists, take a 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 changing 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 previous 20 years combating for reform.