Southern Baptist leaders covered up intercourse abuse, explosive report says

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

The findings of nearly 300 pages embody shocking new particulars about particular abuse circumstances and shine a lightweight on how denominational leaders for many years actively resisted calls for abuse prevention and reform. Evidence in the report suggests leaders also lied to Southern Baptists over whether or not they could keep a database of offenders to stop extra abuse when high leaders have been secretly preserving a non-public checklist for years.

The report — the primary investigation of its form in a large Protestant denomination just like the SBC — is expected to ship shock waves all through a conservative Christian community that has had intense inner battles over the way to handle sex abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, together with other spiritual institutions in the United States, 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 total variety of abuse cases amongst 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 Convention’s administrative arm to report alleged youngster molesters and other accused abusers who had been within the pulpit or employed as church staff members. Most of the instances referred to within the report have been considered outdoors the statute of limitations, the time survivors can report intercourse abuse, so it’s unclear how many abusers had been criminally charged.

The report, compiled by a company known as Guidepost Solutions on 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 had been involved more with defending the establishment from liability than from protecting Southern Baptists from additional abuse.

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

Whereas the report focuses primarily on how leaders handled abuse issues when survivors came forward, it additionally states that a main Southern Baptist chief was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a girl just one month after he completed 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 vp at the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a lady during a Panama City 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 together with her. After the report was launched, 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 line with a statement by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell stated that before Could 13, he was not aware of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Usually, he referred to as the details 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 launch would verify the information around many of the tales they have already shared, however many have been nonetheless stunned to see the pattern of coverups by the best levels of management.

“I knew it was rotten, however it’s astonishing and infuriating,” stated Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was as soon as the highest-paid feminine govt on the SBC and whose story of sexual abuse at a Southern Baptist seminary is detailed in the report. “This is a denomination that's via and through about power. It is misappropriated energy. It doesn't in any way 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 chairman and the former head of the SBC’s administrative arm.

The third-party investigation into actions between 2000 and 2021 focused on actions by the SBC’s Government Committee, which handles financial and administrative duties. Though Southern Baptist churches operate independently from each other, the Nashville-based Executive 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 had been told the denomination couldn't put collectively a registry of sex offenders because it could go against 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 for getting sued. The report additionally includes personal emails showing how longtime leaders similar to August Boto have been dismissive about sexual abuse issues, calling them “a satanic scheme to fully distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 email, the convention’s lawyer sent Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database may very well be carried out in step with SBC polity, saying “it will match our polity and current ministries to help churches in this space of kid abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he really useful “speedy action to signal the Convention’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 motion for a database, Boto rejected the idea.

For a denomination designed to give more democratic energy to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to commission the third-party investigation, the report reveals how lay Southern Baptists allowed just a few key leaders, together with Boto and the convention’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to manage the national institutional response to intercourse abuse for decades. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, mentioned he had not read the report yet. Makes an attempt to succeed in Boto on Sunday have been unsuccessful.

“The report is going to validate so much about how they really blindly chose to stay on the same 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 hold the load.”

During Govt Committee conferences in 2021, some members argued against waiving attorney-client privilege, which might give investigators entry to records of conversations on authorized matters among the many committee’s members and staffers. They said doing so went towards the recommendation of conference legal professionals and will bankrupt the SBC by exposing it to lawsuits.

The talk over waiving privilege upset a big swath of Southern Baptists, causing some to believe the Government 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 Government Committee’s head, Ronnie Floyd, who also 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 conference’s attorneys, who're named throughout the report.

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In line with the report, Floyd told SBC leaders in a 2019 e-mail 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 acknowledged: “Our priority can't be the latest cultural crisis.” Floyd didn't instantly return a request for comment.

Christa Brown, who told SBC leaders that she was abused by a youth pastor who went on to serve in other Southern Baptist church buildings in a number of 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 Govt Committee “turned his back to her throughout her speech and one other chortled.”

“The Executive Committee betrayed not solely survivors who worked hard to try to make one thing happen, however betrayed the whole Southern Baptist Convention,” said Brown, who's a retired appellate lawyer in Colorado. “They’ve made their own religion into a complicit companion for their very own resolution to decide on 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 before its next gathering in Anaheim, Calif., where members are anticipated discuss subsequent steps. Suggestions by Guidepost include offering devoted survivor advocacy help and a survivor compensation fund.

“We should be able to take significant steps to vary our tradition because it pertains to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the current SBC president, stated in a press release.

Since decades of sex abuse and coverups in the Catholic Church had been reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have revealed lists of priests they are saying have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to prevent the switch of abusers to different church buildings. Not like the Catholic Church, the SBC has a non-hierarchical structure.

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 Govt Committee presidents, according to the report. He expressed his issues that SBC leaders could possibly be falling into a number of the similar patterns as Catholic leaders in not coping with clergy intercourse abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists ought to be taught from Catholic mistakes and take motion early on to implement structural reforms in order to make youngsters safer.

The report states that Frank Web page, who was main the Government 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 would try to make use of their “affect” to provide protections. In an article, Web 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 place in 2018 over having a “morally inappropriate relationship.” Page didn't 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 force on the difficulty and mentioned that the report reveals a necessity for institutions just like the SBC to hunt outside expertise on intercourse abuse.

“It shows a stage of coverup and harassment and resistance to reforms on an institutional stage that has led to decades of survivors being victimized and damage,” Denhollander stated. “The query Southern Baptists should ask is, ‘How might this occur?’”

The difficulty of intercourse 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 & Spiritual Liberty Commission. Moore said 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 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 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 preventing for reform.