Southern Baptist leaders coated up intercourse abuse, explosive report says

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

The findings of nearly 300 pages include stunning new details about specific abuse instances and shine a light-weight on how denominational leaders for decades actively resisted requires abuse prevention and reform. Evidence in the report suggests leaders also lied to Southern Baptists over whether or not they may preserve a database of offenders to stop extra abuse when top leaders had been secretly protecting a private checklist for years.

The report — the first investigation of its kind in a massive Protestant denomination just like the SBC — is expected to send shock waves throughout a conservative Christian group that has had intense inner battles over the right way to deal with sex abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, along with different non secular institutions in america, has struggled with declining membership for the previous 15 years. Its leaders have lengthy resisted comparisons between its sexual abuse disaster and that of the Catholic Church, saying the entire variety of abuse instances among Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for nearly two decades, survivors of abuse and other concerned Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Conference’s administrative arm to report alleged baby molesters and other accused abusers who have been within the pulpit or employed as church employees members. Most of the circumstances referred to in the report have been considered outdoors the statute of limitations, the time survivors can report intercourse abuse, so it’s unclear how many abusers have been criminally charged.

The report, compiled by a corporation referred to as Guidepost Options on the request of Southern Baptists, states that abuse survivors’ calls and emails were “solely to be met, time and time again, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who have been involved more with defending the institution from legal responsibility than from protecting Southern Baptists from additional abuse.

“Whereas stories of abuse have been minimized, and survivors have been ignored or even vilified, revelations got here to light in recent years 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 points when survivors got here ahead, it also states that a major Southern Baptist leader was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a woman 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 City Seashore, Fla., vacation in 2010.

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

Hunt resigned on Might 13 from the North American Mission Board, in keeping with a press release by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell stated that earlier than Could 13, he was not aware of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Usually, he referred to as the small print of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

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Intercourse abuse survivors, many of whom have been sharing their tales for years, anticipated Sunday’s release would confirm the facts round many of the tales they have already shared, however many were nonetheless stunned to see the sample of coverups by the highest levels of management.

“I knew it was rotten, but 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 within the report. “This can be a denomination that's by way of and thru about energy. It is misappropriated power. It doesn't in any way reflect the Jesus I see in 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 focused on actions by the SBC’s Executive Committee, which handles monetary and administrative duties. Although Southern Baptist church buildings operate independently from one another, the Nashville-based Executive Committee distributes more than $190 million cooperative program in its annual funds that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For many years, the findings show, Southern Baptists have been informed the denomination could not put together a registry of sex offenders because it might go in opposition to the denomination’s polity — or the way it features. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained a listing of offenders while preserving it a secret to avoid the possibility of getting sued. The report also consists of private emails exhibiting how longtime leaders resembling August Boto had been dismissive about sexual abuse concerns, calling them “a satanic scheme to utterly distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 e-mail, the conference’s lawyer despatched Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database may very well be implemented consistent with SBC polity, saying “it could match our polity and current ministries to assist church buildings in this space of child abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he really useful “fast motion to sign the Conference’s want that the [executive committee] and the entities start a extra 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 provide more democratic energy to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to commission the third-party investigation, the report exhibits how lay Southern Baptists allowed a couple of key leaders, including Boto and the conference’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to manage the national institutional response to sex abuse for decades. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, said he had not read the report but. Makes an attempt to achieve Boto on Sunday had been unsuccessful.

“The report goes to validate so much about how they really blindly selected to stay 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 burden.”

During Govt Committee conferences in 2021, some members argued in opposition to waiving attorney-client privilege, which would give investigators entry to records of conversations on authorized matters among the many committee’s members and staffers. They stated doing so went in opposition to the recommendation of convention lawyers and will bankrupt the SBC by exposing it to lawsuits.

The talk over waiving privilege upset a big swath of Southern Baptists, inflicting some to believe 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 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 are named all through the report.

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In accordance with the report, Floyd told SBC leaders in a 2019 electronic 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 stated: “Our priority can't be the most recent cultural disaster.” Floyd did not immediately return a request for comment.

Christa Brown, who instructed SBC leaders that she was abused by a youth pastor who went on to serve in different Southern Baptist churches in multiple 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 Govt Committee “turned his again to her during her speech and one other chortled.”

“The Govt Committee betrayed not only survivors who worked hard to attempt to make one thing happen, however betrayed the whole Southern Baptist Conference,” stated Brown, who is a retired appellate lawyer in Colorado. “They’ve made their own religion right into a complicit associate for their very own determination to choose institutional protection over the protection of youngsters and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists during its final annual meeting, comes just weeks earlier than its subsequent gathering in Anaheim, Calif., the place members are anticipated focus on subsequent steps. Suggestions by Guidepost embrace providing dedicated survivor advocacy assist and a survivor compensation fund.

“We have to be ready to take significant steps to alter our tradition as it pertains to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the present SBC president, said in a statement.

Since a long time of sex abuse and coverups in the Catholic Church have been reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have published lists of clergymen they are saying have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to prevent the transfer 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 intercourse abuse crisis, wrote to the SBC and Executive Committee presidents, in line with the report. He expressed his issues that SBC leaders might be falling into a number of the similar patterns as Catholic leaders in not dealing with clergy sex abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists should be taught from Catholic mistakes and take motion early on to implement structural reforms in order to make children safer.

The report states that Frank Web page, who was leading the Government Committee at the time, responded to Doyle in a short letter that “Southern Baptist leaders actually haven't any authority over native church buildings” however that they'd try to make use of their “influence” to provide protections. In an article, Page accused a survivor group of getting a hidden agenda of organising the nation’s largest Protestant body for lawsuits. Web page later resigned from his position in 2018 over having a “morally inappropriate relationship.” Web 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 job drive on the difficulty and mentioned that the report reveals a need for establishments like the SBC to seek exterior expertise on sex abuse.

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

The problem of sex abuse was a prominent theme in leaked personal 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 said he expects Southern Baptists to obtain Sunday’s report in an identical strategy 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. “Folks will say, ‘This isn't all Southern Baptists, take a look at all the great we do.’ The report demonstrates a pattern of stonewalling, coverup, intimidation and retaliation.”

Moore mentioned he hopes the SBC will take into account changing a statue of evangelist Billy Graham, which was moved from Nashville to Graham’s residence state in 2016, with a statue of Christa Brown, the abuse survivor who spent the past 20 years combating for reform.