Southern Baptist leaders lined up intercourse abuse, explosive report says

Leaders within the Southern Baptist Convention on Sunday launched a serious third-party investigation that found that intercourse abuse survivors had been usually ignored, minimized and “even vilified” by top clergy within the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

The findings of nearly 300 pages embody shocking new details about specific abuse circumstances and shine a lightweight on how denominational leaders for decades actively resisted requires abuse prevention and reform. Proof in the report suggests leaders also lied to Southern Baptists over whether or not they may keep a database of offenders to forestall more abuse when top leaders had been secretly maintaining a private record for years.

The report — the first investigation of its kind in an enormous Protestant denomination like the SBC — is expected to send shock waves throughout 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 religious institutions in america, 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 entire variety of abuse instances among Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for nearly two decades, survivors of abuse and other involved Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Convention’s administrative arm to report alleged baby molesters and other accused abusers who have been within the pulpit or employed as church workers members. Many of the instances referred to within the report were thought of outside the statute of limitations, the time survivors can report intercourse abuse, so it’s unclear what number of abusers had been criminally charged.

The report, compiled by a corporation called Guidepost Options on the request of Southern Baptists, states that abuse survivors’ calls and emails have been “solely to be met, time and time once more, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who had been involved extra with defending the institution from legal responsibility than from protecting Southern Baptists from further abuse.

“Whereas tales of abuse had been minimized, and survivors had been ignored or even vilified, revelations got here to light in recent times 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 points when survivors got here forward, it additionally states that a main Southern Baptist chief was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a lady 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 president at the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a lady during a Panama Metropolis Beach, Fla., trip in 2010.

The report states that Hunt, in an interview with investigators, denied any physical contact with the lady however acknowledged that he had interactions 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 in the Guidepost report. I've by no means abused anybody.”

Hunt resigned on May 13 from the North American Mission Board, in response to a statement by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell mentioned that before May 13, he was not aware of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Generally, he called the main points of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

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

Intercourse abuse survivors, many of whom have been sharing their tales for years, anticipated Sunday’s release would verify the information round most of the tales they've already shared, but many were nonetheless surprised to see the sample of coverups by the best ranges of management.

“I knew it was rotten, but it’s astonishing and infuriating,” stated Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was as soon as the highest-paid feminine govt at the SBC and whose story of sexual abuse at a Southern Baptist seminary is detailed in the report. “It is a denomination that is via and through about energy. It's misappropriated power. It does not in any means replicate the Jesus I see in the scriptures. I'm so gutted.”

The report also names several senior SBC leaders who protected and even supported alleged abusers, including three previous presidents of the convention, a former vice president 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 Government Committee, which handles monetary 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 show, Southern Baptists were advised the denomination couldn't put collectively a registry of intercourse offenders because it would go towards the denomination’s polity — or the way it functions. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained a list of offenders whereas holding it a secret to keep away from the potential for getting sued. The report additionally includes non-public emails showing how longtime leaders such as August Boto have been dismissive about sexual abuse issues, calling them “a satanic scheme to fully distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 electronic mail, the convention’s legal professional despatched Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database could possibly be carried out in keeping with SBC polity, saying “it might match our polity and current ministries to help churches in this area of kid abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he beneficial “fast action to signal the Conference’s desire that the [executive committee] and the entities start a extra aggressive effort in this area.” That very same year, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a motion for a database, Boto rejected the concept.

For a denomination designed to offer extra democratic energy to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to fee the third-party investigation, the report reveals how lay Southern Baptists allowed a couple of key leaders, including Boto and the conference’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to control the national institutional response to sex abuse for many years. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, mentioned he had not read the report yet. Attempts to reach Boto on Sunday have been unsuccessful.

“The report goes to validate a lot about how they really blindly selected 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 alongside. Now Southern Baptists have to hold the weight.”

Throughout Govt Committee conferences in 2021, some members argued towards waiving attorney-client privilege, which would give investigators access to records of conversations on legal matters among the committee’s members and staffers. They said doing so went against the recommendation of convention attorneys and will bankrupt the SBC by exposing it to lawsuits.

The talk 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 additionally 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 choice over attorney-client privilege also led to the resignation of the conference’s attorneys, who are named throughout the report.

Newly leaked letter details allegations that Southern Baptist leaders mishandled intercourse abuse claims

According to the report, Floyd advised SBC leaders in a 2019 electronic mail that he had obtained “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “rising concern about all the emphasis on the sexual abuse crisis.” He then acknowledged: “Our precedence can't be the most recent cultural disaster.” Floyd did not immediately return a request for remark.

Christa Brown, who advised 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 Executive Committee “turned his back to her during her speech and one other chortled.”

“The Govt Committee betrayed not solely survivors who worked exhausting to try to make something occur, however betrayed the whole Southern Baptist Conference,” said Brown, who's a retired appellate lawyer in Colorado. “They’ve made their very own faith into a complicit associate for their very own resolution to decide on institutional safety 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 subsequent gathering in Anaheim, Calif., where members are expected talk about next steps. Recommendations by Guidepost include providing devoted survivor advocacy help and a survivor compensation fund.

“We must be able to take significant steps to change our tradition as it relates to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the present SBC president, said in a press release.

Since decades of sex abuse and coverups in the Catholic Church were reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have revealed lists of clergymen they say have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to forestall 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, in line with the report. He expressed his issues that SBC leaders may very well be falling into a number of the identical patterns as Catholic leaders in not coping with clergy intercourse abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists ought to learn from Catholic mistakes 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 Government Committee at the time, responded to Doyle in a short letter that “Southern Baptist leaders truly have no authority over native church buildings” however that they'd try to make use of their “affect” to supply protections. In an article, 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 position in 2018 over having a “morally inappropriate relationship.” Web page didn't 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 activity pressure on the issue and mentioned that the report reveals a necessity for establishments just like the SBC to hunt outside expertise on intercourse abuse.

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

The problem of sex abuse was a outstanding 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 & Religious Liberty Commission. Moore stated he expects Southern Baptists to receive Sunday’s report in an analogous strategy 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 said. “People will say, ‘This is not all Southern Baptists, take a look at all the nice we do.’ The report demonstrates a sample of stonewalling, coverup, intimidation and retaliation.”

Moore mentioned he hopes the SBC will consider 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 previous two decades combating for reform.