Southern Baptist leaders covered up sex abuse, explosive report says

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

The findings of nearly 300 pages include surprising new details about specific abuse cases and shine a lightweight on how denominational leaders for decades actively resisted calls for abuse prevention and reform. Evidence within the report suggests leaders additionally lied to Southern Baptists over whether or not they may keep a database of offenders to stop extra abuse when high leaders were secretly preserving a private record for years.

The report — the first investigation of its kind in an enormous Protestant denomination just like the SBC — is expected to ship shock waves throughout a conservative Christian neighborhood that has had intense internal battles over the right way to handle sex abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, together with different spiritual institutions 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 full number of abuse instances among Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for almost 20 years, survivors of abuse and other involved Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Conference’s administrative arm to report alleged youngster molesters and different accused abusers who have been within the pulpit or employed as church workers members. Many of the cases referred to within the report had been considered outside the statute of limitations, the time survivors can report intercourse abuse, so it’s unclear how many abusers have been criminally charged.

The report, compiled by a corporation called Guidepost Solutions at the request of Southern Baptists, states that abuse survivors’ calls and emails were “only to be met, time and time again, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who were involved extra with defending the establishment from legal responsibility than from defending Southern Baptists from further abuse.

“While tales of abuse were minimized, and survivors had been ignored and even vilified, revelations came 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 dealt with abuse issues when survivors got here ahead, it also states that a main Southern Baptist chief 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 president at the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a girl throughout a Panama Metropolis Seaside, Fla., vacation in 2010.

The report states that Hunt, in an interview with investigators, denied any bodily contact with the lady 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 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 Might 13 from the North American Mission Board, in accordance with a press release by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell stated that before May 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.”

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Sex abuse survivors, many of whom have been sharing their tales for years, anticipated Sunday’s launch would affirm the info round most of the tales they have already shared, however many had been still surprised to see the pattern of coverups by the very best ranges 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 government on the SBC and whose story of sexual abuse at a Southern Baptist seminary is detailed within the report. “It is a denomination that's via and thru about power. It is misappropriated power. It doesn't in any approach replicate the Jesus I see within the scriptures. I'm so gutted.”

The report also names a number of senior SBC leaders who protected and even supported alleged abusers, together with three previous presidents of the conference, a former vp 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 monetary and administrative duties. Though Southern Baptist church buildings operate independently from each other, 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 told the denomination couldn't put collectively a registry of intercourse offenders as a result of it might go towards the denomination’s polity — or how it capabilities. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained a listing of offenders while retaining it a secret to keep away from the potential for getting sued. The report additionally consists of non-public emails displaying how longtime leaders comparable 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 e-mail, the conference’s attorney despatched Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database may very well be carried out in step with SBC polity, saying “it could fit our polity and present ministries to assist churches on this space of child abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he beneficial “fast action to sign the Convention’s desire that the [executive committee] and the entities start a more aggressive effort in this space.” That same yr, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a motion for a database, Boto rejected the idea.

For a denomination designed to provide more democratic power to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to fee the third-party investigation, the report exhibits how lay Southern Baptists allowed just a few key leaders, including Boto and the convention’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to regulate the national institutional response to intercourse abuse for many years. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, mentioned he had not read the report but. Attempts to achieve Boto on Sunday had been unsuccessful.

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

During Government Committee meetings in 2021, some members argued towards waiving attorney-client privilege, which would give investigators entry to information of conversations on legal issues among the many committee’s members and staffers. They said doing so went in opposition to the recommendation of convention legal professionals and could 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 also led to the resignation of the Executive 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 choice over attorney-client privilege additionally led to the resignation of the convention’s attorneys, who are named throughout the report.

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In line with the report, Floyd informed SBC leaders in a 2019 e mail that he had acquired “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “growing concern about all the emphasis on the sexual abuse crisis.” He then said: “Our precedence can't be the newest cultural disaster.” Floyd did not instantly 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 other Southern Baptist churches in a number of 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 Govt Committee “turned his again to her throughout her speech and one other chortled.”

“The Government Committee betrayed not only survivors who labored hard to attempt to make something happen, however betrayed the whole Southern Baptist Conference,” said Brown, who is a retired appellate lawyer in Colorado. “They’ve made their very own faith into a complicit accomplice for their own resolution to choose institutional safety over the safety of children and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists throughout its last annual assembly, comes just weeks before its next gathering in Anaheim, Calif., where members are expected discuss next steps. Recommendations by Guidepost include offering dedicated survivor advocacy assist and a survivor compensation fund.

“We must be able to take significant steps to change our tradition as it pertains to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the current SBC president, stated in a press release.

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 printed lists of clergymen they are saying have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to prevent the switch 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 intercourse abuse crisis, wrote to the SBC and Executive Committee presidents, based on the report. He expressed his concerns that SBC leaders may very well be falling into some of the same patterns as Catholic leaders in not coping with clergy sex abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists ought to be taught from Catholic mistakes and take motion early on to implement structural reforms in order to make children safer.

The report states that Frank Page, who was leading the Govt Committee at the time, responded to Doyle in a short letter that “Southern Baptist leaders actually have no authority over local church buildings” however that they might try to use their “affect” to supply 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. Page later resigned from his place 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 process power on the problem and said that the report shows a necessity for institutions just like the SBC to seek outside expertise on sex abuse.

“It shows a stage of coverup and harassment and resistance to reforms on an institutional stage that has led to many years of survivors being victimized and hurt,” Denhollander stated. “The query Southern Baptists have to ask is, ‘How might this happen?’”

The difficulty of intercourse abuse was a prominent theme in leaked personal letters written by Russell Moore, who left his place in 2021 as head of the SBC’s policy arm, the Ethics & Spiritual Liberty Fee. Moore said 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 said. “Folks 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 home state in 2016, with a statue of Christa Brown, the abuse survivor who spent the past twenty years preventing for reform.