Southern Baptist leaders covered up intercourse abuse, explosive report says

Leaders in the Southern Baptist Conference on Sunday released a significant third-party investigation that discovered that sex abuse survivors have 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 particular abuse circumstances and shine a light on how denominational leaders for decades actively resisted requires abuse prevention and reform. Evidence within the report suggests leaders additionally lied to Southern Baptists over whether they could keep a database of offenders to prevent extra abuse when prime leaders have been secretly protecting a non-public list for years.

The report — the first investigation of its type in an enormous Protestant denomination like the SBC — is expected to ship shock waves throughout a conservative Christian neighborhood that has had intense internal battles over how you can handle sex abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, together with different spiritual institutions in the USA, has struggled with declining membership for the previous 15 years. Its leaders have long resisted comparisons between its sexual abuse disaster and that of the Catholic Church, saying the overall variety of abuse instances amongst Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for almost 20 years, survivors of abuse and different involved Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Convention’s administrative arm to report alleged youngster molesters and other accused abusers who were in the pulpit or employed as church workers members. Lots of the circumstances referred to within the report have been thought-about 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 an organization known as Guidepost Options at the request of Southern Baptists, states that abuse survivors’ calls and emails were “solely to be met, time and time again, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who were involved extra with protecting the institution from liability than from protecting Southern Baptists from additional abuse.

“While tales of abuse were minimized, and survivors had been ignored or even vilified, revelations came to gentle lately 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 came forward, it additionally states that a main Southern Baptist chief was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a girl only one month after he completed his two-year tenure as president of the convention. The report finds that Johnny Hunt, a beloved Georgia-based Southern Baptist pastor who has been a senior vice chairman at 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 woman however acknowledged that he had interactions together with her. After the report was launched, 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 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 aware of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Usually, he called the small print of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

Southern Baptists have been immersed in their very own intercourse abuse scandals. Now, they’re debating their response.

Sex abuse survivors, lots of whom have been sharing their stories for years, anticipated Sunday’s release would affirm the details round lots of the stories they've already shared, but many have been nonetheless stunned to see the pattern of coverups by the highest ranges of management.

“I knew it was rotten, but it’s astonishing and infuriating,” said 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. “It is a denomination that is through and through about energy. It's misappropriated power. It doesn't in any manner replicate the Jesus I see within the scriptures. I'm so gutted.”

The report additionally names several senior SBC leaders who protected and even supported alleged abusers, together with three previous presidents of the conference, a former vice chairman 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 Executive Committee, which handles financial and administrative duties. Although Southern Baptist church buildings operate independently from each other, the Nashville-based Govt Committee distributes greater than $190 million cooperative program in its annual funds that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For decades, the findings show, Southern Baptists have been instructed the denomination couldn't put collectively a registry of sex offenders as a result of it will go against the denomination’s polity — or how it features. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained an inventory of offenders while retaining it a secret to keep away from the potential of getting sued. The report additionally contains personal emails exhibiting how longtime leaders corresponding to August Boto had been dismissive about sexual abuse concerns, calling them “a satanic scheme to completely distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 e mail, the convention’s legal professional sent Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database may very well be carried out per SBC polity, saying “it would fit our polity and current ministries to help church buildings in this space of kid abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he beneficial “speedy action to sign the Conference’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 provide more democratic power to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to commission the third-party investigation, the report exhibits how lay Southern Baptists allowed just a few key leaders, including Boto and the convention’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to regulate the national institutional response to sex abuse for many years. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, mentioned he had not read the report but. Makes an attempt to succeed in Boto on Sunday had been unsuccessful.

“The report is going to validate so much about how they actually blindly chose to stay 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 meetings in 2021, some members argued against waiving attorney-client privilege, which would give investigators access to information of conversations on legal issues among the many committee’s members and staffers. They mentioned doing so went against the advice of convention lawyers 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 imagine 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 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 conference’s attorneys, who are named all through the report.

Newly leaked letter particulars allegations that Southern Baptist leaders mishandled intercourse abuse claims

According to the report, Floyd informed SBC leaders in a 2019 e mail that he had acquired “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “growing concern about all the emphasis on the sexual abuse crisis.” He then acknowledged: “Our precedence cannot be the newest cultural disaster.” Floyd didn't instantly 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 church buildings 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 one other chortled.”

“The Executive Committee betrayed not solely survivors who labored arduous to try to make something occur, but betrayed the whole Southern Baptist Convention,” mentioned Brown, who is a retired appellate attorney in Colorado. “They’ve made their own religion right into a complicit companion for their very own resolution to choose institutional protection over the protection of children and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists during its final annual assembly, comes just weeks earlier than its next gathering in Anaheim, Calif., where members are expected discuss subsequent steps. Recommendations by Guidepost embrace providing devoted survivor advocacy assist and a survivor compensation fund.

“We have to be ready to take significant steps to alter our tradition because it relates to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the present SBC president, said in a press release.

Since a long time of sex abuse and coverups in the Catholic Church had been reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have revealed lists of priests they are saying have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to forestall the transfer of abusers to other church buildings. Unlike 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, based on the report. He expressed his concerns that SBC leaders may very well be falling into a few of the same patterns as Catholic leaders in not coping with clergy intercourse abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists should study from Catholic mistakes and take motion early on to implement structural reforms in order to make youngsters safer.

The report states that Frank Page, who was leading the Govt Committee at the time, responded to Doyle in a short letter that “Southern Baptist leaders really have no authority over native church buildings” but that they'd attempt to make use of their “affect” to provide protections. In an article, Page accused a survivor group of getting a hidden agenda of organising 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 comment.

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 issue and stated that the report reveals a necessity for institutions just like the SBC to hunt outside expertise on intercourse abuse.

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

The problem of intercourse abuse was a outstanding theme in leaked non-public 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 said he expects Southern Baptists to receive Sunday’s report in the same 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, 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 think about 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 fighting for reform.