Southern Baptist leaders coated 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 usually ignored, minimized and “even vilified” by high clergy within the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

The findings of practically 300 pages embody surprising new details about specific abuse cases 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 they might maintain a database of offenders to prevent more abuse when high leaders have been secretly keeping a non-public record for years.

The report — the primary investigation of its sort in a massive Protestant denomination just like the SBC — is expected to send shock waves throughout a conservative Christian group that has had intense inner battles over the way to handle sex abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, together with different religious institutions in the United States, 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 total variety of abuse instances amongst Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for almost two decades, survivors of abuse and different involved Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Convention’s administrative arm to report alleged baby molesters and different accused abusers who were in the pulpit or employed as church staff members. Most of the instances referred to within the report have been thought-about outside the statute of limitations, the time survivors can report intercourse abuse, so it’s unclear what number of abusers were criminally charged.

The report, compiled by a corporation referred to as Guidepost Options at the request of Southern Baptists, states that abuse survivors’ calls and emails had been “only to be met, time and time again, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who have been concerned extra with protecting the institution from legal responsibility than from defending Southern Baptists from further abuse.

“Whereas tales of abuse were minimized, and survivors have been ignored or even vilified, revelations got here to mild 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 handled abuse points when survivors came ahead, it also states that a main Southern Baptist leader was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a woman 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 chairman at the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a woman throughout a Panama City Seaside, Fla., trip in 2010.

The report states that Hunt, in an interview with investigators, denied any bodily contact with the girl but acknowledged that he had interactions together with her. After the report was launched, 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 within the Guidepost report. I've by no means 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 before Might 13, he was not conscious of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Usually, he called the small print 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 launch would confirm the info around many of the stories they have already shared, but many have been nonetheless stunned to see the sample of coverups by the highest levels of management.

“I knew it was rotten, nevertheless it’s astonishing and infuriating,” mentioned Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was as soon as the highest-paid female government on the SBC and whose story of sexual abuse at a Southern Baptist seminary is detailed in the report. “This can be a denomination that's by way of and through about energy. It is misappropriated energy. It does not in any approach replicate the Jesus I see in the scriptures. I'm so gutted.”

The report also names several senior SBC leaders who protected and even supported alleged abusers, including three past presidents of the convention, a former vice president and the former head of the SBC’s administrative arm.

The third-party investigation into actions between 2000 and 2021 focused on actions by the SBC’s Govt Committee, which handles financial and administrative duties. Though Southern Baptist churches operate independently from one another, the Nashville-based Government Committee distributes greater than $190 million cooperative program in its annual budget that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For many years, the findings present, Southern Baptists had been advised the denomination couldn't put collectively a registry of sex offenders because it could go in opposition to the denomination’s polity — or how it capabilities. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained a listing of offenders while holding it a secret to avoid the possibility of getting sued. The report additionally consists of non-public emails displaying how longtime leaders comparable 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 conference’s attorney despatched Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database may very well be carried out per SBC polity, saying “it might match our polity and current ministries to assist churches in this area of child abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he beneficial “quick action to sign the Convention’s want that the [executive committee] and the entities begin a more aggressive effort in this area.” That same year, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a motion 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 exhibits how lay Southern Baptists allowed just a few key leaders, together with Boto and the conference’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to regulate the nationwide institutional response to intercourse abuse for decades. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, mentioned he had not read the report but. Attempts to succeed in Boto on Sunday had been unsuccessful.

“The report goes to validate so much about how they actually blindly selected to remain 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 along. Now Southern Baptists have to hold the weight.”

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

The debate over waiving privilege upset a big swath of Southern Baptists, inflicting some to imagine 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 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 also led to the resignation of the conference’s attorneys, who're named throughout the report.

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In response to the report, Floyd informed SBC leaders in a 2019 electronic mail that he had obtained “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “rising concern about all the emphasis on the sexual abuse crisis.” He then stated: “Our precedence cannot be the most recent cultural crisis.” Floyd didn't instantly return a request for remark.

Christa Brown, who advised SBC leaders that she was abused by a youth pastor who went on to serve in other Southern Baptist churches 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 Executive Committee “turned his back to her during her speech and one other chortled.”

“The Govt Committee betrayed not only survivors who worked arduous to try to make one thing occur, however betrayed the whole Southern Baptist Convention,” said Brown, who's a retired appellate lawyer in Colorado. “They’ve made their very own religion right into a complicit accomplice for their own decision to decide on institutional protection over the safety of children and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists during its last annual meeting, comes simply weeks earlier than its next gathering in Anaheim, Calif., where members are anticipated discuss next steps. Recommendations by Guidepost embody providing devoted survivor advocacy help and a survivor compensation fund.

“We should be able to take significant steps to vary our tradition because it relates to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the present SBC president, said in an announcement.

Since a long time of intercourse 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 say 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 intercourse abuse crisis, wrote to the SBC and Government 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 coping with clergy intercourse abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists should study from Catholic mistakes and take motion early on to implement structural reforms in order to make kids safer.

The report states that Frank Page, who was leading the Govt Committee on the time, responded to Doyle in a short letter that “Southern Baptist leaders truly don't have any authority over native church buildings” but that they might try to make use of 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. Page later resigned from his place in 2018 over having a “morally inappropriate relationship.” Web page didn't immediately 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 activity drive on the problem and said that the report shows a necessity for establishments like the SBC to hunt exterior expertise on intercourse abuse.

“It shows a level of coverup and harassment and resistance to reforms on an institutional level that has led to a long time of survivors being victimized and damage,” Denhollander said. “The query Southern Baptists have to ask is, ‘How might this happen?’”

The difficulty of sex abuse was a outstanding theme in leaked private letters written by Russell Moore, who left his position in 2021 as head of the SBC’s policy arm, the Ethics & Religious Liberty Fee. 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 stated. “Individuals will say, ‘This isn't all Southern Baptists, take a look at all the great we do.’ The report demonstrates a pattern of stonewalling, coverup, intimidation and retaliation.”

Moore said he hopes the SBC will think about changing 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 fighting for reform.