Southern Baptist leaders covered up sex abuse, explosive report says

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

The findings of practically 300 pages embody surprising new details about particular abuse circumstances and shine a light on how denominational leaders for decades actively resisted calls for abuse prevention and reform. Proof within the report suggests leaders additionally lied to Southern Baptists over whether they may maintain a database of offenders to prevent extra abuse when prime leaders have been secretly conserving a personal record for years.

The report — the first investigation of its kind in an enormous Protestant denomination just like the SBC — is predicted to send shock waves all through a conservative Christian group that has had intense internal battles over learn how to deal with sex abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, along with different spiritual establishments in the United States, 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 entire variety of abuse cases amongst Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for almost two decades, survivors of abuse and other concerned Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Conference’s administrative arm to report alleged child molesters and other accused abusers who have been within the pulpit or employed as church staff members. Many of the instances referred to within the report have been thought-about 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 an organization known as Guidepost Solutions at the request of Southern Baptists, states that abuse survivors’ calls and emails have been “only to be met, time and time again, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who have been involved more with protecting the establishment from liability than from defending Southern Baptists from additional abuse.

“While stories of abuse had been minimized, and survivors had been ignored or even vilified, revelations came to gentle 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 dealt with abuse points when survivors got here ahead, it additionally states that a main Southern Baptist leader was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a woman just one month after he accomplished 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 vp on the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a lady throughout a Panama City Beach, 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 along 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 never abused anybody.”

Hunt resigned on May 13 from the North American Mission Board, in keeping with an announcement by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell mentioned that before May 13, he was not conscious of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Usually, he called the main points of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

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Sex abuse survivors, lots of whom have been sharing their tales for years, anticipated Sunday’s release would confirm the details around most of the tales they have already shared, however many had been still surprised to see the sample of coverups by the highest ranges of leadership.

“I knew it was rotten, however it’s astonishing and infuriating,” said Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was once the highest-paid feminine executive at the SBC and whose story of sexual abuse at a Southern Baptist seminary is detailed in the report. “It is a denomination that's by and thru about power. It is misappropriated energy. It does not in any approach replicate the Jesus I see within the scriptures. I'm so gutted.”

The report also names a number of senior SBC leaders who protected and even supported alleged abusers, together with three past 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 Govt Committee, which handles monetary and administrative duties. Though Southern Baptist churches function independently from each other, the Nashville-based Govt Committee distributes greater than $190 million cooperative program in its annual budget that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For many years, the findings show, Southern Baptists had been instructed the denomination could not put together a registry of intercourse offenders as a result of it could go in opposition to the denomination’s polity — or how it capabilities. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained an inventory of offenders while protecting it a secret to keep away from the possibility of getting sued. The report additionally consists of personal emails displaying how longtime leaders such as August Boto were dismissive about sexual abuse concerns, calling them “a satanic scheme to fully distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 e-mail, the convention’s legal professional despatched Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database could be carried out in step with SBC polity, saying “it could match our polity and current ministries to help church buildings on this area of kid abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he beneficial “instant action to sign the Convention’s need that the [executive committee] and the entities begin a more aggressive effort in this space.” That same yr, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a movement for a database, Boto rejected the idea.

For a denomination designed to provide more 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, mentioned he had not read the report yet. Makes an attempt to achieve Boto on Sunday had been unsuccessful.

“The report goes 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 in the report. “It buoys what we’ve been saying all alongside. Now Southern Baptists have to hold the load.”

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

The talk over waiving privilege upset a large swath of Southern Baptists, causing 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 Govt Committee’s head, Ronnie Floyd, who also as soon as 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're named all through the report.

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In accordance with the report, Floyd instructed SBC leaders in a 2019 email that he had acquired “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “growing concern about all of the emphasis on the sexual abuse disaster.” He then stated: “Our priority can't be the newest cultural disaster.” Floyd did not instantly 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 other Southern Baptist churches 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 one other chortled.”

“The Executive Committee betrayed not only survivors who labored exhausting to attempt to make something occur, but betrayed the entire Southern Baptist Convention,” stated Brown, who is a retired appellate legal professional in Colorado. “They’ve made their very own religion right into a complicit accomplice for their very own choice to choose institutional safety over the safety of children and congregants.”

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

“We have to be ready to take significant steps to vary our tradition because it pertains to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the current SBC president, said in a press release.

Since decades of intercourse abuse and coverups in the Catholic Church have been reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have published lists of priests they say have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to stop 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 disaster, wrote to the SBC and Govt Committee presidents, in accordance with the report. He expressed his considerations that SBC leaders may very well be falling into a number of the same patterns as Catholic leaders in not dealing with clergy sex abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists should study from Catholic errors and take motion early on to implement structural reforms so as to make children safer.

The report states that Frank Web page, who was main the Govt Committee at the time, responded to Doyle in a short letter that “Southern Baptist leaders actually have no authority over local church buildings” however that they'd attempt to use their “affect” to provide protections. In an article, Web page accused a survivor group of getting a hidden agenda of establishing the nation’s largest Protestant physique for lawsuits. Page later resigned from his place in 2018 over having a “morally inappropriate relationship.” Web page did not 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 task pressure on the difficulty and said that the report reveals a need for establishments just like the SBC to hunt outdoors expertise on sex abuse.

“It reveals 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 difficulty of sex abuse was a outstanding 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 Fee. Moore mentioned he expects Southern Baptists to receive Sunday’s report in a similar method 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 on this report are breathtaking,” Moore mentioned. “Individuals will say, ‘This is not all Southern Baptists, take a look at all the good we do.’ The report demonstrates a pattern of stonewalling, coverup, intimidation and retaliation.”

Moore mentioned he hopes the SBC will contemplate changing 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 two decades preventing for reform.