Southern Baptist leaders coated up sex abuse, explosive report says

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

The findings of practically 300 pages embody surprising new details about particular abuse cases and shine a light on how denominational leaders for many years actively resisted requires abuse prevention and reform. Evidence in the report suggests leaders also lied to Southern Baptists over whether or not they could maintain a database of offenders to forestall extra abuse when prime leaders have been secretly protecting a personal list for years.

The report — the first investigation of its kind in an enormous Protestant denomination just like the SBC — is predicted to send shock waves throughout a conservative Christian community that has had intense internal battles over how one can handle intercourse abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, together with other religious institutions in the US, 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 full variety of abuse cases amongst Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for nearly twenty years, survivors of abuse and other involved Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Convention’s administrative arm to report alleged child molesters and other accused abusers who have been in the pulpit or employed as church staff members. Most of the circumstances referred to in the report had been considered 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 an organization called Guidepost Options on the request of Southern Baptists, states that abuse survivors’ calls and emails have been “solely to be met, time and time again, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who have been involved more with protecting the establishment from liability than from defending Southern Baptists from further abuse.

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

While the report focuses totally on how leaders dealt with abuse points when survivors came ahead, it additionally 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 on the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a woman during a Panama City Seaside, Fla., trip in 2010.

The report states that Hunt, in an interview with investigators, denied any physical contact with the lady but acknowledged that he had interactions 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 by no means abused anyone.”

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

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

Intercourse abuse survivors, many of whom have been sharing their tales for years, anticipated Sunday’s release would affirm the details round many of the tales they've already shared, however many had been nonetheless surprised to see the sample of coverups by the best levels of management.

“I knew it was rotten, nevertheless it’s astonishing and infuriating,” mentioned Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was once the highest-paid female government 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 via and through about energy. It's misappropriated energy. It does not in any means reflect 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, including three previous presidents of the convention, a former vice president and the previous head of the SBC’s administrative arm.

The third-party investigation into actions between 2000 and 2021 focused on actions by the SBC’s Govt Committee, which handles financial and administrative duties. Though Southern Baptist churches operate independently from one another, the Nashville-based Govt Committee distributes more than $190 million cooperative program in its annual price range that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For decades, the findings show, Southern Baptists had been told the denomination could not put together a registry of sex offenders as a result of it would go towards the denomination’s polity — or how it features. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained a listing of offenders whereas holding it a secret to avoid the opportunity of getting sued. The report also consists of personal emails exhibiting how longtime leaders reminiscent of August Boto were dismissive about sexual abuse considerations, calling them “a satanic scheme to utterly distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 e mail, the convention’s lawyer despatched Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database may very well be implemented in line with SBC polity, saying “it will match our polity and current ministries to assist church buildings on this area of child abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he recommended “fast action to sign the Conference’s want 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 thought.

For a denomination designed to present more democratic energy to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to commission the third-party investigation, the report reveals how lay Southern Baptists allowed a few key leaders, together with Boto and the convention’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to manage the national institutional response to intercourse abuse for many years. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, mentioned he had not learn the report yet. Attempts to achieve Boto on Sunday had been unsuccessful.

“The report is going to validate so much about how they really 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 carry the burden.”

During Government Committee meetings in 2021, some members argued in opposition to waiving attorney-client privilege, which might give investigators access to records of conversations on legal issues among the many committee’s members and staffers. They said doing so went towards the advice of convention lawyers and will bankrupt the SBC by exposing it to lawsuits.

The controversy over waiving privilege upset a big swath of Southern Baptists, causing some to consider 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 additionally 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 conference’s attorneys, who are named throughout the report.

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In accordance with the report, Floyd advised SBC leaders in a 2019 email that he had received “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “rising concern about all the emphasis on the sexual abuse disaster.” He then said: “Our precedence can't be the most recent cultural crisis.” Floyd did not immediately return a request for remark.

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

“The Executive Committee betrayed not solely survivors who labored onerous to try to make one thing happen, but betrayed the whole Southern Baptist Conference,” said Brown, who is a retired appellate attorney in Colorado. “They’ve made their very own faith into a complicit companion for their own resolution to decide on institutional safety over the protection of youngsters 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 anticipated talk about subsequent steps. Suggestions by Guidepost include offering devoted survivor advocacy assist and a survivor compensation fund.

“We have to be ready to take significant steps to change our tradition because it relates to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the current SBC president, mentioned in an announcement.

Since decades of sex abuse and coverups within the Catholic Church have been reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have printed lists of monks they are saying have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to forestall the switch of abusers to different church buildings. In contrast to 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 disaster, wrote to the SBC and Executive Committee presidents, in line with the report. He expressed his concerns that SBC leaders might be falling into among the same patterns as Catholic leaders in not dealing with clergy sex abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists should be taught from Catholic errors and take motion early on to implement structural reforms so as to make kids safer.

The report states that Frank Web page, who was main the Govt Committee at the time, responded to Doyle in a short letter that “Southern Baptist leaders actually have no authority over local church buildings” however that they'd attempt to make use of their “affect” 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 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 activity power on the problem and stated that the report shows a necessity for institutions just like the SBC to hunt outside expertise on sex abuse.

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

The problem of sex abuse was a prominent theme in leaked private 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 stated he expects Southern Baptists to obtain Sunday’s report in a similar option 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. “Folks will say, ‘This is not all Southern Baptists, take 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 changing a statue of evangelist Billy Graham, which was moved from Nashville to Graham’s dwelling state in 2016, with a statue of Christa Brown, the abuse survivor who spent the past twenty years fighting for reform.