Southern Baptist leaders coated up sex abuse, explosive report says

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

The findings of practically 300 pages include surprising new particulars about particular abuse circumstances and shine a lightweight on how denominational leaders for many years actively resisted requires abuse prevention and reform. Evidence within the report suggests leaders additionally lied to Southern Baptists over whether they could maintain a database of offenders to stop more abuse when high leaders have been secretly preserving a private list for years.

The report — the primary investigation of its form in a massive Protestant denomination like the SBC — is predicted to send shock waves all through a conservative Christian community that has had intense inside battles over easy methods to deal with sex abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, along with other spiritual establishments in america, 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 total number of abuse circumstances amongst Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for almost two decades, survivors of abuse and other involved Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Convention’s administrative arm to report alleged child molesters and other accused abusers who were within the pulpit or employed as church staff members. Lots 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 what number of abusers have been criminally charged.

The report, compiled by a company referred to 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 had been concerned extra with defending the establishment from legal responsibility than from protecting Southern Baptists from additional abuse.

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

While the report focuses totally on how leaders handled abuse issues when survivors got here ahead, it additionally states that a main Southern Baptist chief was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a lady just 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 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 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 a press release on Twitter, saying, “I vigorously deny the circumstances and characterizations set forth in the Guidepost report. I've never abused anybody.”

Hunt resigned on May 13 from the North American Mission Board, in line with a press release by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell mentioned that earlier than May 13, he was not aware of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Generally, he referred to as the details of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

Southern Baptists have been immersed in their own intercourse abuse scandals. Now, they’re debating their response.

Sex abuse survivors, lots of whom have been sharing their stories for years, anticipated Sunday’s release would affirm the details around most of the tales they have already shared, but many were still stunned to see the pattern of coverups by the best levels of leadership.

“I knew it was rotten, but it surely’s astonishing and infuriating,” mentioned Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was once the highest-paid female government at the SBC and whose story of sexual abuse at a Southern Baptist seminary is detailed within the report. “This is a denomination that's by way of and through about power. It's misappropriated power. It does not in any means reflect the Jesus I see in the scriptures. I'm so gutted.”

The report additionally names a number of senior SBC leaders who protected and even supported alleged abusers, including three past presidents of the convention, a former vp 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 Executive Committee, which handles monetary and administrative duties. Though Southern Baptist churches operate independently from one another, the Nashville-based Government Committee distributes more than $190 million cooperative program in its annual budget that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For decades, the findings present, Southern Baptists had been instructed the denomination could not put collectively a registry of sex offenders because it might go against the denomination’s polity — or the way it functions. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained a list of offenders while conserving it a secret to keep away from the possibility of getting sued. The report additionally includes non-public emails exhibiting how longtime leaders reminiscent of August Boto have been dismissive about sexual abuse concerns, calling them “a satanic scheme to fully distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 electronic mail, the conference’s lawyer sent Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database could be implemented according to SBC polity, saying “it might match our polity and present ministries to assist church buildings on this space of kid abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he recommended “quick action to sign the Conference’s desire that the [executive committee] and the entities begin a more aggressive effort on this space.” That same yr, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a movement for a database, Boto rejected the thought.

For a denomination designed to give extra democratic power to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to commission the third-party investigation, the report shows how lay Southern Baptists allowed a number of key leaders, together with Boto and the conference’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to regulate the nationwide institutional response to sex abuse for many years. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, stated he had not read the report but. Makes an attempt to succeed in Boto on Sunday were unsuccessful.

“The report goes to validate so much about how they really blindly selected to remain on the identical 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 alongside. Now Southern Baptists have to carry the weight.”

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

The debate over waiving privilege upset a big swath of Southern Baptists, inflicting some to consider 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 also led to the resignation of the Executive Committee’s head, Ronnie Floyd, who additionally as soon as served as SBC president and was on President Donald Trump’s evangelical advisory council. The decision over attorney-client privilege also led to the resignation of the conference’s attorneys, who're named all through the report.

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In line with the report, Floyd advised SBC leaders in a 2019 electronic mail that he had acquired “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “growing concern about all of the emphasis on the sexual abuse crisis.” He then acknowledged: “Our priority cannot be the latest cultural crisis.” Floyd did not 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 other Southern Baptist church buildings 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 Govt Committee “turned his back to her throughout her speech and one other chortled.”

“The Government Committee betrayed not only survivors who worked exhausting to attempt to make something occur, but betrayed the entire Southern Baptist Conference,” stated Brown, who's a retired appellate lawyer in Colorado. “They’ve made their very own religion into a complicit partner for their very own resolution to decide on institutional protection over the protection of kids and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists during its last annual assembly, comes simply weeks before its next gathering in Anaheim, Calif., where members are anticipated focus on subsequent steps. Suggestions by Guidepost include providing dedicated survivor advocacy support and a survivor compensation fund.

“We have to be able to take meaningful steps to vary our culture as it pertains to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the present SBC president, said in a press release.

Since a long time of sex abuse and coverups in the Catholic Church had been reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have revealed lists of monks they are saying have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to prevent the switch of abusers to different churches. 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 intercourse abuse crisis, wrote to the SBC and Executive Committee presidents, according to the report. He expressed his concerns that SBC leaders may very well be falling into a number 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 action early on to implement structural reforms so as to make youngsters safer.

The report states that Frank Page, who was leading the Executive Committee on the time, responded to Doyle in a short letter that “Southern Baptist leaders really don't have any authority over local church buildings” but that they might try to make use of their “influence” to offer protections. In an article, 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 position in 2018 over having a “morally inappropriate relationship.” 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 activity drive on the difficulty and stated that the report shows a need for establishments like the SBC to hunt outdoors expertise on sex abuse.

“It reveals a degree of coverup and harassment and resistance to reforms on an institutional degree that has led to decades of survivors being victimized and harm,” Denhollander said. “The query Southern Baptists need to ask is, ‘How might this occur?’”

The difficulty of intercourse abuse was a distinguished theme in leaked personal letters written by Russell Moore, who left his place in 2021 as head of the SBC’s coverage arm, the Ethics & Spiritual Liberty Commission. Moore said he expects Southern Baptists to receive Sunday’s report in the same technique 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 nice we do.’ The report demonstrates a sample 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 dwelling state in 2016, with a statue of Christa Brown, the abuse survivor who spent the past twenty years preventing for reform.