Southern Baptist leaders covered up intercourse abuse, explosive report says

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

The findings of almost 300 pages embody surprising new details about specific abuse instances and shine a lightweight on how denominational leaders for decades actively resisted requires abuse prevention and reform. Proof in the report suggests leaders also lied to Southern Baptists over whether or not they may maintain a database of offenders to prevent more abuse when high leaders had been secretly conserving a private record for years.

The report — the first investigation of its form in a massive Protestant denomination just like the SBC — is predicted to send shock waves throughout a conservative Christian group that has had intense inside battles over how one can handle sex abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, along with different religious establishments in the United States, 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 full variety of abuse circumstances among Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for nearly 20 years, survivors of abuse and other concerned Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Convention’s administrative arm to report alleged youngster molesters and different accused abusers who had been within the pulpit or employed as church workers members. Most of the circumstances referred to within the report were thought-about exterior 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 company called Guidepost Options 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 have been concerned more with defending the institution from liability than from defending Southern Baptists from additional abuse.

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

Whereas the report focuses primarily on how leaders handled abuse points when survivors came ahead, it additionally states that a main Southern Baptist leader was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a lady just 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 chairman on the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a girl during a Panama City Seaside, Fla., vacation in 2010.

The report states that Hunt, in an interview with investigators, denied any bodily contact with the woman however acknowledged that he had interactions along 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 May 13 from the North American Mission Board, according to an announcement by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell mentioned that earlier than Might 13, he was not conscious of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Generally, 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 tales for years, anticipated Sunday’s release would affirm the facts round lots of the stories they've already shared, however many have been nonetheless surprised to see the pattern of coverups by the very best levels of management.

“I knew it was rotten, however it’s astonishing and infuriating,” said Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was as soon as the highest-paid feminine executive on the SBC and whose story of sexual abuse at a Southern Baptist seminary is detailed in the report. “This is a denomination that is by means of and thru about energy. It is misappropriated power. It does not in any way replicate 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 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 centered on actions by the SBC’s Government Committee, which handles financial and administrative duties. Though Southern Baptist churches function 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 show, Southern Baptists had been informed the denomination could not put collectively a registry of sex offenders because it could go in opposition to the denomination’s polity — or how it features. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained a listing of offenders whereas conserving it a secret to keep away from the opportunity of getting sued. The report additionally consists of non-public emails displaying how longtime leaders akin to August Boto had been dismissive about sexual abuse concerns, calling them “a satanic scheme to utterly distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 electronic mail, the convention’s legal professional sent Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database could possibly be applied in step with SBC polity, saying “it would fit our polity and current ministries to assist church buildings on this space of child abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he beneficial “instant motion to sign the Convention’s desire that the [executive committee] and the entities begin a more aggressive effort on this space.” That very same year, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a motion for a database, Boto rejected the idea.

For a denomination designed to present 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 few key leaders, including Boto and the conference’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to control the national institutional response to intercourse abuse for decades. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, said he had not read the report yet. Makes an attempt to reach Boto on Sunday had been unsuccessful.

“The report is going to validate a lot about how they really blindly chose to stay on the same path all these years,” stated 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 alongside. Now Southern Baptists have to hold the load.”

During Government Committee conferences in 2021, some members argued in opposition to waiving attorney-client privilege, which might give investigators entry to information of conversations on authorized issues 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 believe 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 Government 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're named all through the report.

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Based on the report, Floyd informed SBC leaders in a 2019 e-mail that he had received “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “rising concern about all of the emphasis on the sexual abuse crisis.” He then said: “Our priority can't be the latest cultural disaster.” Floyd did not instantly return a request for remark.

Christa Brown, who informed SBC leaders that she was abused by a youth pastor who went on to serve in different 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 Government Committee “turned his again to her throughout her speech and another chortled.”

“The Govt Committee betrayed not only survivors who labored exhausting to attempt to make one thing occur, however betrayed the entire Southern Baptist Convention,” said Brown, who's a retired appellate attorney in Colorado. “They’ve made their own faith into a complicit companion for their very own choice to decide on institutional protection over the safety of youngsters and congregants.”

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

“We must be able to take significant steps to vary 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 within the Catholic Church have been reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have printed lists of priests they say have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to forestall the switch of abusers to other 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 sex abuse disaster, wrote to the SBC and Govt Committee presidents, according to the report. He expressed his concerns that SBC leaders may very well be falling into among the identical patterns as Catholic leaders in not coping with clergy intercourse abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists should study from Catholic errors 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 Executive Committee on the time, responded to Doyle in a short letter that “Southern Baptist leaders actually have no authority over local church buildings” but that they might 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 physique for lawsuits. Web page later resigned from his place in 2018 over having a “morally inappropriate relationship.” Page didn't instantly 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 power on the difficulty and stated that the report exhibits a need for establishments like the SBC to seek outside experience on intercourse abuse.

“It reveals a level of coverup and harassment and resistance to reforms on an institutional level that has led to many years of survivors being victimized and damage,” Denhollander mentioned. “The question Southern Baptists need to ask is, ‘How may this happen?’”

The difficulty of sex abuse was a prominent theme in leaked non-public letters written by Russell Moore, who left his place in 2021 as head of the SBC’s policy arm, the Ethics & Non secular Liberty Fee. Moore said he expects Southern Baptists to receive Sunday’s report in a similar approach 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 nice we do.’ The report demonstrates a pattern of stonewalling, coverup, intimidation and retaliation.”

Moore said he hopes the SBC will contemplate 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 preventing for reform.