Southern Baptist leaders coated 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 typically ignored, minimized and “even vilified” by top clergy in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

The findings of nearly 300 pages embrace shocking new details about specific abuse circumstances and shine a light on how denominational leaders for decades actively resisted calls for abuse prevention and reform. Proof within the report suggests leaders also lied to Southern Baptists over whether or not they could keep a database of offenders to prevent extra abuse when prime leaders have been secretly conserving a non-public checklist for years.

The report — the primary investigation of its type in a massive Protestant denomination just like the SBC — is expected to send shock waves throughout a conservative Christian neighborhood that has had intense inner battles over handle sex abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, together with other non secular institutions in the USA, 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 overall variety of abuse instances amongst 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 Conference’s administrative arm to report alleged youngster molesters and other accused abusers who had been in the pulpit or employed as church employees members. Lots of the circumstances referred to within the report had been thought-about outdoors the statute of limitations, the time survivors can report sex abuse, so it’s unclear what number of abusers have been criminally charged.

The report, compiled by an organization 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 were involved extra with defending the establishment from liability than from defending Southern Baptists from further abuse.

“Whereas stories of abuse have been minimized, and survivors had been ignored and even vilified, revelations got here to gentle lately that some senior SBC leaders had protected or even supported alleged abusers, the report states.

While the report focuses primarily on how leaders dealt with abuse points when survivors got here forward, it also states that a main Southern Baptist leader was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a girl just one month after he accomplished his two-year tenure as president of the convention. The report finds that Johnny Hunt, a beloved Georgia-based Southern Baptist pastor who has been a senior vp at the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a girl during a Panama Metropolis Seashore, Fla., vacation in 2010.

The report states that Hunt, in an interview with investigators, denied any bodily contact with the woman 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 in the Guidepost report. I have never abused anybody.”

Hunt resigned on Might 13 from the North American Mission Board, in accordance with a statement by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell said that earlier than Might 13, he was not conscious of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Usually, he called the main points of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

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Sex abuse survivors, lots of whom have been sharing their tales for years, anticipated Sunday’s launch would affirm the info round most of the tales they've already shared, however many were nonetheless shocked to see the pattern of coverups by the highest ranges of management.

“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 govt at the SBC and whose story of sexual abuse at a Southern Baptist seminary is detailed within the report. “This can be a denomination that's by means of and thru about power. It's misappropriated power. It does not in any method 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, 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 targeted on actions by the SBC’s Govt Committee, which handles financial and administrative duties. Although Southern Baptist churches function independently from each other, the Nashville-based Govt Committee distributes greater than $190 million cooperative program in its annual funds that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For decades, the findings show, Southern Baptists had been informed the denomination could not put together a registry of intercourse offenders as a result of it could go in opposition to the denomination’s polity — or the way it functions. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained an inventory of offenders whereas holding it a secret to avoid the opportunity of getting sued. The report also contains non-public emails displaying how longtime leaders resembling August Boto have been dismissive about sexual abuse issues, calling them “a satanic scheme to fully distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 e-mail, the conference’s attorney despatched Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database could be applied in step with SBC polity, saying “it could match our polity and present ministries to assist church buildings on this space of kid abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he really helpful “speedy motion to sign the Convention’s desire that the [executive committee] and the entities begin a extra aggressive effort on this area.” That same 12 months, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a movement for a database, Boto rejected the concept.

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 number of key leaders, including Boto and the conference’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to control the nationwide institutional response to sex abuse for decades. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, mentioned he had not learn the report but. Makes an attempt to reach Boto on Sunday have been unsuccessful.

“The report is going to validate so much about how they actually blindly chose to stay 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 alongside. Now Southern Baptists have to carry the burden.”

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

The debate 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 additionally 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 decision over attorney-client privilege additionally led to the resignation of the convention’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 “growing concern about all of the emphasis on the sexual abuse disaster.” He then stated: “Our precedence cannot be the latest cultural disaster.” Floyd didn't instantly 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 different Southern Baptist church buildings in multiple 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 during her speech and another chortled.”

“The Government Committee betrayed not solely survivors who labored onerous to attempt to make something happen, however betrayed the entire Southern Baptist Convention,” stated Brown, who is a retired appellate lawyer in Colorado. “They’ve made their own faith right into a complicit associate for their very own resolution to decide on institutional safety over the protection of kids and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists throughout its final annual meeting, comes simply weeks earlier than its next gathering in Anaheim, Calif., the place members are anticipated talk about subsequent steps. Suggestions by Guidepost include providing devoted survivor advocacy help and a survivor compensation fund.

“We must be ready to take significant steps to alter our tradition because it pertains to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the current SBC president, said in a press release.

Since a long time of sex abuse and coverups in the Catholic Church were reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have printed lists of monks they are saying have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to stop the transfer of abusers to other churches. 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 Govt Committee presidents, according to the report. He expressed his concerns that SBC leaders could be falling into among the same patterns as Catholic leaders in not coping with clergy intercourse abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists ought to study from Catholic mistakes 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 on the time, responded to Doyle in a short letter that “Southern Baptist leaders truly haven't any authority over native churches” however that they might attempt to use their “affect” to provide protections. In an article, Web page accused a survivor group of getting a hidden agenda of establishing the nation’s largest Protestant physique for lawsuits. Web page later resigned from his position in 2018 over having a “morally inappropriate relationship.” Web page did not 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 process drive on the problem and stated that the report exhibits a need for institutions like the SBC to seek outdoors experience on intercourse abuse.

“It exhibits a level of coverup and harassment and resistance to reforms on an institutional degree that has led to decades of survivors being victimized and harm,” Denhollander stated. “The question Southern Baptists need to ask is, ‘How might this happen?’”

The difficulty of intercourse abuse was a distinguished theme in leaked non-public letters written by Russell Moore, who left his place in 2021 as head of the SBC’s coverage arm, the Ethics & Spiritual Liberty Commission. Moore mentioned he expects Southern Baptists to obtain Sunday’s report in an analogous option 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 said. “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 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 past 20 years preventing for reform.