Southern Baptist leaders lined up intercourse abuse, explosive report says

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

The findings of practically 300 pages embrace stunning new particulars about specific abuse circumstances and shine a light on how denominational leaders for decades actively resisted calls for abuse prevention and reform. Evidence in the report suggests leaders also lied to Southern Baptists over whether or not they may maintain a database of offenders to stop more abuse when top leaders were secretly protecting a personal checklist for years.

The report — the primary investigation of its kind in a large Protestant denomination just like the SBC — is expected to ship shock waves throughout a conservative Christian community that has had intense inner battles over methods to deal with sex abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, along with different spiritual institutions in the US, 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 number of abuse cases amongst Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for nearly twenty years, survivors of abuse and other concerned Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Convention’s administrative arm to report alleged little one molesters and other accused abusers who were within the pulpit or employed as church staff members. Lots of the instances referred to within 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 were criminally charged.

The report, compiled by a corporation called Guidepost Options on the request of Southern Baptists, states that abuse survivors’ calls and emails had been “only to be met, time and time again, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who had been involved extra with defending the establishment from liability than from defending Southern Baptists from further abuse.

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

While the report focuses primarily on how leaders handled abuse issues when survivors got here forward, it additionally 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 vice president at the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a lady during a Panama City Beach, Fla., vacation in 2010.

The report states that Hunt, in an interview with investigators, denied any bodily contact with the woman but acknowledged that he had interactions along 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 have never abused anyone.”

Hunt resigned on Might 13 from the North American Mission Board, in keeping with an announcement by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell said that earlier than Could 13, he was not aware of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Generally, he called the small print of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

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

“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 in the report. “This is a denomination that is by and through about power. It's misappropriated energy. It doesn't in any approach mirror the Jesus I see within the scriptures. I am so gutted.”

The report additionally names a number of senior SBC leaders who protected and even supported alleged abusers, together with three previous 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 centered on actions by the SBC’s Govt Committee, which handles financial and administrative duties. Though Southern Baptist church buildings function independently from one another, the Nashville-based Govt Committee distributes greater than $190 million cooperative program in its annual finances that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For decades, the findings show, Southern Baptists had been instructed the denomination couldn't put together a registry of sex offenders as a result of it might go towards the denomination’s polity — or how it capabilities. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained an inventory of offenders whereas keeping it a secret to keep away from the possibility of getting sued. The report also includes private emails showing how longtime leaders such as August Boto were dismissive about sexual abuse issues, calling them “a satanic scheme to utterly distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 electronic mail, the conference’s legal professional despatched Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database could possibly be implemented consistent with SBC polity, saying “it would fit our polity and present ministries to help church buildings in this area of kid abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he really helpful “fast action to sign the Conference’s need that the [executive committee] and the entities begin a extra aggressive effort in 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 present extra democratic energy to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to commission the third-party investigation, the report shows how lay Southern Baptists allowed just a few key leaders, including Boto and the conference’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to control the national institutional response to sex abuse for decades. 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 is going to validate so much about how they actually blindly selected to stay 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 meetings in 2021, some members argued in opposition to waiving attorney-client privilege, which might give investigators access to data of conversations on authorized matters among the committee’s members and staffers. They mentioned doing so went against the recommendation of convention legal professionals and could bankrupt the SBC by exposing it to lawsuits.

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

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According to the report, Floyd informed SBC leaders in a 2019 electronic mail that he had acquired “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “growing 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 comment.

Christa Brown, who told SBC leaders that she was abused by a youth pastor who went on to serve in different 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 Government Committee “turned his again to her throughout her speech and one other chortled.”

“The Govt Committee betrayed not only survivors who labored laborious to attempt to make something occur, however 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 associate for their own choice to decide on institutional protection over the protection of children and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists throughout its final annual assembly, comes just weeks before its next gathering in Anaheim, Calif., where members are expected discuss subsequent steps. Recommendations by Guidepost embrace offering devoted survivor advocacy support and a survivor compensation fund.

“We must be ready to take meaningful steps to change our tradition because it pertains to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the current SBC president, stated in a press release.

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 printed lists of monks they say have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to forestall the transfer of abusers to different churches. In contrast to 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 line with the report. He expressed his issues that SBC leaders might be falling into some of the same patterns as Catholic leaders in not dealing with clergy sex abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists ought to be taught from Catholic errors and take action early on to implement structural reforms in order to make youngsters safer.

The report states that Frank 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 local churches” however that they'd try to use their “affect” to supply protections. In an article, Web page accused a survivor group of having a hidden agenda of setting up the nation’s largest Protestant physique for lawsuits. Web page later resigned from his position in 2018 over having a “morally inappropriate relationship.” 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 drive on the difficulty and stated that the report exhibits a need for institutions like the SBC to seek outdoors experience on sex abuse.

“It exhibits 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 stated. “The question Southern Baptists should ask is, ‘How might this occur?’”

The issue of sex abuse was a outstanding theme in leaked personal letters written by Russell Moore, who left his place in 2021 as head of the SBC’s policy arm, the Ethics & Religious Liberty Fee. Moore stated he expects Southern Baptists to obtain Sunday’s report in an analogous option 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. “People will say, ‘This is not all Southern Baptists, look at all the good 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 home state in 2016, with a statue of Christa Brown, the abuse survivor who spent the past twenty years fighting for reform.