Southern Baptist leaders covered up sex abuse, explosive report says

Leaders in the Southern Baptist Convention on Sunday launched a significant third-party investigation that found that sex abuse survivors had been often ignored, minimized and “even vilified” by high clergy in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

The findings of almost 300 pages embrace stunning new details about particular abuse circumstances and shine a light-weight on how denominational leaders for decades actively resisted calls for abuse prevention and reform. Proof within the report suggests leaders additionally lied to Southern Baptists over whether or not they might preserve a database of offenders to prevent more abuse when top leaders have been secretly retaining a private listing for years.

The report — the first investigation of its variety in a massive Protestant denomination just like the SBC — is anticipated to ship shock waves all through a conservative Christian group that has had intense inside battles over deal with intercourse abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, along with different religious establishments in america, has struggled with declining membership for the past 15 years. Its leaders have long resisted comparisons between its sexual abuse disaster and that of the Catholic Church, saying the whole variety of abuse instances 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 child molesters and other accused abusers who have been in the pulpit or employed as church employees members. Many of the circumstances referred to within the report had been considered exterior 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 referred to as Guidepost Solutions on the request of Southern Baptists, states that abuse survivors’ calls and emails have been “solely to be met, time and time again, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who have been involved extra with defending the institution from liability than from defending Southern Baptists from additional abuse.

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

While the report focuses primarily on how leaders dealt with abuse points when survivors got here forward, it also states that a major Southern Baptist chief was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a girl only 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 at the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a woman during a Panama Metropolis Seaside, Fla., vacation in 2010.

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

Hunt resigned on Might 13 from the North American Mission Board, in response to a statement by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell mentioned that earlier than Could 13, he was not conscious 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, a lot of whom have been sharing their stories for years, anticipated Sunday’s release would verify the info around many of the tales they've already shared, however many had been nonetheless stunned to see the pattern of coverups by the very best levels of leadership.

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

The report also names several 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 focused on actions by the SBC’s Govt Committee, which handles monetary and administrative duties. Though Southern Baptist churches function 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 present, Southern Baptists were advised the denomination could not put collectively a registry of intercourse offenders as a result of it will go in opposition to the denomination’s polity — or the way it capabilities. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained a list of offenders whereas preserving it a secret to keep away from the potential of getting sued. The report also contains non-public emails showing how longtime leaders akin to August Boto have been dismissive about sexual abuse issues, calling them “a satanic scheme to fully distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 e mail, the convention’s attorney despatched Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database might be implemented in line with SBC polity, saying “it might match our polity and current ministries to assist church buildings on this space of child abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he beneficial “rapid motion to sign the Conference’s want that the [executive committee] and the entities begin a extra aggressive effort on this space.” That same year, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a movement for a database, Boto rejected the thought.

For a denomination designed to give extra democratic power to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to fee the third-party investigation, the report exhibits how lay Southern Baptists allowed just 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 learn the report but. Attempts to reach Boto on Sunday have been unsuccessful.

“The report is going to validate so much about how they actually blindly selected to remain on the identical path all these years,” mentioned Tiffany Thigpen, whose story of sexual abuse in a Southern Baptist church is detailed in the report. “It buoys what we’ve been saying all along. Now Southern Baptists have to carry the weight.”

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

The debate over waiving privilege upset a big swath of Southern Baptists, causing some to consider 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 also led to the resignation of the Executive 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 additionally led to the resignation of the conference’s attorneys, who are named throughout the report.

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In keeping with the report, Floyd instructed SBC leaders in a 2019 electronic mail that he had obtained “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “growing concern about all of the emphasis on the sexual abuse disaster.” He then stated: “Our priority cannot be the latest cultural crisis.” Floyd did not instantly return a request for remark.

Christa Brown, who instructed 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 only survivors who labored arduous to attempt to make something occur, however betrayed the entire Southern Baptist Conference,” mentioned Brown, who's a retired appellate lawyer in Colorado. “They’ve made their very own faith right into a complicit partner for their very own resolution to choose institutional safety over the protection of children and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists throughout its last annual assembly, comes just weeks before its next gathering in Anaheim, Calif., where members are expected focus on subsequent steps. Recommendations by Guidepost embody providing devoted survivor advocacy assist and a survivor compensation fund.

“We must be ready to take meaningful steps to change our culture because it pertains to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the present SBC president, mentioned in an announcement.

Since many years of sex 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 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 Govt Committee presidents, in line with the report. He expressed his considerations that SBC leaders could be falling into some of the identical patterns as Catholic leaders in not dealing with clergy intercourse abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists ought to study from Catholic mistakes 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 haven't any authority over local church buildings” but that they might attempt to make use of their “influence” to supply 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 position in 2018 over having a “morally inappropriate relationship.” Web page didn't 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 pressure on the difficulty and mentioned that the report exhibits a necessity for establishments like the SBC to hunt outdoors expertise on sex abuse.

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

The difficulty of sex abuse was a prominent 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 & Non secular Liberty Fee. Moore said he expects Southern Baptists to obtain Sunday’s report in an analogous strategy 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. “People will say, ‘This is not all Southern Baptists, have 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 contemplate replacing a statue of evangelist Billy Graham, which was moved from Nashville to Graham’s home state in 2016, with a statue of Christa Brown, the abuse survivor who spent the previous twenty years preventing for reform.