Southern Baptist leaders lined 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 prime clergy within the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

The findings of nearly 300 pages include surprising new details about specific abuse cases and shine a light-weight on how denominational leaders for many years actively resisted requires abuse prevention and reform. Evidence within the report suggests leaders also lied to Southern Baptists over whether or not they could keep a database of offenders to forestall extra abuse when top leaders had been secretly preserving a non-public checklist for years.

The report — the first investigation of its type in an enormous Protestant denomination like the SBC — is expected to ship shock waves throughout a conservative Christian community that has had intense internal battles over learn how to deal with sex abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, together with other 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 overall variety of abuse circumstances amongst Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for almost 20 years, survivors of abuse and different concerned Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Conference’s administrative arm to report alleged child molesters and other accused abusers who were within the pulpit or employed as church employees members. Lots of the cases referred to within the report had been thought of exterior the statute of limitations, the time survivors can report sex abuse, so it’s unclear how many abusers had been criminally charged.

The report, compiled by an organization called Guidepost Solutions on the request of Southern Baptists, states that abuse survivors’ calls and emails had been “only to be met, time and time once more, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who have been involved more with protecting the establishment from liability than from protecting Southern Baptists from additional abuse.

“Whereas tales of abuse had been minimized, and survivors had been ignored and even vilified, revelations got here to mild in recent years 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 points when survivors got here ahead, it additionally states that a main Southern Baptist leader was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a lady only 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 vice chairman at the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a woman throughout a Panama Metropolis Seashore, Fla., trip 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 in the Guidepost report. I have by no means abused anyone.”

Hunt resigned on Might 13 from the North American Mission Board, in response to a statement by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell stated that before Could 13, he was not aware of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Typically, he known as the details of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

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Sex abuse survivors, many of whom have been sharing their stories for years, anticipated Sunday’s release would affirm the info around many of the stories they've already shared, but many were still shocked to see the sample of coverups by the best ranges of management.

“I knew it was rotten, but it surely’s astonishing and infuriating,” stated Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was once the highest-paid feminine govt at the SBC and whose story of sexual abuse at a Southern Baptist seminary is detailed in the report. “This is a denomination that is via and through about power. It's misappropriated energy. It doesn't in any method replicate the Jesus I see within the scriptures. I'm 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 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 financial and administrative duties. Though Southern Baptist church buildings operate independently from each other, the Nashville-based Executive Committee distributes more than $190 million cooperative program in its annual finances that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For decades, the findings show, Southern Baptists had been instructed the denomination could not put collectively a registry of intercourse offenders as a result of it would go towards the denomination’s polity — or the way it capabilities. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained an inventory of offenders while preserving it a secret to avoid the opportunity of getting sued. The report additionally consists of non-public emails displaying how longtime leaders similar to August Boto had been dismissive about sexual abuse issues, calling them “a satanic scheme to utterly distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 e mail, the convention’s legal professional sent Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database could possibly be carried out in step with SBC polity, saying “it will fit our polity and present ministries to help churches on this area of kid abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he beneficial “immediate action to signal the Conference’s need that the [executive committee] and the entities start a extra aggressive effort in this space.” That same yr, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a movement for a database, Boto rejected the thought.

For a denomination designed to provide extra democratic energy to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to fee the third-party investigation, the report shows how lay Southern Baptists allowed a couple of key leaders, together with Boto and the convention’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to manage the national institutional response to intercourse abuse for decades. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, mentioned he had not learn the report yet. Attempts to achieve Boto on Sunday were unsuccessful.

“The report is going to validate so much about how they actually blindly selected to stay on the identical path all these years,” said 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 access to records of conversations on legal issues among the committee’s members and staffers. They mentioned doing so went in opposition to the advice of convention legal professionals and could bankrupt the SBC by exposing it to lawsuits.

The talk over waiving privilege upset a large swath of Southern Baptists, causing 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 choice over attorney-client privilege additionally led to the resignation of the convention’s attorneys, who're named all through the report.

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In line with the report, Floyd advised SBC leaders in a 2019 e mail that he had obtained “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “rising concern about all the emphasis on the sexual abuse disaster.” He then stated: “Our priority cannot be the latest cultural crisis.” Floyd didn't immediately return a request for remark.

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 a number of states, has long 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 back to her throughout her speech and another chortled.”

“The Executive Committee betrayed not solely survivors who labored arduous to attempt to make something happen, but betrayed the whole Southern Baptist Convention,” stated Brown, who is a retired appellate lawyer in Colorado. “They’ve made their own faith into a complicit partner for their very own resolution to decide on institutional safety over the protection of children and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists during its final annual meeting, comes simply weeks before its subsequent gathering in Anaheim, Calif., where members are anticipated discuss next steps. Suggestions by Guidepost embody providing dedicated survivor advocacy support and a survivor compensation fund.

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

Since many years of sex abuse and coverups in the Catholic Church have been reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have revealed lists of clergymen they are saying have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to prevent the switch of abusers to different churches. 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 concerns that SBC leaders could possibly be falling into among the identical patterns as Catholic leaders in not dealing with clergy sex abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists should learn from Catholic errors and take motion early on to implement structural reforms so as to make youngsters safer.

The report states that Frank Web page, who was leading the Executive Committee at the time, responded to Doyle in a brief letter that “Southern Baptist leaders truly have no authority over local church buildings” however that they might try to make use of their “influence” to provide protections. In an article, Page accused a survivor group of getting a hidden agenda of establishing the nation’s largest Protestant body for lawsuits. Page later resigned from his position 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 process pressure on the problem and mentioned that the report reveals a necessity for establishments like the SBC to hunt outside expertise on sex abuse.

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

The issue of sex abuse was a prominent theme in leaked non-public letters written by Russell Moore, who left his position in 2021 as head of the SBC’s coverage arm, the Ethics & Spiritual Liberty Commission. Moore mentioned he expects Southern Baptists to receive Sunday’s report in the same solution 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. “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 mentioned he hopes the SBC will think about 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 previous twenty years fighting for reform.