Southern Baptist leaders coated up intercourse abuse, explosive report says

Leaders within the Southern Baptist Convention on Sunday launched a serious third-party investigation that found that intercourse abuse survivors had been often ignored, minimized and “even vilified” by high clergy within the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

The findings of practically 300 pages embrace surprising new particulars about particular abuse circumstances and shine a lightweight on how denominational leaders for decades actively resisted calls for abuse prevention and reform. Proof in the report suggests leaders additionally lied to Southern Baptists over whether they may maintain a database of offenders to stop extra abuse when prime leaders were secretly maintaining a personal list for years.

The report — the first investigation of its sort in a large Protestant denomination just like the SBC — is predicted to send shock waves all through a conservative Christian group that has had intense inside battles over tips on how to handle intercourse abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, along with different religious establishments in the US, has struggled with declining membership for the previous 15 years. Its leaders have lengthy resisted comparisons between its sexual abuse crisis and that of the Catholic Church, saying the overall variety of abuse cases among Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for almost 20 years, survivors of abuse and different concerned Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Conference’s administrative arm to report alleged baby molesters and other accused abusers who have been within the pulpit or employed as church staff members. Most of the circumstances referred to in the report had been considered outside 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 an organization called Guidepost Options 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 involved more with defending the establishment from legal responsibility than from defending Southern Baptists from additional abuse.

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

Whereas the report focuses primarily on how leaders handled abuse issues when survivors came forward, it additionally states that a major Southern Baptist chief 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 vp on the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a lady during a Panama City Seaside, Fla., vacation 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 together with her. After the report was released, 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 never abused anybody.”

Hunt resigned on Could 13 from the North American Mission Board, in response to a statement by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell stated that earlier than May 13, he was not conscious of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Usually, he known as the small print of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

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

Intercourse abuse survivors, a lot of whom have been sharing their tales for years, anticipated Sunday’s release would affirm the information around many of the tales they've already shared, but many have been nonetheless stunned to see the pattern of coverups by the highest ranges of management.

“I knew it was rotten, but it surely’s astonishing and infuriating,” stated Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was once the highest-paid feminine 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's by means of and thru about power. It is misappropriated power. It doesn't in any manner replicate the Jesus I see within the scriptures. I'm so gutted.”

The report additionally names a number of senior SBC leaders who protected and even supported alleged abusers, together with three previous presidents of the convention, a former vp 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 financial and administrative duties. Although Southern Baptist churches function 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 show, Southern Baptists had been told the denomination could not put together a registry of sex offenders because it will go in opposition to the denomination’s polity — or how it features. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained a listing of offenders whereas protecting it a secret to keep away from the opportunity of getting sued. The report also contains personal emails showing how longtime leaders akin to August Boto have 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 lawyer sent Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database may very well be implemented per SBC polity, saying “it will fit our polity and current ministries to help church buildings on this space of child abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he advisable “quick motion to signal the Convention’s need that the [executive committee] and the entities start a extra aggressive effort on this space.” That same year, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a motion for a database, Boto rejected the concept.

For a denomination designed to provide more democratic power to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to commission the third-party investigation, the report shows how lay Southern Baptists allowed a number of key leaders, together with Boto and the convention’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to regulate the nationwide institutional response to intercourse abuse for decades. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, stated he had not read the report but. Makes an attempt to reach Boto on Sunday were unsuccessful.

“The report goes to validate a lot about how they actually blindly selected to remain on the same 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 Govt Committee meetings in 2021, some members argued against waiving attorney-client privilege, which would give investigators entry to records of conversations on authorized matters among the committee’s members and staffers. They mentioned doing so went in opposition to the advice of conference lawyers and will bankrupt the SBC by exposing it to lawsuits.

The debate over waiving privilege upset a large swath of Southern Baptists, causing 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 Government 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 also led to the resignation of the convention’s attorneys, who're named throughout the report.

Newly leaked letter particulars allegations that Southern Baptist leaders mishandled sex abuse claims

Based on the report, Floyd instructed SBC leaders in a 2019 e-mail 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 said: “Our precedence cannot be the newest cultural crisis.” Floyd did not instantly return a request for remark.

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 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 Executive Committee “turned his again to her during her speech and another chortled.”

“The Govt Committee betrayed not solely survivors who labored onerous to attempt to make one thing occur, but betrayed the whole Southern Baptist Conference,” mentioned Brown, who's a retired appellate lawyer in Colorado. “They’ve made their own religion right into a complicit accomplice for their own determination to choose institutional safety over the protection of children and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists throughout its final annual meeting, comes simply weeks before its next gathering in Anaheim, Calif., the place members are anticipated discuss subsequent steps. Suggestions by Guidepost embrace providing devoted survivor advocacy assist and a survivor compensation fund.

“We should be able to take meaningful steps to alter our tradition as it relates to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the current SBC president, said in an announcement.

Since decades of sex abuse and coverups in the Catholic Church were reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have revealed lists of priests they are saying have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to stop the switch of abusers to different churches. 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 sex abuse crisis, wrote to the SBC and Govt Committee presidents, according to the report. He expressed his issues that SBC leaders could possibly be falling into a few of the identical patterns as Catholic leaders in not dealing with clergy sex abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists ought to learn from Catholic mistakes and take motion early on to implement structural reforms so as to make kids safer.

The report states that Frank Web page, who was leading the Executive Committee at the time, responded to Doyle in a short letter that “Southern Baptist leaders truly haven't any authority over native churches” but that they might attempt to make use of their “influence” to provide protections. In an article, Page accused a survivor group of having a hidden agenda of setting up the nation’s largest Protestant body for lawsuits. Page later resigned from his place in 2018 over having a “morally inappropriate relationship.” Web 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 job force on the issue and stated that the report shows a necessity for establishments just like the SBC to hunt outdoors expertise on intercourse abuse.

“It shows a degree of coverup and harassment and resistance to reforms on an institutional stage 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 occur?’”

The problem of intercourse abuse was a prominent theme in leaked non-public letters written by Russell Moore, who left his place in 2021 as head of the SBC’s coverage arm, the Ethics & Non secular Liberty Fee. Moore mentioned he expects Southern Baptists to obtain Sunday’s report in a similar way 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 said. “People will say, ‘This is not all Southern Baptists, look at all the nice we do.’ The report demonstrates a pattern of stonewalling, coverup, intimidation and retaliation.”

Moore mentioned he hopes the SBC will take into account replacing 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 two decades preventing for reform.