Southern Baptist leaders coated up sex abuse, explosive report says

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

The findings of almost 300 pages include stunning new particulars about particular abuse cases and shine a light-weight on how denominational leaders for decades actively resisted requires abuse prevention and reform. Proof within the report suggests leaders additionally lied to Southern Baptists over whether or not they might maintain a database of offenders to stop extra abuse when prime leaders had been secretly keeping a non-public listing for years.

The report — the first investigation of its variety in a large Protestant denomination like the SBC — is predicted to send shock waves throughout a conservative Christian neighborhood that has had intense inside battles over the best way to deal with sex abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, along with different spiritual institutions in the USA, has struggled with declining membership for the past 15 years. Its leaders have lengthy resisted comparisons between its sexual abuse disaster and that of the Catholic Church, saying the full number of abuse cases amongst Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for nearly twenty years, survivors of abuse and other involved Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Conference’s administrative arm to report alleged child molesters and other accused abusers who were in the pulpit or employed as church workers members. Most of the instances referred to within the report have been thought of outside the statute of limitations, the time survivors can report intercourse abuse, so it’s unclear how many abusers were criminally charged.

The report, compiled by a corporation referred to as Guidepost Solutions on the request of Southern Baptists, states that abuse survivors’ calls and emails had been “only to be met, time and time once more, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who were concerned extra with protecting the establishment from liability than from defending Southern Baptists from additional abuse.

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

While the report focuses totally on how leaders dealt with abuse points when survivors got here forward, it additionally states that a major Southern Baptist chief was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a woman only 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 chairman 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 lady however acknowledged that he had interactions 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 by no means abused anybody.”

Hunt resigned on May 13 from the North American Mission Board, in line with a statement by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell said that earlier than Could 13, he was not aware of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Typically, 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 information round many of the tales they have already shared, however many had been nonetheless stunned to see the sample of coverups by the very best ranges of management.

“I knew it was rotten, nevertheless it’s astonishing and infuriating,” said Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was as soon as the highest-paid feminine executive on the SBC and whose story of sexual abuse at a Southern Baptist seminary is detailed in the report. “It is a denomination that's through and thru about power. It's misappropriated energy. It doesn't in any way replicate the Jesus I see within the scriptures. I am so gutted.”

The report additionally names several senior SBC leaders who protected and even supported alleged abusers, together with 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 Government Committee, which handles financial and administrative duties. Although Southern Baptist church buildings function independently from each other, the Nashville-based Govt Committee distributes greater than $190 million cooperative program in its annual finances that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For many years, the findings present, Southern Baptists have been advised the denomination could not put collectively a registry of intercourse offenders as a result of it would go in opposition to the denomination’s polity — or how it functions. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained a listing of offenders while maintaining it a secret to keep away from the potential for getting sued. The report additionally includes personal emails displaying how longtime leaders comparable to August Boto have been dismissive about sexual abuse considerations, calling them “a satanic scheme to completely distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 email, the convention’s attorney sent Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database might be carried out in step with SBC polity, saying “it could fit our polity and current ministries to assist church buildings on this space of kid abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he really useful “quick action to signal the Conference’s desire that the [executive committee] and the entities start a extra aggressive effort on this space.” That very same yr, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a movement for a database, Boto rejected the concept.

For a denomination designed to offer more democratic power to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to fee the third-party investigation, the report shows how lay Southern Baptists allowed just a few key leaders, together with Boto and the conference’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to manage the nationwide institutional response to intercourse abuse for decades. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, said he had not learn the report yet. Makes an attempt to succeed in Boto on Sunday have been unsuccessful.

“The report is going to validate a lot about how they actually blindly chose to remain 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 against waiving attorney-client privilege, which would give investigators entry to data of conversations on authorized issues among the many committee’s members and staffers. They mentioned doing so went against the recommendation of conference legal professionals and could bankrupt the SBC by exposing it to lawsuits.

The debate over waiving privilege upset a large swath of Southern Baptists, causing some to believe 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 additionally once served as SBC president and was on President Donald Trump’s evangelical advisory council. The choice over attorney-client privilege also led to the resignation of the conference’s attorneys, who are named all through the report.

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In keeping with the report, Floyd advised SBC leaders in a 2019 email that he had received “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “rising concern about all of the emphasis on the sexual abuse disaster.” He then stated: “Our precedence cannot be the latest cultural disaster.” Floyd didn't immediately return a request for remark.

Christa Brown, who informed SBC leaders that she was abused by a youth pastor who went on to serve in other Southern Baptist churches 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 throughout her speech and another chortled.”

“The Govt Committee betrayed not only survivors who labored laborious to attempt to make something occur, however betrayed the whole Southern Baptist Conference,” said Brown, who is a retired appellate attorney in Colorado. “They’ve made their own religion into a complicit accomplice for their own determination to decide on institutional protection over the safety of kids 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., the place members are expected discuss subsequent steps. Suggestions by Guidepost embrace offering devoted survivor advocacy assist and a survivor compensation fund.

“We have to be ready to take meaningful steps to vary our culture as it relates to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the current SBC president, stated in a statement.

Since a long time of sex abuse and coverups in the Catholic Church were 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 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 intercourse abuse crisis, wrote to the SBC and Executive Committee presidents, according to the report. He expressed his issues that SBC leaders might be falling into a few of the same patterns as Catholic leaders in not dealing with clergy intercourse abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists should be taught from Catholic errors and take motion early on to implement structural reforms so as to make youngsters safer.

The report states that Frank Page, who was leading the Govt Committee on the time, responded to Doyle in a short letter that “Southern Baptist leaders really haven't any authority over native churches” however that they might attempt to make use of their “influence” to provide protections. In an article, Web page accused a survivor group of having a hidden agenda of organising the nation’s largest Protestant body for lawsuits. Page later resigned from his place in 2018 over having a “morally inappropriate relationship.” Web 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 job drive on the problem and stated that the report exhibits a need for establishments just like the SBC to hunt outside expertise on intercourse abuse.

“It shows a level of coverup and harassment and resistance to reforms on an institutional stage that has led to a long time of survivors being victimized and hurt,” Denhollander said. “The query Southern Baptists need to ask is, ‘How may this occur?’”

The issue of sex abuse was a prominent theme in leaked non-public letters written by Russell Moore, who left his position in 2021 as head of the SBC’s policy arm, the Ethics & Non secular Liberty Commission. Moore mentioned he expects Southern Baptists to obtain Sunday’s report in an identical 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 said. “Folks will say, ‘This isn't all Southern Baptists, look at all the great we do.’ The report demonstrates a pattern of stonewalling, coverup, intimidation and retaliation.”

Moore mentioned he hopes the SBC will think about 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 previous 20 years combating for reform.