Southern Baptist leaders covered up intercourse abuse, explosive report says

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

The findings of practically 300 pages embody surprising new particulars about specific abuse instances and shine a light-weight on how denominational leaders for many years actively resisted requires abuse prevention and reform. Evidence in the report suggests leaders also lied to Southern Baptists over whether they may preserve a database of offenders to prevent more abuse when prime leaders were secretly conserving a personal record for years.

The report — the first investigation of its sort in an enormous Protestant denomination like the SBC — is expected to send shock waves throughout a conservative Christian community that has had intense internal battles over how one can handle intercourse abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, along with different religious institutions in the US, has struggled with declining membership for the past 15 years. Its leaders have lengthy resisted comparisons between its sexual abuse disaster and that of the Catholic Church, saying the full variety of abuse instances amongst Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for almost twenty years, survivors of abuse and different involved Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Convention’s administrative arm to report alleged baby molesters and other accused abusers who had been in the pulpit or employed as church workers members. Most of the cases referred to in the report have been thought-about outdoors 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 have been “solely to be met, time and time once more, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who were involved more with protecting the establishment from liability than from protecting Southern Baptists from additional abuse.

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

Whereas the report focuses totally on how leaders dealt with abuse issues when survivors came forward, it also states that a major Southern Baptist leader was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a woman only 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 president at the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a girl during a Panama Metropolis Beach, Fla., vacation in 2010.

The report states that Hunt, in an interview with investigators, denied any physical contact with the girl 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 have by no means abused anybody.”

Hunt resigned on May 13 from the North American Mission Board, in line with a press release by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell said that earlier than Could 13, he was not aware of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Generally, he called the main points of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

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Intercourse abuse survivors, many of whom have been sharing their tales for years, anticipated Sunday’s launch would verify the facts round lots of the stories they've already shared, however many have been still stunned to see the sample of coverups by the best ranges of leadership.

“I knew it was rotten, but it’s astonishing and infuriating,” stated Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was once the highest-paid female executive on 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 via and through about power. It is misappropriated energy. It does not in any manner mirror the Jesus I see within the scriptures. I am so gutted.”

The report also names several senior SBC leaders who protected and even supported alleged abusers, including three previous presidents of the convention, 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 Executive Committee, which handles monetary and administrative duties. Though Southern Baptist church buildings function independently from each other, the Nashville-based Government Committee distributes more 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 couldn't put collectively a registry of sex offenders because it will go against the denomination’s polity — or the way it features. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained a listing of offenders whereas keeping it a secret to avoid the potential of getting sued. The report also includes personal emails exhibiting how longtime leaders corresponding to August Boto were dismissive about sexual abuse concerns, calling them “a satanic scheme to completely distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 electronic mail, the convention’s attorney despatched Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database could possibly be implemented in keeping with SBC polity, saying “it might match our polity and present ministries to assist church buildings in this space of child abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he recommended “speedy action to signal the Conference’s need that the [executive committee] and the entities start a more aggressive effort in this area.” That very same 12 months, 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 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 intercourse abuse for decades. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, mentioned he had not read the report yet. Attempts to reach Boto on Sunday have been unsuccessful.

“The report is going to validate so much about how they actually blindly selected to stay on the same 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 load.”

During Government Committee meetings in 2021, some members argued in opposition to waiving attorney-client privilege, which would give investigators access to data of conversations on authorized issues among the many committee’s members and staffers. They said doing so went in opposition to the recommendation of convention legal professionals and will bankrupt the SBC by exposing it to lawsuits.

The talk over waiving privilege upset a big swath of Southern Baptists, inflicting some to believe 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 additionally 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 conference’s attorneys, who are named all through the report.

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Based on the report, Floyd told SBC leaders in a 2019 email that he had received “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “growing concern about all of the emphasis on the sexual abuse crisis.” He then stated: “Our priority can't be the latest cultural crisis.” Floyd didn't instantly return a request for comment.

Christa Brown, who instructed SBC leaders that she was abused by a youth pastor who went on to serve in other 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 Govt Committee “turned his again to her during her speech and one other chortled.”

“The Govt Committee betrayed not only survivors who worked exhausting to attempt to make something occur, however betrayed the entire Southern Baptist Conference,” stated Brown, who is a retired appellate legal professional in Colorado. “They’ve made their own religion right into a complicit accomplice for their very own resolution to decide on institutional safety over the safety of youngsters and congregants.”

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

“We have to be able to take meaningful steps to change our culture because it relates to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the current SBC president, said in an announcement.

Since decades of intercourse abuse and coverups in the Catholic Church had been reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have published lists of clergymen they are saying have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to stop the transfer of abusers to other church buildings. In contrast to 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 sex abuse crisis, wrote to the SBC and Govt Committee presidents, in accordance with the report. He expressed his issues that SBC leaders may very well be falling into a number of 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 motion 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 brief letter that “Southern Baptist leaders actually don't have any authority over native church buildings” but that they might try to make use of their “influence” to supply protections. In an article, 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 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 job force on the problem and mentioned that the report exhibits a necessity for establishments just like the SBC to seek outdoors expertise on sex abuse.

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

The problem of sex abuse was a distinguished theme in leaked private letters written by Russell Moore, who left his position in 2021 as head of the SBC’s coverage arm, the Ethics & Religious Liberty Fee. Moore stated he expects Southern Baptists to obtain Sunday’s report in the same 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 stated. “Folks will say, ‘This is not all Southern Baptists, take a look at all the nice we do.’ The report demonstrates a sample of stonewalling, coverup, intimidation and retaliation.”

Moore mentioned he hopes the SBC will think about replacing a statue of evangelist Billy Graham, which was moved from Nashville to Graham’s dwelling state in 2016, with a statue of Christa Brown, the abuse survivor who spent the previous 20 years combating for reform.