Southern Baptist leaders covered up sex abuse, explosive report says

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

The findings of nearly 300 pages embrace stunning new details about particular abuse instances and shine a light-weight on how denominational leaders for many years actively resisted requires abuse prevention and reform. Proof within the report suggests leaders also lied to Southern Baptists over whether or not they could preserve a database of offenders to stop extra abuse when high leaders have been secretly maintaining a non-public list for years.

The report — the first investigation of its type in a massive Protestant denomination just like the SBC — is expected to send shock waves throughout a conservative Christian group that has had intense inside battles over the way to deal with sex abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, along with other spiritual establishments in the USA, 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 instances among Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for almost 20 years, survivors of abuse and other involved Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Conference’s administrative arm to report alleged baby molesters and different accused abusers who have been within the pulpit or employed as church staff members. Most of the cases referred to in the report were thought-about outside the statute of limitations, the time survivors can report sex abuse, so it’s unclear how many abusers have been criminally charged.

The report, compiled by an organization known as 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 were concerned extra with defending the institution from liability than from defending Southern Baptists from further abuse.

“While tales of abuse had been minimized, and survivors have been ignored and even vilified, revelations came to gentle 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 issues when survivors came forward, it additionally states that a major Southern Baptist chief was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a lady just one month after he accomplished 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 vp at the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a woman throughout a Panama City Seaside, Fla., trip in 2010.

The report states that Hunt, in an interview with investigators, denied any physical contact with the girl 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 an announcement 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 accordance with a statement by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell stated that before Could 13, he was not conscious of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Typically, he referred to as the details of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

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Sex abuse survivors, many of whom have been sharing their tales for years, anticipated Sunday’s launch would verify the details around most of the tales they have already shared, but many had been nonetheless surprised to see the pattern of coverups by the very best ranges of leadership.

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

The report additionally names a number of senior SBC leaders who protected and even supported alleged abusers, including three past 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 focused on actions by the SBC’s Executive Committee, which handles financial and administrative duties. Although Southern Baptist churches function independently from each other, the Nashville-based Executive Committee distributes greater than $190 million cooperative program in its annual budget that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For many years, the findings present, Southern Baptists were told the denomination could not put together a registry of intercourse offenders as a result of it might go against the denomination’s polity — or how it features. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained a list of offenders while preserving it a secret to avoid the possibility of getting sued. The report additionally includes private emails exhibiting how longtime leaders similar to August Boto were dismissive about sexual abuse considerations, calling them “a satanic scheme to utterly 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 per SBC polity, saying “it might match our polity and current ministries to help churches on this space of child abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he advisable “rapid action to sign the Convention’s need that the [executive committee] and the entities begin a extra aggressive effort in this space.” That 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 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 convention’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to regulate the national institutional response to intercourse abuse for decades. 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 so much about how they really blindly chose to stay 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 Government Committee meetings in 2021, some members argued in opposition to waiving attorney-client privilege, which might give investigators entry to information 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 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 additionally led to the resignation of the Executive Committee’s head, Ronnie Floyd, who additionally as soon as 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 convention’s attorneys, who are named throughout the report.

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According to the report, Floyd told SBC leaders in a 2019 email that he had obtained “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “rising concern about all the emphasis on the sexual abuse disaster.” He then acknowledged: “Our precedence cannot be the most recent cultural disaster.” Floyd did not 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 different 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 Executive Committee “turned his back to her during her speech and one other chortled.”

“The Government Committee betrayed not only survivors who labored laborious to attempt to make something happen, but betrayed the entire Southern Baptist Conference,” stated Brown, who's a retired appellate attorney in Colorado. “They’ve made their very own religion right into a complicit associate for their own resolution to decide on institutional safety over the protection of children and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists throughout its last annual meeting, comes just weeks earlier than its subsequent gathering in Anaheim, Calif., the place members are expected discuss subsequent steps. Recommendations by Guidepost embrace offering devoted survivor advocacy assist and a survivor compensation fund.

“We have to be able to take meaningful steps to vary our tradition as it pertains to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the current SBC president, mentioned in a press release.

Since decades of intercourse 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 say have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to stop the transfer of abusers to other church buildings. 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 disaster, wrote to the SBC and Govt Committee presidents, according to the report. He expressed his considerations that SBC leaders might be falling into a few of the same patterns as Catholic leaders in not dealing with clergy sex abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists should be taught from Catholic errors and take action early on to implement structural reforms in order 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 haven't any authority over local churches” however that they'd attempt to use their “affect” to offer protections. In an article, Page accused a survivor group of having 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.” 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 problem and mentioned that the report shows a necessity for institutions just like the SBC to hunt outdoors experience on sex abuse.

“It shows a stage 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 mentioned. “The query Southern Baptists have to ask is, ‘How might this happen?’”

The problem of intercourse abuse was a distinguished theme in leaked personal letters written by Russell Moore, who left his place in 2021 as head of the SBC’s coverage arm, the Ethics & Non secular Liberty Commission. Moore mentioned he expects Southern Baptists to obtain Sunday’s report in an identical 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 in this report are breathtaking,” Moore said. “Individuals will say, ‘This is not all Southern Baptists, 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 replacing 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 fighting for reform.