Southern Baptist leaders coated up sex abuse, explosive report says

Leaders within the Southern Baptist Conference on Sunday launched a serious third-party investigation that discovered that sex abuse survivors had been usually 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 specific 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 or not they could preserve a database of offenders to stop more abuse when prime leaders had been secretly maintaining a private listing for years.

The report — the primary investigation of its variety in a large Protestant denomination like the SBC — is anticipated to ship shock waves throughout a conservative Christian community that has had intense internal battles over handle sex abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, along with other non secular establishments in the United States, 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 entire number of abuse instances amongst Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for nearly 20 years, survivors of abuse and different concerned 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 staff members. Most of the circumstances referred to within the report had been considered outside 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 an organization known as Guidepost Options at the request of Southern Baptists, states that abuse survivors’ calls and emails have been “only to be met, time and time once more, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who have been concerned extra with defending the institution from legal responsibility than from defending Southern Baptists from further abuse.

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

While the report focuses primarily on how leaders handled abuse issues when survivors came ahead, it additionally states that a major Southern Baptist chief was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a woman 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 vp at the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a lady during a Panama City Seaside, Fla., vacation in 2010.

The report states that Hunt, in an interview with investigators, denied any bodily 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 an announcement on Twitter, saying, “I vigorously deny the circumstances and characterizations set forth within the Guidepost report. I've never abused anybody.”

Hunt resigned on May 13 from the North American Mission Board, in line with a press release by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell said that earlier than May 13, he was not conscious of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Typically, he referred to as the main points 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 verify the facts round many of the tales they've already shared, however many had been still surprised to see the pattern of coverups by the highest ranges of leadership.

“I knew it was rotten, but it surely’s astonishing and infuriating,” stated Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was as soon as the highest-paid feminine executive 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 through and through about energy. It's misappropriated power. It doesn't in any means replicate the Jesus I see within the scriptures. I am so gutted.”

The report additionally names several senior SBC leaders who protected and even supported alleged abusers, together with three past presidents of the conference, a former vp and the previous 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. Although Southern Baptist churches function independently from each other, the Nashville-based Govt Committee distributes greater than $190 million cooperative program in its annual finances that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For many years, the findings present, Southern Baptists were informed the denomination couldn't put collectively a registry of intercourse 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 whereas keeping it a secret to keep away from the potential for getting sued. The report also consists of personal emails exhibiting how longtime leaders corresponding to August Boto have been dismissive about sexual abuse considerations, calling them “a satanic scheme to utterly distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 electronic mail, the conference’s legal professional despatched Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database may very well be applied in step with SBC polity, saying “it would match our polity and present ministries to assist churches on this area of kid abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he really useful “immediate motion to signal the Conference’s desire that the [executive committee] and the entities begin a more 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 present extra democratic energy to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to commission the third-party investigation, the report exhibits how lay Southern Baptists allowed a number of key leaders, together with Boto and the convention’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to control the nationwide institutional response to intercourse abuse for decades. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, said he had not learn the report yet. Makes an attempt to succeed in Boto on Sunday have been unsuccessful.

“The report is going to validate so much about how they really 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 along. Now Southern Baptists have to carry the load.”

Throughout Executive Committee meetings in 2021, some members argued against waiving attorney-client privilege, which would give investigators entry to information of conversations on legal matters among the committee’s members and staffers. They said doing so went against the recommendation of conference legal professionals 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 believe 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 Government 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 choice over attorney-client privilege also led to the resignation of the conference’s attorneys, who are named throughout the report.

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In response to the report, Floyd instructed SBC leaders in a 2019 email that he had received “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “rising concern about all the emphasis on the sexual abuse disaster.” He then said: “Our priority can't be the latest cultural crisis.” Floyd didn't immediately return a request for remark.

Christa Brown, who advised 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 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 Executive Committee “turned his back to her during her speech and another chortled.”

“The Government Committee betrayed not solely survivors who worked onerous to try to make one thing happen, however betrayed the entire Southern Baptist Conference,” said Brown, who's a retired appellate lawyer in Colorado. “They’ve made their very own faith into a complicit accomplice for their very own decision to choose institutional safety over the protection of youngsters and congregants.”

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

“We must be able to take significant steps to vary our culture as it relates to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the present SBC president, stated in a statement.

Since many years of sex abuse and coverups in the Catholic Church had been reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have printed lists of clergymen they say have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to prevent the switch 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 intercourse abuse disaster, wrote to the SBC and Govt Committee presidents, in line with the report. He expressed his issues that SBC leaders might be falling into a number of the similar patterns as Catholic leaders in not dealing with clergy sex abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists should learn from Catholic errors and take motion early on to implement structural reforms so as to make children safer.

The report states that Frank Web page, who was leading the Executive Committee at the time, responded to Doyle in a short letter that “Southern Baptist leaders actually have no authority over local church buildings” but that they'd attempt to use their “influence” to offer protections. In an article, Web page accused a survivor group of getting a hidden agenda of setting up the nation’s largest Protestant physique for lawsuits. Web 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 process force on the difficulty and mentioned that the report exhibits a necessity for establishments just like the SBC to hunt exterior experience on intercourse abuse.

“It reveals a stage of coverup and harassment and resistance to reforms on an institutional degree that has led to decades of survivors being victimized and damage,” Denhollander said. “The question Southern Baptists have to ask is, ‘How could this occur?’”

The issue of intercourse abuse was a distinguished theme in leaked personal letters written by Russell Moore, who left his place in 2021 as head of the SBC’s policy arm, the Ethics & Spiritual Liberty Commission. Moore stated he expects Southern Baptists to receive Sunday’s report in a similar method 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 said. “Folks will say, ‘This is not all Southern Baptists, have a 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 contemplate replacing 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 two decades fighting for reform.