Southern Baptist leaders coated up intercourse abuse, explosive report says

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

The findings of nearly 300 pages embrace shocking new particulars about specific abuse instances 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 also lied to Southern Baptists over whether or not they may keep a database of offenders to prevent more abuse when prime leaders were secretly protecting a non-public list for years.

The report — the first investigation of its type in a massive Protestant denomination like the SBC — is expected to send shock waves all through a conservative Christian neighborhood that has had intense inside battles over find out how to deal with sex abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, together with different non secular institutions 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 entire variety of abuse circumstances among Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for almost twenty years, survivors of abuse and other involved Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Conference’s administrative arm to report alleged little one molesters and different accused abusers who were in the pulpit or employed as church workers members. Many of the circumstances referred to in the report have been thought-about outside the statute of limitations, the time survivors can report intercourse abuse, so it’s unclear how many 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 were “solely to be met, time and time once more, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who have been concerned more with defending the institution from liability than from protecting Southern Baptists from additional abuse.

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

Whereas the report focuses primarily on how leaders handled abuse points when survivors came ahead, it also states that a major Southern Baptist leader was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a lady only 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 vice president on the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a girl during a Panama City Beach, Fla., trip in 2010.

The report states that Hunt, in an interview with investigators, denied any physical contact with the girl however acknowledged that he had interactions along with her. After the report was released, 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 May 13 from the North American Mission Board, in keeping with an announcement by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell said that before May 13, he was not aware of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Generally, he known as the small print of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

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

“I knew it was rotten, however it’s astonishing and infuriating,” mentioned Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was as soon as the highest-paid female executive 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 is through and thru about energy. It's misappropriated power. It does not in any way mirror the Jesus I see in the scriptures. I am 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 chairman 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 Government Committee, which handles monetary and administrative duties. Though Southern Baptist churches function independently from one another, the Nashville-based Executive Committee distributes greater than $190 million cooperative program in its annual budget that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For decades, the findings present, Southern Baptists were advised the denomination couldn't put together a registry of sex offenders as a result of it would go towards the denomination’s polity — or how it capabilities. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained a list of offenders whereas preserving it a secret to keep away from the potential of getting sued. The report additionally includes 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 email, the convention’s attorney sent Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database may very well be implemented in step with SBC polity, saying “it will fit our polity and current ministries to help church buildings in this space of kid abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he beneficial “rapid action to sign the Conference’s need 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 movement for a database, Boto rejected the idea.

For a denomination designed to give more democratic energy to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to fee the third-party investigation, the report exhibits how lay Southern Baptists allowed a few key leaders, including Boto and the convention’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to manage the nationwide institutional response to intercourse abuse for decades. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, mentioned he had not read the report yet. Attempts to succeed in Boto on Sunday were unsuccessful.

“The report is going to validate so much 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 within the report. “It buoys what we’ve been saying all alongside. Now Southern Baptists have to hold the load.”

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

The debate over waiving privilege upset a big swath of Southern Baptists, inflicting some to believe the Executive 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 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 additionally led to the resignation of the conference’s attorneys, who're named all through the report.

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Based on the report, Floyd advised SBC leaders in a 2019 e-mail that he had received “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “growing concern about all of the emphasis on the sexual abuse crisis.” He then said: “Our priority can't be the newest cultural crisis.” Floyd didn't immediately return a request for remark.

Christa Brown, who told SBC leaders that she was abused by a youth pastor who went on to serve in different Southern Baptist church buildings 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 Executive Committee “turned his back to her during her speech and another chortled.”

“The Government Committee betrayed not only survivors who labored arduous to attempt to make one thing happen, however betrayed the whole Southern Baptist Convention,” mentioned Brown, who's a retired appellate attorney in Colorado. “They’ve made their own religion right into a complicit associate for their own decision to decide on institutional safety over the protection of children 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 expected discuss subsequent steps. Suggestions by Guidepost include providing devoted survivor advocacy help and a survivor compensation fund.

“We have to be able to take significant steps to vary our culture because it relates to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the present SBC president, stated in an announcement.

Since a long time of intercourse abuse and coverups within the Catholic Church had 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 prevent the switch of abusers to other church buildings. Not like the Catholic Church, the SBC has a non-hierarchical construction.

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 keeping with the report. He expressed his concerns 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 should learn 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 Govt Committee at the time, responded to Doyle in a brief letter that “Southern Baptist leaders truly have no authority over native churches” however that they might try to use their “affect” to offer protections. In an article, Page accused a survivor group of getting a hidden agenda of establishing the nation’s largest Protestant body for lawsuits. Web page later resigned from his place in 2018 over having a “morally inappropriate relationship.” Web page didn't 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 process force on the problem and mentioned that the report shows a necessity for establishments like the SBC to seek outside expertise on sex abuse.

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

The issue of sex abuse was a prominent theme in leaked private letters written by Russell Moore, who left his position in 2021 as head of the SBC’s policy arm, the Ethics & Spiritual Liberty Commission. Moore mentioned he expects Southern Baptists to receive 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 mentioned. “Individuals will say, ‘This is not all Southern Baptists, have 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 contemplate replacing 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 past 20 years combating for reform.