Southern Baptist leaders covered up sex abuse, explosive report says

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

The findings of almost 300 pages embody stunning new details about specific 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 also lied to Southern Baptists over whether or not they may maintain a database of offenders to stop extra abuse when prime leaders have been secretly holding a personal listing for years.

The report — the primary investigation of its form in a massive Protestant denomination just like the SBC — is expected to send shock waves all through a conservative Christian group that has had intense internal battles over how to deal with intercourse abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, along with different non secular establishments in the United States, has struggled with declining membership for the previous 15 years. Its leaders have lengthy resisted comparisons between its sexual abuse disaster and that of the Catholic Church, saying the entire variety of abuse circumstances 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 Convention’s administrative arm to report alleged little one molesters and different accused abusers who have been within the pulpit or employed as church employees members. Many of the instances referred to within the report had been considered outdoors the statute of limitations, the time survivors can report intercourse abuse, so it’s unclear how many abusers were criminally charged.

The report, compiled by a corporation called Guidepost Options at the request of Southern Baptists, states that abuse survivors’ calls and emails have been “solely to be met, time and time again, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who had been concerned more with protecting the establishment from liability than from defending Southern Baptists from additional abuse.

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

While the report focuses totally on how leaders handled abuse issues when survivors got here ahead, it additionally states that a main Southern Baptist leader was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a woman just 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 president at the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a lady throughout a Panama Metropolis Seashore, Fla., trip in 2010.

The report states that Hunt, in an interview with investigators, denied any physical contact with the lady 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 in the Guidepost report. I've by no means abused anybody.”

Hunt resigned on Might 13 from the North American Mission Board, according to an announcement by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell said that earlier than Could 13, he was not aware of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Usually, he called the details of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

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Intercourse abuse survivors, a lot of whom have been sharing their tales for years, anticipated Sunday’s release would verify the information round lots of the tales they have already shared, however many were nonetheless surprised to see the sample of coverups by the highest levels of management.

“I knew it was rotten, however it’s astonishing and infuriating,” mentioned Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was as soon as the highest-paid female 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 is by means of and thru about power. It is misappropriated energy. It does not in any approach mirror the Jesus I see in the scriptures. I am so gutted.”

The report additionally names several senior SBC leaders who protected and even supported alleged abusers, including three past 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 centered on actions by the SBC’s Government Committee, which handles financial and administrative duties. Though Southern Baptist churches operate independently from one another, the Nashville-based Government Committee distributes greater than $190 million cooperative program in its annual funds that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For many years, the findings present, Southern Baptists have been instructed the denomination could not put collectively a registry of sex offenders as a result of it might go towards the denomination’s polity — or how it functions. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained an inventory of offenders while protecting it a secret to keep away from the opportunity of getting sued. The report also consists of non-public emails exhibiting how longtime leaders similar to August Boto were dismissive about sexual abuse issues, calling them “a satanic scheme to fully distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 electronic mail, the convention’s lawyer despatched Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database could possibly be implemented according to SBC polity, saying “it might match our polity and present ministries to help churches on this space of child abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he advisable “instant motion to signal the Conference’s desire that the [executive committee] and the entities begin a extra aggressive effort in this area.” That 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 reveals how lay Southern Baptists allowed a few key leaders, including Boto and the convention’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 learn the report yet. Attempts to reach Boto on Sunday have been unsuccessful.

“The report goes to validate so much about how they really blindly selected to remain on the identical path all these years,” mentioned 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 burden.”

Throughout Govt Committee conferences in 2021, some members argued towards waiving attorney-client privilege, which might give investigators entry to information of conversations on authorized matters among the many committee’s members and staffers. They said doing so went in opposition to the advice of conference legal professionals 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 consider the Government 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 Government 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 also 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 email that he had obtained “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “rising concern about all of the emphasis on the sexual abuse disaster.” He then said: “Our precedence cannot be the most recent cultural disaster.” Floyd didn't immediately 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 different 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 Government Committee “turned his back to her throughout her speech and one other chortled.”

“The Govt Committee betrayed not solely survivors who worked arduous to try to make one thing happen, but betrayed the entire Southern Baptist Convention,” stated Brown, who's a retired appellate attorney in Colorado. “They’ve made their very own religion right into a complicit associate for their very own decision to choose institutional protection over the protection of kids and congregants.”

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

“We have to be ready to take meaningful steps to change our culture because it pertains to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the current SBC president, mentioned in a press release.

Since a long time of intercourse abuse and coverups within the Catholic Church have been reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have printed lists of clergymen 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 construction.

In March 2007, the Rev. Thomas Doyle, a priest and canon lawyer who first warned of the looming Catholic intercourse abuse disaster, wrote to the SBC and Executive Committee presidents, in accordance with the report. He expressed his issues that SBC leaders could possibly be falling into a few of the similar patterns as Catholic leaders in not coping with clergy sex abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists should learn from Catholic mistakes and take action early on to implement structural reforms so as to make children safer.

The report states that Frank Web page, who was leading the Government Committee on the time, responded to Doyle in a short letter that “Southern Baptist leaders really have no authority over native church buildings” but that they might 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 body for lawsuits. Web page later resigned from his place in 2018 over having a “morally inappropriate relationship.” Page did not 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 job force on the problem and mentioned that the report reveals a need for establishments like the SBC to hunt outdoors expertise on sex abuse.

“It reveals a degree of coverup and harassment and resistance to reforms on an institutional stage that has led to a long time of survivors being victimized and hurt,” Denhollander said. “The question Southern Baptists must ask is, ‘How may this happen?’”

The difficulty of sex 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 & Religious Liberty Fee. Moore mentioned he expects Southern Baptists to obtain Sunday’s report in an analogous method 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 great we do.’ The report demonstrates a sample of stonewalling, coverup, intimidation and retaliation.”

Moore said he hopes the SBC will think about 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 previous 20 years fighting for reform.