Southern Baptist leaders lined up sex abuse, explosive report says

Leaders in the Southern Baptist Convention on Sunday released a significant third-party investigation that found that sex abuse survivors have been often ignored, minimized and “even vilified” by prime clergy in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

The findings of almost 300 pages include shocking new details about particular abuse cases and shine a light 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 or not they might keep a database of offenders to prevent more abuse when high leaders have been secretly holding a private list for years.

The report — the primary investigation of its kind in an enormous Protestant denomination like the SBC — is expected to ship shock waves throughout a conservative Christian group that has had intense internal battles over tips on how to handle sex abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, together with different religious establishments in the United States, has struggled with declining membership for the previous 15 years. Its leaders have long resisted comparisons between its sexual abuse disaster and that of the Catholic Church, saying the entire number of abuse instances amongst Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for nearly two decades, 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 had been in the pulpit or employed as church staff members. Most of the circumstances referred to in the report had been considered exterior the statute of limitations, the time survivors can report intercourse abuse, so it’s unclear how many abusers had been criminally charged.

The report, compiled by a corporation called Guidepost Solutions at the request of Southern Baptists, states that abuse survivors’ calls and emails had been “only to be met, time and time once more, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who were concerned extra with defending the establishment from liability than from protecting Southern Baptists from further abuse.

“Whereas stories of abuse were minimized, and survivors have been ignored or 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 totally on how leaders handled abuse issues when survivors got here forward, it additionally states that a major Southern Baptist leader was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a girl only one month after he accomplished 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 chairman on the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a lady throughout 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 but acknowledged that he had interactions with her. After the report was launched, Hunt, who has not been charged over the alleged incident, posted an announcement on Twitter, saying, “I vigorously deny the circumstances and characterizations set forth in the Guidepost report. I've never abused anyone.”

Hunt resigned on Could 13 from the North American Mission Board, in accordance with an announcement by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell stated that before May 13, he was not conscious of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Typically, he known as the main points of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

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Sex abuse survivors, lots of whom have been sharing their tales for years, anticipated Sunday’s launch would affirm the information round lots of the tales they've already shared, however many have been still stunned to see the pattern of coverups by the highest ranges of management.

“I knew it was rotten, nevertheless it’s astonishing and infuriating,” said 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 is a denomination that's via and through about energy. It is misappropriated power. It does not in any approach reflect the Jesus I see within the scriptures. I'm so gutted.”

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

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

For decades, the findings show, Southern Baptists have been told the denomination could not put together a registry of intercourse offenders as a result of it might go towards the denomination’s polity — or the way it functions. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained an inventory of offenders while conserving it a secret to keep away from the possibility of getting sued. The report additionally consists of non-public emails showing how longtime leaders resembling August Boto were dismissive about sexual abuse concerns, calling them “a satanic scheme to fully distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 electronic mail, the convention’s legal professional sent Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database could be carried out in step with SBC polity, saying “it could fit our polity and current ministries to help churches on this area of child abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he advisable “immediate action to signal the Conference’s need that the [executive committee] and the entities start a more aggressive effort in this area.” That same 12 months, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a motion for a database, Boto rejected the concept.

For a denomination designed to offer extra democratic energy to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to fee the third-party investigation, the report shows how lay Southern Baptists allowed just a few key leaders, together with Boto and the conference’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to control the nationwide institutional response to sex abuse for many years. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, mentioned he had not learn the report but. Attempts 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 in the report. “It buoys what we’ve been saying all alongside. Now Southern Baptists have to carry the weight.”

Throughout Govt Committee meetings in 2021, some members argued against waiving attorney-client privilege, which would give investigators access to information of conversations on legal matters among the committee’s members and staffers. They mentioned doing so went in opposition to the recommendation of convention legal professionals and will bankrupt the SBC by exposing it to lawsuits.

The controversy over waiving privilege upset a large swath of Southern Baptists, causing some to imagine 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 choice over attorney-client privilege additionally led to the resignation of the conference’s attorneys, who are named throughout the report.

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According to the report, Floyd told SBC leaders in a 2019 e-mail that he had received “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “rising concern about all the emphasis on the sexual abuse crisis.” He then stated: “Our priority can't be the latest cultural crisis.” Floyd did not immediately return a request for comment.

Christa Brown, who informed SBC leaders that she was abused by a youth pastor who went on to serve in other Southern Baptist churches in multiple 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 Govt Committee betrayed not solely survivors who worked onerous to try to make one thing happen, however betrayed the whole Southern Baptist Convention,” said Brown, who is a retired appellate lawyer in Colorado. “They’ve made their very own religion right into a complicit companion for their own resolution to decide on institutional safety over the protection of children and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists throughout its last annual assembly, comes simply weeks earlier than its next gathering in Anaheim, Calif., the place members are anticipated discuss subsequent steps. Suggestions by Guidepost include offering dedicated survivor advocacy support and a survivor compensation fund.

“We should be able to take significant steps to alter our tradition as it pertains to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the present SBC president, mentioned in a press release.

Since decades of sex abuse and coverups within the Catholic Church were 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 transfer 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 sex abuse disaster, wrote to the SBC and Government Committee presidents, in line with the report. He expressed his concerns that SBC leaders could possibly be falling into some of the identical 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 action early on to implement structural reforms so as to make youngsters safer.

The report states that Frank Page, who was main the Govt Committee on the time, responded to Doyle in a short letter that “Southern Baptist leaders truly don't have any authority over native church buildings” however that they'd attempt to use their “influence” to offer 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 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 process power on the problem and said that the report shows a need for establishments like the SBC to hunt exterior expertise on sex abuse.

“It exhibits 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 question Southern Baptists need to ask is, ‘How could this occur?’”

The difficulty of intercourse abuse was a distinguished theme in leaked private letters written by Russell Moore, who left his position in 2021 as head of the SBC’s coverage arm, the Ethics & Non secular Liberty Fee. Moore said he expects Southern Baptists to receive Sunday’s report in the same 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 on this report are breathtaking,” Moore said. “Individuals will say, ‘This isn't all Southern Baptists, have a look at all the good we do.’ The report demonstrates a pattern of stonewalling, coverup, intimidation and retaliation.”

Moore stated he hopes the SBC will consider changing 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 past two decades fighting for reform.