Southern Baptist leaders coated up intercourse abuse, explosive report says

Leaders in the Southern Baptist Convention on Sunday released a major third-party investigation that found that intercourse abuse survivors were often ignored, minimized and “even vilified” by prime clergy in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

The findings of nearly 300 pages embrace stunning new details about specific abuse instances and shine a light-weight on how denominational leaders for many years actively resisted requires abuse prevention and reform. Proof in the report suggests leaders additionally lied to Southern Baptists over whether or not they might preserve a database of offenders to prevent extra abuse when prime leaders have been secretly conserving a private record for years.

The report — the primary investigation of its variety in a massive Protestant denomination like the SBC — is predicted to ship shock waves throughout a conservative Christian neighborhood that has had intense inside battles over learn how to 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 overall number of abuse cases among Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for nearly twenty years, survivors of abuse and different involved Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Conference’s administrative arm to report alleged little one molesters and other accused abusers who have been in the pulpit or employed as church employees members. Most of the circumstances referred to within the report had been thought-about exterior the statute of limitations, the time survivors can report sex abuse, so it’s unclear what number of abusers had been criminally charged.

The report, compiled by a company referred to 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 have been concerned extra with protecting the establishment from liability than from protecting Southern Baptists from further abuse.

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

Whereas the report focuses primarily on how leaders handled abuse points when survivors got here ahead, it additionally states that a major Southern Baptist chief was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a woman only one month after he completed 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 at the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a girl 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 lady however acknowledged that he had interactions together 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 within the Guidepost report. I've never abused anyone.”

Hunt resigned on May 13 from the North American Mission Board, in keeping with a statement by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell said that before Could 13, he was not aware of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Usually, he known as the main points of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

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Sex abuse survivors, a lot of whom have been sharing their tales for years, anticipated Sunday’s launch would confirm the facts round many of the tales they've already shared, however many were nonetheless shocked to see the sample of coverups by the very best levels of leadership.

“I knew it was rotten, but it surely’s astonishing and infuriating,” said Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was as soon as the highest-paid female govt on the SBC and whose story of sexual abuse at a Southern Baptist seminary is detailed in the report. “This is a denomination that's by way of and through about power. It is misappropriated energy. It doesn't in any means mirror 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 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 Govt Committee, which handles financial and administrative duties. Though Southern Baptist churches function independently from one another, the Nashville-based Executive Committee distributes more than $190 million cooperative program in its annual funds that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For many years, the findings show, Southern Baptists had been instructed the denomination couldn't put collectively a registry of sex offenders because it might go against the denomination’s polity — or the way it features. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained a listing of offenders while holding it a secret to keep away from the opportunity of getting sued. The report also contains non-public emails showing how longtime leaders such as August Boto were dismissive about sexual abuse considerations, calling them “a satanic scheme to fully distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 email, the convention’s legal professional sent Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database could be applied in keeping with SBC polity, saying “it could fit our polity and current ministries to help churches in this area of kid abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he really helpful “fast motion to signal the Conference’s want that the [executive committee] and the entities begin a extra aggressive effort in this space.” That very same yr, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a movement for a database, Boto rejected the concept.

For a denomination designed to present more democratic energy to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to fee the third-party investigation, the report shows how lay Southern Baptists allowed a number of key leaders, including Boto and the convention’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to manage the national institutional response to sex abuse for many years. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, said he had not read the report but. Makes an attempt to achieve Boto on Sunday had been unsuccessful.

“The report goes to validate so much about how they actually blindly chose to stay on the identical path all these years,” said 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 alongside. Now Southern Baptists have to carry the weight.”

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

The talk over waiving privilege upset a large swath of Southern Baptists, causing some to imagine 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 additionally led to the resignation of the Govt Committee’s head, Ronnie Floyd, who also once served as SBC president and was on President Donald Trump’s evangelical advisory council. The choice over attorney-client privilege additionally led to the resignation of the conference’s attorneys, who are named throughout the report.

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Based on the report, Floyd told SBC leaders in a 2019 e-mail that he had acquired “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “rising concern about all the emphasis on the sexual abuse crisis.” He then acknowledged: “Our priority can't be the newest cultural disaster.” Floyd did not immediately return a request for comment.

Christa Brown, who told SBC leaders that she was abused by a youth pastor who went on to serve in different Southern Baptist churches in multiple 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 one other chortled.”

“The Government Committee betrayed not solely survivors who labored exhausting to attempt to make something happen, however betrayed the whole Southern Baptist Conference,” said Brown, who's a retired appellate attorney in Colorado. “They’ve made their very own religion into a complicit partner for their own choice to decide on institutional safety over the safety of children and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists during its final annual meeting, comes simply weeks earlier than its next gathering in Anaheim, Calif., where members are anticipated talk about subsequent steps. Recommendations by Guidepost embody providing devoted survivor advocacy support and a survivor compensation fund.

“We must be able to take significant steps to alter our culture as it pertains to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the present SBC president, said in an announcement.

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 revealed lists of monks they are saying have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to stop the transfer of abusers to different 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 intercourse abuse crisis, wrote to the SBC and Executive Committee presidents, according to the report. He expressed his issues that SBC leaders may very well be falling into among the similar patterns as Catholic leaders in not coping with clergy intercourse abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists ought to study from Catholic errors and take action early on to implement structural reforms in order to make children safer.

The report states that Frank Web page, who was leading the Government Committee at the time, responded to Doyle in a brief letter that “Southern Baptist leaders actually haven't any authority over native church buildings” but that they would try to use their “affect” to provide protections. In an article, Web page accused a survivor group of getting a hidden agenda of setting up the nation’s largest Protestant body for lawsuits. Web page later resigned from his position 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 activity pressure on the problem and stated that the report reveals a necessity for establishments just like the SBC to seek outside experience on sex abuse.

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

The difficulty of sex abuse was a outstanding theme in leaked personal letters written by Russell Moore, who left his position in 2021 as head of the SBC’s coverage arm, the Ethics & Spiritual Liberty Commission. Moore stated he expects Southern Baptists to receive Sunday’s report in an analogous 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 on this report are breathtaking,” Moore mentioned. “People 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 consider 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 preventing for reform.