Southern Baptist leaders covered up intercourse abuse, explosive report says

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

The findings of almost 300 pages include stunning new particulars about specific abuse cases and shine a light-weight on how denominational leaders for decades actively resisted requires abuse prevention and reform. Evidence within the report suggests leaders also lied to Southern Baptists over whether or not they might keep a database of offenders to prevent more abuse when high leaders were secretly maintaining a personal checklist for years.

The report — the primary investigation of its form in a massive Protestant denomination just like the SBC — is anticipated to send shock waves throughout a conservative Christian community that has had intense inside battles over the right way to handle intercourse abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, along with other non secular 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 whole variety of abuse instances among Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for almost two decades, survivors of abuse and other involved Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Conference’s administrative arm to report alleged child molesters and different accused abusers who had been within the pulpit or employed as church workers members. Many of the circumstances referred to in the report were considered exterior 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 an organization referred to as Guidepost Solutions at the request of Southern Baptists, states that abuse survivors’ calls and emails were “only to be met, time and time once more, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who have been concerned extra with defending the institution from liability than from defending Southern Baptists from additional abuse.

“While stories of abuse were minimized, and survivors were ignored or even vilified, revelations got here to light in recent years that some senior SBC leaders had protected and even supported alleged abusers, the report states.

While the report focuses totally on how leaders dealt with abuse issues when survivors came ahead, it also states that a main Southern Baptist chief was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a girl only 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 on the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a girl during a Panama Metropolis Seashore, Fla., trip in 2010.

The report states that Hunt, in an interview with investigators, denied any physical contact with the lady but 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 have never abused anybody.”

Hunt resigned on Could 13 from the North American Mission Board, in accordance with a statement by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell said that before May 13, he was not aware of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Typically, he called the details of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

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Intercourse abuse survivors, a lot of whom have been sharing their tales for years, anticipated Sunday’s launch would affirm the details round many of the tales they have already shared, however many have been nonetheless shocked to see the sample of coverups by the highest levels of leadership.

“I knew it was rotten, however it’s astonishing and infuriating,” said Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was as soon as the highest-paid female executive at the SBC and whose story of sexual abuse at a Southern Baptist seminary is detailed in the report. “This can be a denomination that is by way of and through about power. It is misappropriated power. It does not in any means mirror the Jesus I see in the scriptures. I'm so gutted.”

The report also names a number of senior SBC leaders who protected and even supported alleged abusers, together with 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 centered on actions by the SBC’s Executive Committee, which handles monetary and administrative duties. Although Southern Baptist churches function independently from each other, the Nashville-based Govt Committee distributes greater than $190 million cooperative program in its annual price range that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For many years, the findings present, Southern Baptists have been informed the denomination couldn't put together a registry of sex offenders as a result of it would go against the denomination’s polity — or the way it functions. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained a list of offenders while maintaining it a secret to keep away from the potential of getting sued. The report additionally contains personal emails showing how longtime leaders such as August Boto had been dismissive about sexual abuse issues, calling them “a satanic scheme to utterly distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 e-mail, the conference’s lawyer despatched Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database might be implemented in step with SBC polity, saying “it might match our polity and present ministries to assist churches on this area of child abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he beneficial “speedy motion to signal the Conference’s desire that the [executive committee] and the entities start a more aggressive effort on this space.” That same 12 months, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a motion 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 commission 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 sex abuse for decades. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, stated he had not read the report yet. Makes an attempt to achieve Boto on Sunday were unsuccessful.

“The report goes to validate so much about how they really blindly chose to remain on the identical path all these years,” stated 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 carry the burden.”

During Executive Committee conferences in 2021, some members argued in opposition to waiving attorney-client privilege, which would give investigators entry to information of conversations on legal matters among the many committee’s members and staffers. They said doing so went towards the recommendation of convention legal professionals and could bankrupt the SBC by exposing it to lawsuits.

The controversy 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 Government 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 additionally led to the resignation of the convention’s attorneys, who're named throughout the report.

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Based on the report, Floyd instructed SBC leaders in a 2019 e mail that he had obtained “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “rising concern about all of the emphasis on the sexual abuse crisis.” He then said: “Our precedence can't be the newest cultural crisis.” Floyd didn't instantly 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 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 Govt Committee “turned his back to her throughout her speech and another chortled.”

“The Govt Committee betrayed not only survivors who labored arduous to attempt to make one thing happen, however betrayed the entire Southern Baptist Convention,” stated Brown, who's a retired appellate lawyer in Colorado. “They’ve made their own religion into a complicit accomplice for their very own determination to choose institutional safety over the safety of kids and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists during its final annual assembly, comes just weeks earlier than its next gathering in Anaheim, Calif., where members are anticipated focus on next steps. Recommendations by Guidepost embody offering dedicated survivor advocacy assist and a survivor compensation fund.

“We should be able to take significant steps to change our culture because it relates to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the current SBC president, mentioned in a statement.

Since decades of intercourse abuse and coverups in the Catholic Church were reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have published lists of priests they are saying have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to forestall 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 disaster, wrote to the SBC and Executive Committee presidents, according to 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 dealing 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 Govt Committee on the time, responded to Doyle in a brief letter that “Southern Baptist leaders really haven't any authority over local church buildings” but that they'd attempt to make use of their “affect” to provide protections. In an article, Page accused a survivor group of having a hidden agenda of establishing 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 process drive on the problem and mentioned that the report shows a need for institutions just like the SBC to hunt outside experience on sex abuse.

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

The issue of sex abuse was a outstanding theme in leaked personal letters written by Russell Moore, who left his position in 2021 as head of the SBC’s coverage arm, the Ethics & Religious Liberty Fee. Moore mentioned he expects Southern Baptists to obtain Sunday’s report in a similar 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 mentioned. “Folks will say, ‘This is not all Southern Baptists, take a look at all the great we do.’ The report demonstrates a sample 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 dwelling state in 2016, with a statue of Christa Brown, the abuse survivor who spent the past twenty years preventing for reform.