Southern Baptist leaders coated up sex abuse, explosive report says

Leaders in the Southern Baptist Conference on Sunday released a serious third-party investigation that discovered that intercourse abuse survivors were typically ignored, minimized and “even vilified” by high clergy in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

The findings of practically 300 pages embody stunning new details about particular abuse instances and shine a light-weight on how denominational leaders for many years actively resisted calls for abuse prevention and reform. Proof within the report suggests leaders also lied to Southern Baptists over whether or not they could maintain a database of offenders to prevent extra abuse when prime leaders were secretly keeping a non-public checklist for years.

The report — the primary investigation of its sort in a large Protestant denomination just like the SBC — is predicted to send shock waves all through a conservative Christian neighborhood that has had intense inner battles over learn how to handle sex abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, together with different spiritual institutions in the USA, has struggled with declining membership for the past 15 years. Its leaders have lengthy resisted comparisons between its sexual abuse disaster and that of the Catholic Church, saying the whole number of abuse instances among Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for nearly two decades, survivors of abuse and other concerned Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Conference’s administrative arm to report alleged little one molesters and other accused abusers who were in the pulpit or employed as church staff members. Most of the circumstances referred to in the report were thought-about outside the statute of limitations, the time survivors can report intercourse abuse, so it’s unclear what number of abusers were 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 had been “solely to be met, time and time once more, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who were concerned more with protecting the institution from liability than from defending Southern Baptists from further abuse.

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

Whereas the report focuses totally on how leaders dealt with abuse points when survivors got here ahead, it additionally 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 vp on the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a girl throughout a Panama City Beach, Fla., trip in 2010.

The report states that Hunt, in an interview with investigators, denied any physical contact with the girl 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 a press release on Twitter, saying, “I vigorously deny the circumstances and characterizations set forth within the Guidepost report. I have by no means abused anybody.”

Hunt resigned on Might 13 from the North American Mission Board, in accordance with a statement by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell stated that earlier than Could 13, he was not conscious of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Generally, he called the main points of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

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Intercourse abuse survivors, many of whom have been sharing their stories for years, anticipated Sunday’s launch would confirm the info around many of the stories they have already shared, but many were nonetheless surprised to see the pattern of coverups by the 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 feminine government on the SBC and whose story of sexual abuse at a Southern Baptist seminary is detailed within the report. “This is a denomination that's via and through about energy. It's misappropriated energy. It doesn't in any manner replicate the Jesus I see in the scriptures. I'm so gutted.”

The report additionally names a number of senior SBC leaders who protected and even supported alleged abusers, together with three past 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 targeted on actions by the SBC’s Government Committee, which handles financial and administrative duties. Although Southern Baptist church buildings operate independently from one another, the Nashville-based Govt Committee distributes greater than $190 million cooperative program in its annual budget that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For many years, the findings present, Southern Baptists had been told the denomination couldn't put together a registry of intercourse offenders as a result of it could go in opposition to the denomination’s polity — or the way it features. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained a listing of offenders whereas keeping it a secret to avoid the potential of getting sued. The report additionally includes personal emails displaying how longtime leaders akin to August Boto have been dismissive about sexual abuse issues, calling them “a satanic scheme to utterly distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 e mail, the convention’s attorney despatched Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database could possibly be implemented consistent with SBC polity, saying “it would match our polity and present ministries to help church buildings in this area of kid abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he advisable “instant action to sign the Convention’s want that the [executive committee] and the entities start a extra aggressive effort in this area.” That same yr, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a movement for a database, Boto rejected the concept.

For a denomination designed to offer extra democratic power to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to commission the third-party investigation, the report reveals how lay Southern Baptists allowed just a few key leaders, including Boto and the convention’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to manage the national institutional response to sex abuse for decades. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, mentioned he had not read the report but. Attempts to reach Boto on Sunday have been unsuccessful.

“The report goes to validate so much about how they actually blindly selected to stay 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 Govt Committee conferences in 2021, some members argued in opposition to waiving attorney-client privilege, which might give investigators entry to records of conversations on authorized issues among the committee’s members and staffers. They said doing so went against the recommendation of conference attorneys and will bankrupt the SBC by exposing it to lawsuits.

The talk over waiving privilege upset a big 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 Govt 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 also led to the resignation of the conference’s attorneys, who are named all through the report.

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In response to the report, Floyd instructed SBC leaders in a 2019 e mail that he had acquired “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “growing concern about all of the emphasis on the sexual abuse disaster.” He then acknowledged: “Our precedence cannot be the latest cultural disaster.” Floyd didn't immediately return a request for remark.

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

“The Govt Committee betrayed not only survivors who labored exhausting to try to make one thing happen, but betrayed the whole Southern Baptist Conference,” said Brown, who's a retired appellate attorney in Colorado. “They’ve made their very own faith right into a complicit associate for their very own resolution to decide on institutional protection over the safety of kids and congregants.”

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

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

Since many years of intercourse abuse and coverups within the Catholic Church were reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have published 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 construction.

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, in keeping with the report. He expressed his issues that SBC leaders may very well be falling into some of the same patterns as Catholic leaders in not dealing with clergy sex abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists should study from Catholic mistakes and take action early on to implement structural reforms in order to make kids safer.

The report states that Frank Web page, who was main the Govt Committee on the time, responded to Doyle in a brief letter that “Southern Baptist leaders really have no authority over local church buildings” however that they might try to make use of their “affect” to provide protections. In an article, Page accused a survivor group of having a hidden agenda of setting up the nation’s largest Protestant physique for lawsuits. Web page later resigned from his position 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 activity force on the problem and stated that the report reveals a need for establishments just like the SBC to hunt outside experience on intercourse abuse.

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

The difficulty of intercourse abuse was a distinguished theme in leaked private 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 stated he expects Southern Baptists to obtain Sunday’s report in an identical way 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. “Individuals 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 said he hopes the SBC will consider replacing a statue of evangelist Billy Graham, which was moved from Nashville to Graham’s dwelling state in 2016, with a statue of Christa Brown, the abuse survivor who spent the previous 20 years preventing for reform.