Southern Baptist leaders lined up sex abuse, explosive report says

Leaders within the Southern Baptist Conference on Sunday released a significant third-party investigation that discovered that sex abuse survivors had been often ignored, minimized and “even vilified” by top clergy within the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

The findings of practically 300 pages embrace shocking new details about specific abuse circumstances and shine a lightweight on how denominational leaders for decades actively resisted requires abuse prevention and reform. Proof in the report suggests leaders additionally lied to Southern Baptists over whether they might keep a database of offenders to prevent more abuse when high leaders have been secretly conserving a non-public record for years.

The report — the primary investigation of its type in a massive Protestant denomination just like the SBC — is predicted to send shock waves throughout a conservative Christian group that has had intense inside battles over methods to deal with intercourse abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, together with other spiritual institutions in the US, has struggled with declining membership for the past 15 years. Its leaders have lengthy resisted comparisons between its sexual abuse crisis and that of the Catholic Church, saying the entire number of abuse instances amongst Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for almost two decades, survivors of abuse and other involved Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Conference’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 were thought-about outdoors the statute of limitations, the time survivors can report intercourse abuse, so it’s unclear how many abusers had been criminally charged.

The report, compiled by an organization called Guidepost Solutions on the request of Southern Baptists, states that abuse survivors’ calls and emails had 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 establishment from legal responsibility than from protecting Southern Baptists from additional abuse.

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

While the report focuses primarily on how leaders handled abuse issues when survivors got here forward, it also states that a main Southern Baptist leader was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a lady 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 chairman on the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a woman during a Panama Metropolis Seaside, Fla., trip in 2010.

The report states that Hunt, in an interview with investigators, denied any physical contact with the girl but acknowledged that he had interactions with her. After the report was released, Hunt, who has not been charged over the alleged incident, posted a press release on Twitter, saying, “I vigorously deny the circumstances and characterizations set forth in the Guidepost report. I have by no means abused anyone.”

Hunt resigned on Might 13 from the North American Mission Board, in accordance with an announcement by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell mentioned that earlier than Could 13, he was not conscious of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Usually, he referred to as the main points 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.

Intercourse abuse survivors, a lot of whom have been sharing their stories for years, anticipated Sunday’s launch would affirm the details round most of the stories they've already shared, but many were nonetheless stunned to see the pattern of coverups by the very best ranges of leadership.

“I knew it was rotten, but it’s astonishing and infuriating,” mentioned Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was as soon as the highest-paid female 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's via and through about energy. It's misappropriated energy. It doesn't in any way replicate the Jesus I see within the scriptures. I'm so gutted.”

The report additionally names a number of senior SBC leaders who protected and even supported alleged abusers, including three previous presidents of the conference, a former vice president and the previous head of the SBC’s administrative arm.

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

For many years, the findings present, Southern Baptists were instructed the denomination couldn't put together a registry of intercourse offenders because it would go against the denomination’s polity — or the way it features. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained a listing of offenders whereas conserving it a secret to avoid the possibility of getting sued. The report also includes non-public emails displaying how longtime leaders equivalent to August Boto had been dismissive about sexual abuse considerations, calling them “a satanic scheme to fully distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 email, the convention’s attorney despatched Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database might be applied in line with SBC polity, saying “it would match our polity and current ministries to help church buildings in this space of kid abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he advisable “instant action to sign the Conference’s desire that the [executive committee] and the entities begin a extra aggressive effort on this area.” That very same 12 months, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a motion 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 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 many years. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, stated he had not learn the report yet. Attempts to reach Boto on Sunday have been unsuccessful.

“The report goes to validate so much about how they actually blindly selected to remain on the identical 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 along. Now Southern Baptists have to carry the weight.”

During Govt Committee conferences in 2021, some members argued towards waiving attorney-client privilege, which might give investigators access to data of conversations on authorized matters among the many committee’s members and staffers. They mentioned doing so went towards the advice of convention legal professionals 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 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 also led to the resignation of the Executive Committee’s head, Ronnie Floyd, who also once 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're named throughout the report.

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

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 of the emphasis on the sexual abuse disaster.” He then stated: “Our priority can't be the newest cultural crisis.” Floyd didn't instantly return a request for comment.

Christa Brown, who advised SBC leaders that she was abused by a youth pastor who went on to serve in other Southern Baptist churches 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 Govt Committee “turned his again to her during her speech and another chortled.”

“The Govt Committee betrayed not only survivors who labored hard to try to make something happen, but betrayed the entire Southern Baptist Conference,” said Brown, who's a retired appellate lawyer in Colorado. “They’ve made their own religion into a complicit associate for their own decision to decide on institutional protection over the safety of children and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists throughout its last annual assembly, comes simply weeks earlier than its next gathering in Anaheim, Calif., the place members are expected discuss next steps. Recommendations by Guidepost embrace providing dedicated survivor advocacy assist and a survivor compensation fund.

“We should be ready to take meaningful steps to alter our tradition as it pertains to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the current SBC president, mentioned in a press release.

Since a long time of sex abuse and coverups in the Catholic Church were reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have revealed lists of monks they say have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to forestall the transfer of abusers to other churches. 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 sex abuse disaster, wrote to the SBC and Executive Committee presidents, according to the report. He expressed his concerns that SBC leaders may very well be falling into a number of the similar patterns as Catholic leaders in not coping with clergy intercourse abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists should study from Catholic mistakes and take action early on to implement structural reforms so as to make kids safer.

The report states that Frank Page, who was leading the Government Committee at the time, responded to Doyle in a short letter that “Southern Baptist leaders actually have no authority over local churches” but that they might try to make use of their “affect” to provide protections. In an article, Web page accused a survivor group of getting a hidden agenda of establishing the nation’s largest Protestant physique for lawsuits. Page later resigned from his place in 2018 over having a “morally inappropriate relationship.” Page did not instantly 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 power on the difficulty and mentioned that the report exhibits a need for establishments just like the SBC to hunt exterior expertise on sex abuse.

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

The problem of intercourse abuse was a distinguished 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 & Religious Liberty Commission. Moore stated he expects Southern Baptists to obtain 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 said. “Individuals will say, ‘This isn't all Southern Baptists, look at all the great we do.’ The report demonstrates a pattern 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 home state in 2016, with a statue of Christa Brown, the abuse survivor who spent the past two decades fighting for reform.