Southern Baptist leaders covered up intercourse abuse, explosive report says

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

The findings of nearly 300 pages embrace shocking new details about specific abuse cases and shine a light on how denominational leaders for decades actively resisted requires abuse prevention and reform. Proof within the report suggests leaders also lied to Southern Baptists over whether they could keep a database of offenders to forestall more abuse when top leaders had been secretly holding a personal checklist for years.

The report — the first investigation of its type in an enormous Protestant denomination like the SBC — is predicted to send shock waves all through a conservative Christian group that has had intense internal battles over find out how to deal with sex abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, along with different religious institutions in america, 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 instances amongst Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for nearly two decades, survivors of abuse and different concerned Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Convention’s administrative arm to report alleged child molesters and different accused abusers who had been within the pulpit or employed as church staff members. Lots of the circumstances referred to within the report have been considered exterior 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 known as Guidepost Solutions at the request of Southern Baptists, states that abuse survivors’ calls and emails had been “solely to be met, time and time again, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who were involved more with protecting the institution from legal responsibility than from defending Southern Baptists from further abuse.

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

Whereas the report focuses primarily on how leaders dealt with abuse issues when survivors came ahead, it also 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 president on the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a lady during a Panama Metropolis Beach, 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 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 within the Guidepost report. I have by no means abused anyone.”

Hunt resigned on Could 13 from the North American Mission Board, according to an announcement by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell mentioned that earlier than May 13, he was not conscious of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Usually, he referred to as the main points of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

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Intercourse abuse survivors, lots of whom have been sharing their stories for years, anticipated Sunday’s release would confirm the info round most of the stories they've already shared, but many have been still surprised to see the sample of coverups by the best ranges of management.

“I knew it was rotten, however it’s astonishing and infuriating,” stated Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was as soon as the highest-paid female govt 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 and through about energy. It is misappropriated energy. It does not in any method mirror the Jesus I see in the scriptures. I'm so gutted.”

The report also names a number of senior SBC leaders who protected and even supported alleged abusers, together with three past 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 focused on actions by the SBC’s Executive Committee, which handles monetary and administrative duties. Although Southern Baptist churches function independently from each other, the Nashville-based Government Committee distributes greater than $190 million cooperative program in its annual price range that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For many years, the findings present, Southern Baptists were instructed the denomination couldn't put together a registry of intercourse offenders as a result of it will go towards the denomination’s polity — or the way it features. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained a list of offenders whereas keeping it a secret to keep away from the potential of getting sued. The report also consists of private emails exhibiting how longtime leaders corresponding to August Boto had been dismissive about sexual abuse considerations, calling them “a satanic scheme to fully distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 e-mail, the convention’s legal professional despatched Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database could be carried out according to SBC polity, saying “it will match our polity and present ministries to help churches in this area of child abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he recommended “rapid action to sign the Convention’s want that the [executive committee] and the entities begin a extra aggressive effort on this area.” That very same 12 months, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a movement for a database, Boto rejected the thought.

For a denomination designed to offer 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 few key leaders, together with Boto and the conference’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to control the nationwide institutional response to intercourse abuse for many years. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, mentioned he had not read the report but. Makes an attempt to reach Boto on Sunday had been unsuccessful.

“The report goes to validate so much about how they really blindly chose 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 along. Now Southern Baptists have to carry the load.”

During Executive Committee meetings in 2021, some members argued against waiving attorney-client privilege, which would give investigators entry to data of conversations on legal issues among the many committee’s members and staffers. They stated doing so went in opposition to the advice of conference lawyers and will bankrupt the SBC by exposing it to lawsuits.

The talk over waiving privilege upset a large swath of Southern Baptists, inflicting 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 Executive Committee’s head, Ronnie Floyd, who additionally once served as SBC president and was on President Donald Trump’s evangelical advisory council. The choice over attorney-client privilege also led to the resignation of the conference’s attorneys, who are named throughout the report.

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Based on the report, Floyd informed SBC leaders in a 2019 e mail 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 can't be the most recent cultural disaster.” Floyd didn't instantly return a request for comment.

Christa Brown, who instructed 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 Govt Committee “turned his back to her during her speech and one other chortled.”

“The Executive Committee betrayed not solely survivors who worked laborious to try to make one thing occur, however betrayed the whole Southern Baptist Convention,” said Brown, who is a retired appellate legal professional in Colorado. “They’ve made their own faith into a complicit companion for their own determination to choose institutional safety over the protection of kids and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists during its final annual assembly, comes simply weeks earlier than its next gathering in Anaheim, Calif., the place members are anticipated focus on subsequent steps. Recommendations by Guidepost embrace providing dedicated survivor advocacy assist and a survivor compensation fund.

“We must be ready to take meaningful steps to vary our culture because it pertains to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the current SBC president, mentioned in a statement.

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 published lists of monks they say have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to forestall the switch of abusers to different church buildings. Not like 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 disaster, wrote to the SBC and Government Committee presidents, according to the report. He expressed his issues that SBC leaders could be falling into a number of 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 youngsters safer.

The report states that Frank Web page, who was main the Government Committee at the time, responded to Doyle in a brief letter that “Southern Baptist leaders really have no authority over native church buildings” however that they'd attempt to make use of their “affect” to offer protections. In an article, Web page accused a survivor group of having 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.” Web page did not 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 job drive on the problem and said that the report reveals a necessity for establishments like the SBC to hunt exterior experience on intercourse abuse.

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

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 & Spiritual Liberty Fee. Moore stated he expects Southern Baptists to receive Sunday’s report in an analogous approach 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, 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 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 previous two decades fighting for reform.