Southern Baptist leaders covered up sex abuse, explosive report says

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

The findings of almost 300 pages include shocking new details about specific abuse instances and shine a lightweight on how denominational leaders for decades actively resisted requires abuse prevention and reform. Proof within the report suggests leaders also lied to Southern Baptists over whether they could preserve a database of offenders to stop extra abuse when top leaders have been secretly maintaining a non-public listing for years.

The report — the primary investigation of its variety in a massive Protestant denomination just like the SBC — is anticipated to ship shock waves all through a conservative Christian community that has had intense internal battles over easy methods to handle intercourse abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, together with different religious establishments in the USA, has struggled with declining membership for the past 15 years. Its leaders have lengthy resisted comparisons between its sexual abuse crisis and that of the Catholic Church, saying the overall number of abuse instances amongst Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for nearly twenty years, survivors of abuse and different concerned Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Convention’s administrative arm to report alleged baby molesters and different accused abusers who have been within the pulpit or employed as church workers members. Many of the instances referred to in the report were thought of outdoors the statute of limitations, the time survivors can report sex abuse, so it’s unclear what number of abusers were criminally charged.

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

“While tales of abuse were minimized, and survivors have been ignored and even vilified, revelations got here to light in recent times that some senior SBC leaders had protected and even supported alleged abusers, the report states.

Whereas the report focuses totally on how leaders handled abuse issues when survivors came forward, it also states that a major Southern Baptist chief was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a woman 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 vp at the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a woman during a Panama City Seashore, Fla., vacation in 2010.

The report states that Hunt, in an interview with investigators, denied any bodily 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 a statement on Twitter, saying, “I vigorously deny the circumstances and characterizations set forth within the Guidepost report. I have by no means abused anyone.”

Hunt resigned on Could 13 from the North American Mission Board, according to a press release by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell stated that earlier than May 13, he was not aware of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Typically, he known as the main points 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 verify the information around lots of the tales they have already shared, but many were nonetheless stunned to see the pattern of coverups by the very best ranges of management.

“I knew it was rotten, but it’s astonishing and infuriating,” mentioned Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was once the highest-paid feminine govt at the SBC and whose story of sexual abuse at a Southern Baptist seminary is detailed in the report. “This is a denomination that's by and through about energy. It's misappropriated energy. It doesn't in any approach replicate 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 past 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 Executive Committee, which handles financial and administrative duties. Although Southern Baptist church buildings operate independently from one another, the Nashville-based Government 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 had been instructed the denomination could not put collectively a registry of sex offenders as a result of it will 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 whereas holding it a secret to avoid the possibility of getting sued. The report also consists of private emails exhibiting how longtime leaders such as August Boto had been dismissive about sexual abuse issues, 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 might be carried out consistent with SBC polity, saying “it will fit our polity and present ministries to assist churches in this area of kid abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he really helpful “immediate action to sign the Convention’s want that the [executive committee] and the entities begin a extra aggressive effort in this space.” That same yr, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a motion for a database, Boto rejected the thought.

For a denomination designed to give more democratic power to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to commission the third-party investigation, the report reveals how lay Southern Baptists allowed just a few key leaders, including Boto and the convention’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. Makes an attempt to succeed in Boto on Sunday have been unsuccessful.

“The report is going to validate so much about how they actually 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 within the report. “It buoys what we’ve been saying all along. Now Southern Baptists have to carry the load.”

Throughout Government Committee conferences in 2021, some members argued in opposition to waiving attorney-client privilege, which might give investigators entry to data of conversations on legal issues among the many committee’s members and staffers. They mentioned doing so went in opposition to the advice of conference attorneys and will bankrupt the SBC by exposing it to lawsuits.

The talk over waiving privilege upset a large swath of Southern Baptists, inflicting some to consider 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 also led to the resignation of the Executive Committee’s head, Ronnie Floyd, who additionally 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 convention’s attorneys, who are named all through the report.

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In response to the report, Floyd informed 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 crisis.” He then said: “Our priority cannot be the latest cultural crisis.” Floyd didn't instantly return a request for remark.

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 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 Executive Committee “turned his again to her throughout her speech and one other chortled.”

“The Govt Committee betrayed not only survivors who worked arduous to attempt to make something occur, but betrayed the whole Southern Baptist Conference,” stated Brown, who's a retired appellate lawyer in Colorado. “They’ve made their own faith right into a complicit partner for their own choice to decide on institutional safety 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 expected focus on subsequent steps. Recommendations by Guidepost include offering devoted survivor advocacy support and a survivor compensation fund.

“We must be ready to take meaningful steps to alter our culture because it pertains to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the current SBC president, stated in a statement.

Since many years of sex abuse and coverups in the Catholic Church have been reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have revealed lists of priests they say have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to stop the transfer of abusers to different 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 Government Committee presidents, according to the report. He expressed his issues that SBC leaders might be falling into some of the identical patterns as Catholic leaders in not coping with clergy intercourse abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists ought to learn from Catholic mistakes and take motion early on to implement structural reforms in order to make kids safer.

The report states that Frank Page, who was leading the Govt Committee at the time, responded to Doyle in a short letter that “Southern Baptist leaders really haven't any authority over local churches” but that they'd try to use their “influence” to provide protections. In an article, Web page accused a survivor group of getting a hidden agenda of organising the nation’s largest Protestant physique for lawsuits. Web page later resigned from his place 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 activity pressure on the difficulty and stated that the report shows a necessity for institutions just like the SBC to hunt outdoors experience on sex abuse.

“It exhibits a stage of coverup and harassment and resistance to reforms on an institutional stage that has led to decades of survivors being victimized and damage,” Denhollander stated. “The question Southern Baptists need to ask is, ‘How could this occur?’”

The problem of sex abuse was a distinguished theme in leaked non-public 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 stated he expects Southern Baptists to obtain Sunday’s report in an analogous 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 stated. “Individuals will say, ‘This is not all Southern Baptists, have a look at all the nice we do.’ The report demonstrates a sample 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 twenty years combating for reform.