Southern Baptist leaders covered up intercourse abuse, explosive report says

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

The findings of almost 300 pages embody stunning new details about particular abuse instances and shine a light-weight 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 may maintain a database of offenders to prevent more abuse when high leaders were secretly conserving a non-public listing for years.

The report — the primary investigation of its variety in a massive Protestant denomination like the SBC — is anticipated to send shock waves all through a conservative Christian community that has had intense internal battles over learn how to handle intercourse abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, together with different religious institutions in the United States, 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 full number of abuse cases among Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for nearly twenty years, survivors of abuse and other involved 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 employees members. Most of the circumstances referred to in the report were thought-about exterior the statute of limitations, the time survivors can report intercourse abuse, so it’s unclear what number of abusers have been criminally charged.

The report, compiled by a corporation 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 had been involved extra with protecting the institution from liability than from defending Southern Baptists from further abuse.

“While stories of abuse had been minimized, and survivors have been ignored or even vilified, revelations got here to gentle in recent times 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 additionally states that a main Southern Baptist chief was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a lady 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 president at 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 woman however acknowledged that he had interactions with her. After the report was released, Hunt, who has not been charged over the alleged incident, posted a statement on Twitter, saying, “I vigorously deny the circumstances and characterizations set forth within the Guidepost report. I have never abused anybody.”

Hunt resigned on May 13 from the North American Mission Board, in response to an announcement by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell stated that before Might 13, he was not aware of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Generally, he known as the details of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

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

Intercourse abuse survivors, many of whom have been sharing their tales for years, anticipated Sunday’s launch would verify the facts around many of the stories they've already shared, but many have been nonetheless stunned to see the pattern of coverups by the very best levels of management.

“I knew it was rotten, but it’s astonishing and infuriating,” stated Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was as soon as the highest-paid feminine govt at the SBC and whose story of sexual abuse at a Southern Baptist seminary is detailed within the report. “This is a denomination that's through and through about power. It is misappropriated power. It doesn't in any manner mirror 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 previous presidents of the conference, a former vice president and the former 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 monetary and administrative duties. Although Southern Baptist church buildings operate independently from one another, the Nashville-based Executive Committee distributes more than $190 million cooperative program in its annual finances that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For many years, the findings present, Southern Baptists have been informed the denomination couldn't put collectively a registry of sex offenders because it will go towards the denomination’s polity — or the way it features. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained an inventory of offenders whereas conserving it a secret to keep away from the potential of getting sued. The report also contains personal emails exhibiting how longtime leaders equivalent to August Boto had been dismissive about sexual abuse considerations, calling them “a satanic scheme to utterly distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 email, the conference’s attorney despatched Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database might be applied per SBC polity, saying “it could fit our polity and current ministries to assist church buildings on this space of child abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he really useful “quick action to sign the Convention’s desire that the [executive committee] and the entities start a extra aggressive effort on this area.” That very same year, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a motion for a database, Boto rejected the thought.

For a denomination designed to provide extra democratic power to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to commission the third-party investigation, the report shows how lay Southern Baptists allowed just a few key leaders, including Boto and the conference’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to manage the nationwide institutional response to sex abuse for many years. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, mentioned he had not read the report yet. Makes an attempt to reach Boto on Sunday had been unsuccessful.

“The report goes to validate so much about how they actually blindly chose to remain on the same 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 alongside. Now Southern Baptists have to carry the burden.”

Throughout Government Committee conferences in 2021, some members argued in opposition to waiving attorney-client privilege, which might give investigators access to information of conversations on legal issues among the committee’s members and staffers. They mentioned doing so went in opposition to the recommendation of conference lawyers and will bankrupt the SBC by exposing it to lawsuits.

The talk over waiving privilege upset a big swath of Southern Baptists, causing some to believe 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 Executive Committee’s head, Ronnie Floyd, who additionally once 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 convention’s attorneys, who're named all through the report.

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In response to the report, Floyd instructed SBC leaders in a 2019 email that he had obtained “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “growing concern about all of the emphasis on the sexual abuse crisis.” He then acknowledged: “Our priority can't be the latest cultural disaster.” Floyd did not instantly 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 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 Govt Committee “turned his back to her during her speech and one other chortled.”

“The Executive Committee betrayed not solely survivors who labored hard to attempt to make something occur, however betrayed the whole Southern Baptist Conference,” stated Brown, who's a retired appellate attorney in Colorado. “They’ve made their very own faith right into a complicit companion for their very own choice to decide on institutional safety over the safety of children and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists throughout its final annual assembly, comes simply weeks earlier than its next gathering in Anaheim, Calif., where members are anticipated discuss next steps. Recommendations by Guidepost include offering dedicated survivor advocacy support and a survivor compensation fund.

“We must be ready to take meaningful steps to vary our tradition because it pertains to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the present SBC president, stated in a press release.

Since decades of sex abuse and coverups in the Catholic Church have been reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have revealed lists of clergymen they say have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to forestall the transfer of abusers to different church buildings. Unlike 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 Govt Committee presidents, in keeping with the report. He expressed his issues that SBC leaders might be falling into a few of the identical patterns as Catholic leaders in not dealing with clergy sex abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists should be taught from Catholic errors and take motion early on to implement structural reforms so as to make youngsters safer.

The report states that Frank Page, who was main the Govt Committee at the time, responded to Doyle in a brief letter that “Southern Baptist leaders actually have no authority over local church buildings” but that they would try to make use of their “influence” to offer protections. In an article, Web page accused a survivor group of having a hidden agenda of establishing the nation’s largest Protestant body for lawsuits. Web page later resigned from his place in 2018 over having a “morally inappropriate relationship.” Web 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 drive on the problem and mentioned that the report exhibits a necessity for establishments like the SBC to seek exterior experience on intercourse abuse.

“It reveals a stage 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 mentioned. “The query Southern Baptists must ask is, ‘How may this occur?’”

The issue 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 Commission. Moore stated he expects Southern Baptists to receive Sunday’s report in an analogous 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 on this report are breathtaking,” Moore mentioned. “Folks will say, ‘This isn't all Southern Baptists, take a look at all the nice we do.’ The report demonstrates a sample of stonewalling, coverup, intimidation and retaliation.”

Moore mentioned he hopes the SBC will contemplate 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 previous two decades fighting for reform.