Southern Baptist leaders covered up intercourse abuse, explosive report says

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

The findings of nearly 300 pages embrace surprising new details about specific abuse cases and shine a light-weight on how denominational leaders for many years actively resisted requires abuse prevention and reform. Evidence in the report suggests leaders additionally lied to Southern Baptists over whether or not they could maintain a database of offenders to forestall extra abuse when high leaders have been secretly maintaining a non-public checklist for years.

The report — the first investigation of its kind in an enormous Protestant denomination just like the SBC — is expected to ship shock waves throughout a conservative Christian group that has had intense inside battles over methods to deal with sex abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, along with different spiritual institutions in america, 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 whole number of abuse circumstances among 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 Conference’s administrative arm to report alleged child molesters and other accused abusers who were within the pulpit or employed as church workers members. Lots of the circumstances referred to in the report have been considered exterior the statute of limitations, the time survivors can report sex abuse, so it’s unclear what number of abusers had been criminally charged.

The report, compiled by a company known as Guidepost Options at 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 institution from liability than from protecting Southern Baptists from further abuse.

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

While the report focuses primarily on how leaders handled abuse issues when survivors came ahead, it also states that a main Southern Baptist chief was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a woman 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 chairman at the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a woman throughout a Panama City Seashore, Fla., trip in 2010.

The report states that Hunt, in an interview with investigators, denied any bodily contact with the lady but acknowledged that he had interactions together 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 within the Guidepost report. I have never abused anybody.”

Hunt resigned on May 13 from the North American Mission Board, based on an announcement by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell stated that before May 13, he was not conscious of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Generally, he referred to as the small print of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

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Intercourse abuse survivors, lots of whom have been sharing their stories for years, anticipated Sunday’s release would verify the facts around most of the tales they've already shared, but many had been still shocked to see the pattern of coverups by the very best levels of leadership.

“I knew it was rotten, nevertheless it’s astonishing and infuriating,” stated 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 thru about power. It is misappropriated energy. It doesn't in any way mirror 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 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 Govt Committee, which handles monetary and administrative duties. Though Southern Baptist church buildings operate independently from each other, the Nashville-based Executive Committee distributes more than $190 million cooperative program in its annual funds that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For decades, the findings present, Southern Baptists had been instructed the denomination could not put together a registry of sex offenders as a result of it might go towards the denomination’s polity — or the way it capabilities. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained a list of offenders whereas preserving it a secret to avoid the possibility of getting sued. The report additionally contains personal emails exhibiting how longtime leaders akin to August Boto have been dismissive about sexual abuse concerns, calling them “a satanic scheme to fully distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 email, the convention’s lawyer sent Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database may very well be implemented in line with SBC polity, saying “it could match our polity and present ministries to assist church buildings on this area of child abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he advisable “instant motion to sign the Convention’s need that the [executive committee] and the entities start a more aggressive effort on this area.” That same yr, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a motion for a database, Boto rejected the idea.

For a denomination designed to provide more democratic energy to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to fee the third-party investigation, the report reveals how lay Southern Baptists allowed a couple of key leaders, together with Boto and the conference’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to regulate 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 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 in the report. “It buoys what we’ve been saying all along. Now Southern Baptists have to carry the weight.”

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

The controversy over waiving privilege upset a large swath of Southern Baptists, inflicting some to imagine 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 also led to the resignation of the conference’s attorneys, who are named throughout the report.

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Based on the report, Floyd told SBC leaders in a 2019 e-mail that he had obtained “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “rising concern about all the emphasis on the sexual abuse disaster.” He then said: “Our priority can't be the newest cultural disaster.” Floyd didn't immediately 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 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 Govt Committee “turned his back to her during her speech and one other chortled.”

“The Govt Committee betrayed not only survivors who worked onerous to try to make something happen, however betrayed the entire Southern Baptist Conference,” mentioned Brown, who's a retired appellate legal professional in Colorado. “They’ve made their own religion right into a complicit accomplice for their very own choice to decide on institutional protection over the safety of youngsters and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists throughout its last annual assembly, comes simply weeks before its subsequent gathering in Anaheim, Calif., where members are anticipated discuss subsequent steps. Recommendations by Guidepost embody providing devoted survivor advocacy assist and a survivor compensation fund.

“We have to be ready to take meaningful steps to vary our culture because it pertains to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the current SBC president, said in an announcement.

Since many years of intercourse abuse and coverups in the Catholic Church have been reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have printed lists of priests they say have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to forestall the transfer 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 crisis, wrote to the SBC and Govt Committee presidents, in keeping with the report. He expressed his concerns that SBC leaders could be falling into a few of the identical patterns as Catholic leaders in not dealing with clergy intercourse abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists ought to be taught from Catholic errors and take motion early on to implement structural reforms in order to make children safer.

The report states that Frank Web page, who was main the Executive Committee at the time, responded to Doyle in a brief letter that “Southern Baptist leaders truly haven't any authority over native churches” but that they would try to make use of their “affect” to provide protections. In an article, Web page accused a survivor group of getting 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.” Page didn't immediately 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 task force on the difficulty and said that the report shows a necessity for institutions just like the SBC to seek outside expertise on intercourse abuse.

“It shows a stage of coverup and harassment and resistance to reforms on an institutional level that has led to a long time of survivors being victimized and hurt,” Denhollander said. “The query Southern Baptists should ask is, ‘How could this happen?’”

The difficulty of intercourse abuse was a distinguished theme in leaked non-public letters written by Russell Moore, who left his place in 2021 as head of the SBC’s policy arm, the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. Moore said he expects Southern Baptists to obtain Sunday’s report in an analogous solution 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 isn't all Southern Baptists, look at all the nice we do.’ The report demonstrates a pattern of stonewalling, coverup, intimidation and retaliation.”

Moore stated he hopes the SBC will consider 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 previous two decades preventing for reform.