Southern Baptist leaders coated up intercourse abuse, explosive report says

Leaders within the Southern Baptist Convention on Sunday released a serious third-party investigation that discovered that sex abuse survivors have been typically ignored, minimized and “even vilified” by high clergy within the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

The findings of almost 300 pages embody surprising new details about particular abuse circumstances and shine a light-weight on how denominational leaders for many years actively resisted calls for abuse prevention and reform. Proof within the report suggests leaders additionally lied to Southern Baptists over whether they may keep a database of offenders to prevent extra abuse when prime leaders have been secretly protecting a personal checklist for years.

The report — the primary investigation of its sort in a massive Protestant denomination like the SBC — is anticipated to ship shock waves all through a conservative Christian community that has had intense inner battles over how one can deal with sex abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, together with other non secular institutions in the USA, 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 total number of abuse instances amongst Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for almost twenty years, survivors of abuse and different involved Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Convention’s administrative arm to report alleged little one molesters and different accused abusers who had been in the pulpit or employed as church employees members. Many of the instances referred to in 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 company called 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 liability than from defending Southern Baptists from additional abuse.

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

Whereas the report focuses primarily on how leaders dealt with abuse issues when survivors came ahead, it additionally states that a major Southern Baptist chief was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a lady just one month after he completed 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 vice president at the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a woman during a Panama Metropolis Seashore, 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 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 within the Guidepost report. I have never abused anybody.”

Hunt resigned on Could 13 from the North American Mission Board, in response to an announcement by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell said that before Could 13, he was not aware of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Usually, he known as 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.

Sex abuse survivors, lots of whom have been sharing their stories for years, anticipated Sunday’s release would confirm the facts round lots of the stories they've already shared, but many had been nonetheless stunned to see the sample of coverups by the highest ranges of management.

“I knew it was rotten, nevertheless it’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. “It is a denomination that's through and through about energy. It's misappropriated power. It does not in any way reflect the Jesus I see in the scriptures. I am so gutted.”

The report also names several senior SBC leaders who protected and even supported alleged abusers, including 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 focused on actions by the SBC’s Govt Committee, which handles financial and administrative duties. Although Southern Baptist church buildings operate independently from each other, the Nashville-based Govt Committee distributes greater than $190 million cooperative program in its annual budget that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For decades, the findings show, Southern Baptists were told the denomination couldn't put together a registry of intercourse offenders as a result of it could go against the denomination’s polity — or how it functions. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained a listing of offenders while holding it a secret to keep away from 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 fully distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 e mail, the conference’s legal professional despatched Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database could be applied per SBC polity, saying “it would fit our polity and current ministries to assist church buildings on this space of child abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he really helpful “instant motion to signal the Convention’s want that the [executive committee] and the entities start a extra aggressive effort on this area.” That same 12 months, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a motion 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 fee the third-party investigation, the report reveals how lay Southern Baptists allowed just a few key leaders, together with Boto and the convention’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to manage the nationwide institutional response to sex abuse for many years. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, said he had not read the report yet. Makes an attempt to reach Boto on Sunday were unsuccessful.

“The report is going to validate a lot about how they actually blindly chose to remain on the identical path all these years,” mentioned 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 along. Now Southern Baptists have to carry the load.”

Throughout Govt Committee conferences in 2021, some members argued towards waiving attorney-client privilege, which might give investigators access to records of conversations on legal matters among the committee’s members and staffers. They said doing so went towards the advice of convention legal professionals and will bankrupt the SBC by exposing it to lawsuits.

The debate over waiving privilege upset a large swath of Southern Baptists, inflicting some to consider 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 additionally led to the resignation of the Govt Committee’s head, Ronnie Floyd, who also once 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 conference’s attorneys, who're named all through the report.

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According to the report, Floyd informed SBC leaders in a 2019 electronic mail that he had received “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “growing concern about all the emphasis on the sexual abuse crisis.” He then said: “Our priority cannot be the latest cultural disaster.” Floyd didn't instantly return a request for comment.

Christa Brown, who told 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 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 Government Committee “turned his back to her during her speech and another chortled.”

“The Executive Committee betrayed not only survivors who labored laborious to attempt to make one thing happen, however betrayed the entire Southern Baptist Conference,” said Brown, who is a retired appellate legal professional in Colorado. “They’ve made their very own religion into a complicit partner for their own choice to decide on institutional protection over the protection of children and congregants.”

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

“We must be ready to take significant steps to alter our culture as it pertains to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the present SBC president, said in an announcement.

Since decades of intercourse abuse and coverups in the Catholic Church had been reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have revealed lists of clergymen they say have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to forestall the switch of abusers to other 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 intercourse abuse disaster, wrote to the SBC and Government Committee presidents, in response to the report. He expressed his issues that SBC leaders could be falling into a few of the similar patterns as Catholic leaders in not dealing with clergy sex abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists ought to study from Catholic errors and take action early on to implement structural reforms so as to make youngsters safer.

The report states that Frank Web page, who was main the Executive Committee on the time, responded to Doyle in a brief letter that “Southern Baptist leaders actually have no authority over native church buildings” but that they might attempt to use their “affect” to provide protections. In an article, Page accused a survivor group of getting a hidden agenda of establishing the nation’s largest Protestant physique for lawsuits. Page later resigned from his position in 2018 over having a “morally inappropriate relationship.” Web page did not instantly 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 process force on the difficulty and said that the report reveals a need for institutions like the SBC to hunt outside experience on sex abuse.

“It exhibits a degree of coverup and harassment and resistance to reforms on an institutional degree that has led to a long time of survivors being victimized and hurt,” Denhollander stated. “The question Southern Baptists need to ask is, ‘How may this happen?’”

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 coverage arm, the Ethics & Non secular Liberty Commission. Moore mentioned he expects Southern Baptists to obtain Sunday’s report in an identical technique 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 stated. “Folks will say, ‘This is not all Southern Baptists, have a 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 think about changing a statue of evangelist Billy Graham, which was moved from Nashville to Graham’s home state in 2016, with a statue of Christa Brown, the abuse survivor who spent the previous 20 years preventing for reform.