Southern Baptist leaders lined up intercourse abuse, explosive report says

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

The findings of practically 300 pages embody stunning new particulars about specific abuse circumstances and shine a lightweight on how denominational leaders for many years actively resisted requires abuse prevention and reform. Proof in the report suggests leaders additionally lied to Southern Baptists over whether they may preserve a database of offenders to prevent extra abuse when prime leaders had been secretly keeping a personal listing for years.

The report — the first investigation of its sort in a massive Protestant denomination just like the SBC — is predicted to send shock waves all through a conservative Christian community that has had intense internal battles over the right way to handle intercourse abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, together with other 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 disaster and that of the Catholic Church, saying the whole variety of abuse instances among Southern Baptists was small.

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

The report, compiled by a company called Guidepost Solutions at the request of Southern Baptists, states that abuse survivors’ calls and emails have been “only to be met, time and time once more, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who have been involved extra with defending the institution from legal responsibility than from defending Southern Baptists from further abuse.

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

While the report focuses primarily on how leaders handled abuse issues when survivors came ahead, it also states that a main Southern Baptist leader was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a woman 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 vice chairman at the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a lady 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 lady however 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 in the Guidepost report. I've never abused anyone.”

Hunt resigned on Could 13 from the North American Mission Board, according to a press release by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell said that before Could 13, he was not conscious of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Typically, he known as the details of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

Southern Baptists have been immersed in their very own sex abuse scandals. Now, they’re debating their response.

Sex abuse survivors, many of whom have been sharing their stories for years, anticipated Sunday’s launch would verify the details around most of the stories they have already shared, but many have been nonetheless stunned to see the pattern of coverups by the best levels of leadership.

“I knew it was rotten, but it surely’s astonishing and infuriating,” mentioned Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was as soon as the highest-paid female government at the SBC and whose story of sexual abuse at a Southern Baptist seminary is detailed in the report. “It is a denomination that's via and thru about power. It's misappropriated power. It does not in any method reflect 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 previous presidents of the convention, a former vice chairman 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 Government Committee, which handles monetary and administrative duties. Though Southern Baptist church buildings function 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 many years, the findings present, Southern Baptists had been told the denomination could not put collectively a registry of sex offenders because it might go against the denomination’s polity — or how it capabilities. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained an inventory of offenders while keeping it a secret to avoid the potential of getting sued. The report additionally consists of non-public emails displaying how longtime leaders akin to August Boto have been dismissive about sexual abuse concerns, calling them “a satanic scheme to fully distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 e-mail, the conference’s legal professional sent Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database could be applied in line with SBC polity, saying “it could match our polity and current ministries to assist church buildings in this area of kid abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he beneficial “instant action to signal the Convention’s desire that the [executive committee] and the entities start a extra aggressive effort on this space.” That same yr, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a movement for a database, Boto rejected the concept.

For a denomination designed to present more democratic energy to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to fee the third-party investigation, the report exhibits how lay Southern Baptists allowed a number of key leaders, together with 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, stated he had not read the report yet. Attempts to reach Boto on Sunday had been unsuccessful.

“The report is going to validate so much about how they really blindly chose to stay on the same path all these years,” said Tiffany Thigpen, whose story of sexual abuse in a Southern Baptist church is detailed in the report. “It buoys what we’ve been saying all along. Now Southern Baptists have to hold the weight.”

During Executive 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 committee’s members and staffers. They stated doing so went against the recommendation of conference legal professionals and could 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 also led to the resignation of the Govt 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 conference’s attorneys, who're named all through the report.

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Based on the report, Floyd told 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 crisis.” He then acknowledged: “Our priority can't be the most recent cultural disaster.” Floyd did not immediately return a request for comment.

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 multiple 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 Government Committee betrayed not solely survivors who labored arduous to attempt to make one thing occur, but betrayed the whole Southern Baptist Conference,” said Brown, who's a retired appellate attorney in Colorado. “They’ve made their very own faith into a complicit partner for their own determination to decide on institutional safety 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 next gathering in Anaheim, Calif., where members are expected talk about subsequent steps. Recommendations by Guidepost embody providing devoted survivor advocacy assist and a survivor compensation fund.

“We must be able to take meaningful steps to vary our culture as it relates to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the present SBC president, stated in a press release.

Since decades of intercourse abuse and coverups within the Catholic Church were 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 intercourse abuse crisis, wrote to the SBC and Executive Committee presidents, according to the report. He expressed his concerns that SBC leaders could possibly be falling into some of the same patterns as Catholic leaders in not dealing with clergy sex 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 children safer.

The report states that Frank Web page, who was leading the Government Committee at the time, responded to Doyle in a brief letter that “Southern Baptist leaders really haven't any authority over native church buildings” but that they would attempt to make use of their “affect” to provide protections. In an article, Page accused a survivor group of getting a hidden agenda of setting up the nation’s largest Protestant body for lawsuits. Page later resigned from his position in 2018 over having a “morally inappropriate relationship.” Web page didn't 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 task force on the problem and said that the report shows a need for establishments like the SBC to hunt exterior expertise on intercourse abuse.

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

The problem of sex abuse was a outstanding theme in leaked personal letters written by Russell Moore, who left his position in 2021 as head of the SBC’s policy arm, the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. Moore mentioned he expects Southern Baptists to obtain Sunday’s report in a similar strategy 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 mentioned. “Folks will say, ‘This isn't all Southern Baptists, 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 take into account replacing a statue of evangelist Billy Graham, which was moved from Nashville to Graham’s residence state in 2016, with a statue of Christa Brown, the abuse survivor who spent the past twenty years fighting for reform.