Southern Baptist leaders coated up sex abuse, explosive report says

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

The findings of nearly 300 pages include surprising new details about particular abuse cases and shine a light-weight on how denominational leaders for decades actively resisted calls for abuse prevention and reform. Evidence in the report suggests leaders additionally lied to Southern Baptists over whether or not they could maintain a database of offenders to stop more abuse when prime leaders have been secretly maintaining a personal listing for years.

The report — the first investigation of its type in an enormous Protestant denomination just like the SBC — is expected to send shock waves throughout a conservative Christian community that has had intense internal battles over the right way to handle intercourse abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, along with different non secular establishments in the US, has struggled with declining membership for the past 15 years. Its leaders have long resisted comparisons between its sexual abuse crisis and that of the Catholic Church, saying the whole variety of abuse instances amongst Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for nearly 20 years, survivors of abuse and different involved Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Conference’s administrative arm to report alleged youngster molesters and different accused abusers who had been within the pulpit or employed as church staff members. Lots of the cases referred to within the report were considered outdoors 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 corporation known as Guidepost Solutions on the request of Southern Baptists, states that abuse survivors’ calls and emails have been “only to be met, time and time again, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who have been concerned more with protecting the institution from liability than from protecting Southern Baptists from additional abuse.

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

While the report focuses totally on how leaders handled abuse issues when survivors came forward, it additionally states that a major Southern Baptist leader was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a girl 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 on the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a lady during a Panama City Seaside, Fla., trip 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 along with her. After the report was released, 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 within the Guidepost report. I've never abused anybody.”

Hunt resigned on Might 13 from the North American Mission Board, in line with an announcement by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell stated that earlier than Might 13, he was not conscious of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Typically, he referred to as the small print of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

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Intercourse abuse survivors, a lot of whom have been sharing their stories for years, anticipated Sunday’s release would affirm the information around most of the tales they've already shared, but many have been nonetheless stunned to see the sample of coverups by the highest levels of leadership.

“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 executive at the SBC and whose story of sexual abuse at a Southern Baptist seminary is detailed in the report. “This can be a denomination that is by means of and through about energy. It is misappropriated energy. It does not in any method mirror the Jesus I see in the scriptures. I am so gutted.”

The report also names several senior SBC leaders who protected and even supported alleged abusers, together with three past presidents of the convention, 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 Govt Committee, which handles financial and administrative duties. Although Southern Baptist churches operate 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 decades, the findings show, Southern Baptists have been informed the denomination couldn't put together a registry of intercourse offenders because it will go in opposition to the denomination’s polity — or the way it capabilities. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained a list of offenders whereas protecting it a secret to keep away from the potential for getting sued. The report additionally includes non-public emails exhibiting how longtime leaders reminiscent of August Boto had been dismissive about sexual abuse concerns, calling them “a satanic scheme to fully distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 electronic mail, the conference’s lawyer despatched Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database may very well be implemented in keeping with SBC polity, saying “it might match our polity and present ministries to assist church buildings in this space of kid abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he advisable “quick motion to sign the Convention’s want that the [executive committee] and the entities begin a extra aggressive effort on this area.” That very same 12 months, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a motion for a database, Boto rejected the concept.

For a denomination designed to give more 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 number of key leaders, together with Boto and the conference’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to regulate the national institutional response to intercourse abuse for decades. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, stated he had not read the report yet. Attempts to achieve Boto on Sunday have been unsuccessful.

“The report goes to validate a lot about how they really blindly selected to stay on the identical 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 along. Now Southern Baptists have to carry the weight.”

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

The debate over waiving privilege upset a big swath of Southern Baptists, inflicting 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 also led to the resignation of the Govt Committee’s head, Ronnie Floyd, who also as soon as served as SBC president and was on President Donald Trump’s evangelical advisory council. The decision over attorney-client privilege additionally led to the resignation of the conference’s attorneys, who're named throughout the report.

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In line with the report, Floyd advised SBC leaders in a 2019 e mail that he had received “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “rising concern about all the emphasis on the sexual abuse disaster.” He then stated: “Our precedence cannot be the newest cultural crisis.” 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 church buildings 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 Government Committee “turned his back to her throughout her speech and another chortled.”

“The Govt Committee betrayed not solely survivors who labored laborious to attempt to make something happen, but betrayed the whole Southern Baptist Convention,” mentioned Brown, who is a retired appellate attorney in Colorado. “They’ve made their own faith into a complicit companion for their own decision to decide on institutional protection over the protection of kids and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists during its final annual meeting, comes just weeks before its next gathering in Anaheim, Calif., where members are expected talk about subsequent steps. Suggestions by Guidepost include providing devoted survivor advocacy help and a survivor compensation fund.

“We have to be ready to take significant steps to vary our culture as it relates to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the current SBC president, stated in a statement.

Since a long time of intercourse abuse and coverups in the Catholic Church were reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have published lists of monks they say have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to prevent the switch of abusers to different church buildings. 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 disaster, wrote to the SBC and Executive Committee presidents, in line with the report. He expressed his concerns that SBC leaders could be falling into a number of the same patterns as Catholic leaders in not dealing with clergy intercourse abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists ought to be taught from Catholic errors and take action early on to implement structural reforms in order to make youngsters safer.

The report states that Frank Web page, who was leading the Govt Committee at the time, responded to Doyle in a brief letter that “Southern Baptist leaders really haven't any authority over local churches” however that they'd try to use their “influence” to supply protections. In an article, Web page accused a survivor group of having 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.” Web page didn't immediately 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 job drive on the problem and said that the report shows a need for establishments just like the SBC to hunt outdoors expertise on intercourse abuse.

“It shows a level of coverup and harassment and resistance to reforms on an institutional degree that has led to a long time of survivors being victimized and damage,” Denhollander mentioned. “The question Southern Baptists should ask is, ‘How may this occur?’”

The difficulty of intercourse abuse was a prominent theme in leaked personal letters written by Russell Moore, who left his position in 2021 as head of the SBC’s policy arm, the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. Moore said he expects Southern Baptists to obtain Sunday’s report in the same 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 on this report are breathtaking,” Moore mentioned. “Individuals will say, ‘This is not all Southern Baptists, look at all the nice 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 residence state in 2016, with a statue of Christa Brown, the abuse survivor who spent the previous 20 years combating for reform.