Southern Baptist leaders coated up intercourse abuse, explosive report says

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

The findings of almost 300 pages embrace surprising new details about particular abuse circumstances and shine a light-weight on how denominational leaders for many years actively resisted calls for abuse prevention and reform. Proof in the report suggests leaders additionally lied to Southern Baptists over whether they may keep a database of offenders to stop more abuse when prime leaders have been secretly conserving a non-public listing for years.

The report — the primary investigation of its variety in a large Protestant denomination like the SBC — is expected to ship shock waves throughout a conservative Christian neighborhood that has had intense inner battles over how one can deal with intercourse abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, along with different non secular institutions in the USA, has struggled with declining membership for the previous 15 years. Its leaders have lengthy resisted comparisons between its sexual abuse crisis and that of the Catholic Church, saying the entire variety of abuse circumstances amongst Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for almost twenty years, survivors of abuse and different concerned Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Conference’s administrative arm to report alleged little one molesters and different accused abusers who had been within the pulpit or employed as church workers members. Many of the cases referred to within the report have been thought-about outside 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 company referred to as Guidepost Options at 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 have been concerned extra with defending the establishment from legal responsibility than from protecting Southern Baptists from additional abuse.

“While stories of abuse had been minimized, and survivors have been ignored and even vilified, revelations came to gentle lately 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 came forward, it also 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 vice president on the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a girl during a Panama Metropolis Seashore, Fla., vacation in 2010.

The report states that Hunt, in an interview with investigators, denied any bodily contact with the girl however acknowledged that he had interactions with her. After the report was launched, 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 have never abused anybody.”

Hunt resigned on Might 13 from the North American Mission Board, based on an announcement by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell said that before Might 13, he was not aware of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Typically, he referred to as the small print of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

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

Sex abuse survivors, many of whom have been sharing their stories for years, anticipated Sunday’s launch would affirm the facts around most of the stories they've already shared, but many were nonetheless stunned to see the sample of coverups by the best levels of leadership.

“I knew it was rotten, nevertheless it’s astonishing and infuriating,” mentioned Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was as soon as the highest-paid female govt 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 means of and thru about energy. It's misappropriated power. It does not in any method mirror 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, including three previous 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 targeted on actions by the SBC’s Govt Committee, which handles financial and administrative duties. Though Southern Baptist church buildings function independently from each other, the Nashville-based Govt Committee distributes greater than $190 million cooperative program in its annual funds that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For decades, the findings present, Southern Baptists have been informed the denomination couldn't put collectively a registry of intercourse offenders as a result of it could go in opposition to the denomination’s polity — or the way it capabilities. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained an inventory of offenders while protecting it a secret to avoid the potential of getting sued. The report also consists of private emails showing how longtime leaders resembling August Boto were dismissive about sexual abuse considerations, calling them “a satanic scheme to utterly distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 e-mail, the convention’s legal professional despatched Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database may very well be applied in line with SBC polity, saying “it would fit our polity and present ministries to help church buildings on this area of kid abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he recommended “speedy action to sign the Convention’s desire that the [executive committee] and the entities begin a extra aggressive effort on this area.” That very same 12 months, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a movement for a database, Boto rejected the concept.

For a denomination designed to offer extra democratic power to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to fee the third-party investigation, the report shows how lay Southern Baptists allowed a few key leaders, together with Boto and the conference’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to regulate the nationwide institutional response to intercourse abuse for many years. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, mentioned he had not learn the report but. Attempts to achieve Boto on Sunday have been unsuccessful.

“The report is going to validate a lot about how they really blindly chose 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 Executive Committee meetings in 2021, some members argued towards waiving attorney-client privilege, which would give investigators access to information of conversations on legal issues among the many committee’s members and staffers. They mentioned doing so went in opposition to the recommendation of convention legal professionals and could bankrupt the SBC by exposing it to lawsuits.

The talk over waiving privilege upset a large swath of Southern Baptists, inflicting some to believe 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 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.

Newly leaked letter particulars allegations that Southern Baptist leaders mishandled sex abuse claims

In line with the report, Floyd instructed SBC leaders in a 2019 email that he had acquired “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “rising concern about all of the emphasis on the sexual abuse disaster.” He then acknowledged: “Our precedence can't be the newest cultural crisis.” 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 church buildings in a number of 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 Government Committee “turned his back to her during her speech and one other chortled.”

“The Executive Committee betrayed not only survivors who worked onerous to attempt to make something occur, however betrayed the whole Southern Baptist Convention,” stated Brown, who's a retired appellate lawyer in Colorado. “They’ve made their own faith into a complicit associate for their very own determination to choose institutional safety over the protection of children and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists throughout its final annual meeting, comes simply weeks earlier than its next gathering in Anaheim, Calif., the place members are anticipated focus on subsequent steps. Recommendations by Guidepost include offering dedicated survivor advocacy support and a survivor compensation fund.

“We must be able to take significant steps to vary our culture because it pertains to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the current SBC president, said in a statement.

Since decades of sex abuse and coverups within the Catholic Church have been reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have printed lists of priests they are saying have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to stop the switch of abusers to different churches. Unlike 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 Govt Committee presidents, in response to the report. He expressed his considerations that SBC leaders may very well be falling into some of the identical patterns as Catholic leaders in not coping with clergy intercourse abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists should study from Catholic mistakes and take action early on to implement structural reforms so as to make kids safer.

The report states that Frank Page, who was main the Government Committee on the time, responded to Doyle in a short letter that “Southern Baptist leaders really don't have any authority over native churches” but that they would attempt to use their “affect” to offer protections. In an article, Web page accused a survivor group of getting a hidden agenda of setting up the nation’s largest Protestant body for lawsuits. Page later resigned from his place in 2018 over having a “morally inappropriate relationship.” Page didn't immediately 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 job force on the difficulty and mentioned that the report reveals a need for institutions just like the SBC to seek outside expertise on sex abuse.

“It shows a level of coverup and harassment and resistance to reforms on an institutional degree that has led to many years of survivors being victimized and hurt,” Denhollander said. “The question Southern Baptists must ask is, ‘How might this happen?’”

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 & Religious Liberty Commission. Moore mentioned he expects Southern Baptists to receive Sunday’s report in an analogous approach 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 said. “People will say, ‘This is not all Southern Baptists, have a look at all the great we do.’ The report demonstrates a pattern of stonewalling, coverup, intimidation and retaliation.”

Moore stated he hopes the SBC will think about 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 fighting for reform.