Southern Baptist leaders covered up intercourse abuse, explosive report says

Leaders in the Southern Baptist Convention on Sunday released a serious third-party investigation that discovered that sex abuse survivors were often 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 particular abuse instances 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 might keep a database of offenders to prevent extra abuse when top leaders had been secretly protecting a private list for years.

The report — the primary investigation of its form in a large Protestant denomination like the SBC — is anticipated to ship shock waves all through a conservative Christian neighborhood that has had intense inside battles over how one can handle sex abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, along with other religious establishments in america, has struggled with declining membership for the previous 15 years. Its leaders have long resisted comparisons between its sexual abuse crisis and that of the Catholic Church, saying the whole variety of abuse circumstances amongst Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for almost 20 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 different accused abusers who were in the pulpit or employed as church workers members. Most of the instances referred to within the report were thought-about outside the statute of limitations, the time survivors can report intercourse abuse, so it’s unclear how many abusers were criminally charged.

The report, compiled by a corporation known as Guidepost Solutions on the request of Southern Baptists, states that abuse survivors’ calls and emails were “only to be met, time and time again, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who have been concerned more with protecting the institution from legal responsibility than from protecting Southern Baptists from additional abuse.

“Whereas stories of abuse had been minimized, and survivors had been ignored or even vilified, revelations got here to mild lately 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 issues when survivors came ahead, it additionally states that a main Southern Baptist chief was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a girl just 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 vp on the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a girl throughout a Panama City 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 statement on Twitter, saying, “I vigorously deny the circumstances and characterizations set forth in the Guidepost report. I've by no means abused anyone.”

Hunt resigned on Could 13 from the North American Mission Board, in response to a press release by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell mentioned that earlier than May 13, he was not aware of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Typically, he referred to as the details of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

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Sex abuse survivors, a lot of whom have been sharing their tales for years, anticipated Sunday’s launch would confirm the info round lots of the tales they have already shared, however many have been nonetheless stunned to see the sample of coverups by the highest 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 in the report. “This is a denomination that is through and through about energy. It is misappropriated power. It doesn't in any method reflect the Jesus I see within the scriptures. I am so gutted.”

The report additionally names a number of 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 centered on actions by the SBC’s Government Committee, which handles monetary and administrative duties. Although Southern Baptist church buildings operate independently from one another, the Nashville-based Executive Committee distributes greater than $190 million cooperative program in its annual price range that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For decades, the findings show, Southern Baptists were informed the denomination couldn't put collectively a registry of sex 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 while keeping it a secret to avoid the potential of getting sued. The report additionally contains non-public emails showing how longtime leaders equivalent to August Boto were dismissive about sexual abuse issues, calling them “a satanic scheme to completely distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 e-mail, the convention’s legal professional sent Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database might be implemented per SBC polity, saying “it could match our polity and current ministries to help church buildings on this area of child abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he beneficial “speedy motion to signal the Conference’s desire that the [executive committee] and the entities begin a extra aggressive effort on this space.” That same year, 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 exhibits 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 sex abuse for decades. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, stated he had not read the report but. Attempts to reach Boto on Sunday have been unsuccessful.

“The report goes to validate a lot about how they really blindly selected 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 alongside. Now Southern Baptists have to hold the burden.”

Throughout Executive Committee conferences in 2021, some members argued in opposition to waiving attorney-client privilege, which would give investigators access to records of conversations on authorized matters among the many committee’s members and staffers. They mentioned doing so went against the advice of conference lawyers and could bankrupt the SBC by exposing it to lawsuits.

The controversy over waiving privilege upset a large 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 additionally led to the resignation of the convention’s attorneys, who are named throughout the report.

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In response to the report, Floyd told SBC leaders in a 2019 email that he had obtained “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “growing concern about all of the emphasis on the sexual abuse disaster.” He then acknowledged: “Our priority cannot be the most recent cultural crisis.” Floyd did not instantly 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 other Southern Baptist church buildings in a number of 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 Executive Committee “turned his again to her throughout her speech and one other chortled.”

“The Executive Committee betrayed not only survivors who worked hard to attempt to make one thing happen, but betrayed the entire Southern Baptist Convention,” said Brown, who's a retired appellate legal professional in Colorado. “They’ve made their own faith right into a complicit partner for their very own decision to decide on institutional safety over the protection of kids and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists during its last annual meeting, comes simply weeks before its subsequent gathering in Anaheim, Calif., the place members are expected focus on subsequent steps. Recommendations by Guidepost embody providing devoted survivor advocacy help and a survivor compensation fund.

“We must be able to take significant steps to change our culture as it pertains 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 printed lists of monks they say have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to forestall the transfer 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 sex abuse crisis, wrote to the SBC and Government Committee presidents, in accordance with the report. He expressed his issues that SBC leaders could be falling into among the similar patterns as Catholic leaders in not dealing 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 children safer.

The report states that Frank Web page, who was main the Executive Committee at the time, responded to Doyle in a short letter that “Southern Baptist leaders really don't have any authority over local church buildings” however that they would attempt to make use of their “influence” to provide protections. In an article, Web 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 did not 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 activity drive on the problem and mentioned that the report exhibits a necessity for establishments just like the SBC to seek exterior experience on sex abuse.

“It reveals a stage of coverup and harassment and resistance to reforms on an institutional level that has led to decades of survivors being victimized and damage,” Denhollander stated. “The question Southern Baptists have to ask is, ‘How could this occur?’”

The issue of intercourse 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 & Spiritual Liberty Fee. Moore stated he expects Southern Baptists to obtain Sunday’s report in an analogous method 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. “People will say, ‘This isn't all Southern Baptists, 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 take into account changing a statue of evangelist Billy Graham, which was moved from Nashville to Graham’s house state in 2016, with a statue of Christa Brown, the abuse survivor who spent the previous twenty years fighting for reform.