Southern Baptist leaders lined up intercourse abuse, explosive report says

Leaders within the Southern Baptist Convention on Sunday released a significant third-party investigation that discovered that intercourse abuse survivors have been 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 cases and shine a light on how denominational leaders for decades actively resisted calls for abuse prevention and reform. Evidence within the report suggests leaders additionally lied to Southern Baptists over whether they could preserve a database of offenders to stop more abuse when top leaders have been secretly preserving a non-public listing for years.

The report — the first investigation of its form in a massive Protestant denomination like the SBC — is expected to ship shock waves all through a conservative Christian neighborhood that has had intense inside battles over learn how to handle intercourse abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, along with other spiritual establishments in the USA, 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 overall variety of abuse circumstances among Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for nearly 20 years, survivors of abuse and different involved Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Convention’s administrative arm to report alleged youngster molesters and other accused abusers who were in the pulpit or employed as church staff members. Most of the circumstances referred to within the report have been thought of outdoors 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 corporation known as Guidepost Solutions on 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 were concerned more with defending the institution from legal responsibility than from protecting Southern Baptists from additional abuse.

“While stories of abuse had been minimized, and survivors were ignored and even vilified, revelations came to mild in recent times that some senior SBC leaders had protected or even supported alleged abusers, the report states.

While the report focuses primarily on how leaders dealt with abuse points when survivors came forward, it additionally states that a major Southern Baptist leader was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a woman just one month after he completed 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 on 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 physical contact with the girl but acknowledged that he had interactions along with her. After the report was released, 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 never abused anyone.”

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

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Intercourse abuse survivors, a lot of whom have been sharing their stories for years, anticipated Sunday’s launch would verify the details around lots of the stories they have already shared, but many were still stunned to see the pattern of coverups by the very best levels of management.

“I knew it was rotten, but it surely’s astonishing and infuriating,” stated Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was as soon as the highest-paid feminine executive on the SBC and whose story of sexual abuse at a Southern Baptist seminary is detailed in the report. “It is a denomination that is through and thru about energy. It's misappropriated power. It does not in any way mirror the Jesus I see in the scriptures. I am so gutted.”

The report also names a number of senior SBC leaders who protected and even supported alleged abusers, together with three previous presidents of the conference, a former vice president and the former head of the SBC’s administrative arm.

The third-party investigation into actions between 2000 and 2021 targeted on actions by the SBC’s Executive Committee, which handles monetary and administrative duties. Although Southern Baptist churches operate independently from each other, the Nashville-based Executive Committee distributes more than $190 million cooperative program in its annual funds 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 intercourse offenders as a result of it could go against the denomination’s polity — or the way it features. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained a listing of offenders whereas conserving it a secret to avoid the possibility of getting sued. The report also includes non-public emails showing how longtime leaders similar to August Boto were dismissive about sexual abuse issues, calling them “a satanic scheme to utterly distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 e-mail, the conference’s lawyer sent Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database might be carried out in line with SBC polity, saying “it will fit our polity and current ministries to assist churches on this space of kid abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he recommended “instant action to sign the Conference’s need that the [executive committee] and the entities begin a more aggressive effort in this area.” That very same yr, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a motion for a database, Boto rejected the thought.

For a denomination designed to offer more democratic energy to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to commission the third-party investigation, the report exhibits how lay Southern Baptists allowed a few key leaders, together with Boto and the conference’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to control the national institutional response to sex abuse for decades. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, said he had not learn the report yet. Makes an attempt to succeed in Boto on Sunday were unsuccessful.

“The report is going to validate so much about how they really blindly chose to stay on the identical path all these years,” stated 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 carry the burden.”

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

The talk over waiving privilege upset a big swath of Southern Baptists, causing some to imagine the Executive 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 additionally 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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According to the report, Floyd informed SBC leaders in a 2019 email that he had acquired “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “rising concern about all of the emphasis on the sexual abuse crisis.” He then acknowledged: “Our precedence cannot be the most recent cultural crisis.” Floyd didn't immediately return a request for comment.

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 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 another chortled.”

“The Executive Committee betrayed not only survivors who worked onerous to attempt to make something occur, but betrayed the entire Southern Baptist Conference,” stated Brown, who's a retired appellate lawyer in Colorado. “They’ve made their own faith right into a complicit partner for their own choice to choose institutional protection over the protection of kids and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists throughout its final annual assembly, comes simply weeks before its next gathering in Anaheim, Calif., where members are expected discuss next steps. Suggestions by Guidepost embrace offering devoted survivor advocacy help and a survivor compensation fund.

“We should be ready to take significant steps to alter our culture because it pertains to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the current SBC president, stated in an announcement.

Since many years of intercourse abuse and coverups within the Catholic Church have been reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have revealed lists of monks they say have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to stop the transfer of abusers to other churches. Unlike 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, based on the report. He expressed his concerns that SBC leaders could possibly be falling into among the similar patterns as Catholic leaders in not dealing with clergy intercourse abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists ought to learn from Catholic mistakes and take action early on to implement structural reforms in order to make children safer.

The report states that Frank Page, who was leading the Executive Committee on the time, responded to Doyle in a brief letter that “Southern Baptist leaders really haven't any authority over native church buildings” however that they would try to use their “affect” to provide protections. In an article, Web page accused a survivor group of getting a hidden agenda of setting up the nation’s largest Protestant body for lawsuits. Web 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 task force on the issue and said that the report exhibits a necessity for establishments like the SBC to seek exterior experience on intercourse abuse.

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

The issue of sex abuse was a prominent 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 & Spiritual Liberty Fee. Moore stated he expects Southern Baptists to obtain Sunday’s report in an identical 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. “Individuals will say, ‘This isn't all Southern Baptists, have a look at all the great we do.’ The report demonstrates a sample of stonewalling, coverup, intimidation and retaliation.”

Moore said he hopes the SBC will consider 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 two decades fighting for reform.