Southern Baptist leaders lined up sex abuse, explosive report says

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

The findings of nearly 300 pages embody shocking new details about specific abuse cases and shine a lightweight on how denominational leaders for decades actively resisted requires abuse prevention and reform. Evidence within the report suggests leaders additionally lied to Southern Baptists over whether they may maintain a database of offenders to prevent more abuse when top leaders were secretly maintaining a personal checklist for years.

The report — the first investigation of its kind in a massive Protestant denomination like the SBC — is expected to send shock waves all through a conservative Christian community that has had intense inner battles over the best way to deal with intercourse abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, together with other religious institutions in the United States, has struggled with declining membership for the previous 15 years. Its leaders have long resisted comparisons between its sexual abuse crisis and that of the Catholic Church, saying the overall number of abuse cases amongst Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for nearly twenty years, survivors of abuse and different involved Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Conference’s administrative arm to report alleged youngster molesters and other accused abusers who were in the pulpit or employed as church workers members. Many of the circumstances referred to within the report had been considered outside 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 known as Guidepost Solutions 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 more with defending the institution from legal responsibility than from defending Southern Baptists from further abuse.

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

Whereas the report focuses totally on how leaders dealt with abuse issues when survivors came ahead, it also 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 convention. The report finds that Johnny Hunt, a beloved Georgia-based Southern Baptist pastor who has been a senior vice chairman on the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a girl during a Panama City Seashore, Fla., trip in 2010.

The report states that Hunt, in an interview with investigators, denied any bodily contact with the girl but acknowledged that he had interactions along with her. After the report was released, 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 have by no means abused anyone.”

Hunt resigned on Might 13 from the North American Mission Board, according to a statement by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell mentioned that earlier than Could 13, he was not aware of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Generally, he referred to as the main points of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

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

“I knew it was rotten, nevertheless it’s astonishing and infuriating,” mentioned Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was once the highest-paid feminine executive on the SBC and whose story of sexual abuse at a Southern Baptist seminary is detailed within the report. “It is a denomination that is via and through about energy. It is misappropriated energy. It does not in any method reflect 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, together with three past presidents of the convention, a former vice chairman 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 Government Committee, which handles monetary and administrative duties. Though Southern Baptist churches function independently from one another, the Nashville-based Executive Committee distributes more than $190 million cooperative program in its annual funds that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For many years, the findings present, Southern Baptists had been informed the denomination couldn't put together 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 a listing of offenders whereas keeping it a secret to keep away from the potential for getting sued. The report also includes private emails exhibiting how longtime leaders corresponding to August Boto had been dismissive about sexual abuse issues, calling them “a satanic scheme to completely distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 e-mail, the conference’s attorney sent Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database could possibly be implemented in step with SBC polity, saying “it would fit our polity and current ministries to assist churches in this area of kid abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he recommended “instant motion to sign the Convention’s desire that the [executive committee] and the entities start a extra aggressive effort in this space.” That same year, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a motion for a database, Boto rejected the idea.

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 exhibits how lay Southern Baptists allowed a number of key leaders, including Boto and the convention’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to regulate the national institutional response to sex abuse for many years. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, mentioned he had not read the report but. Attempts to achieve Boto on Sunday had been unsuccessful.

“The report goes to validate a lot about how they actually blindly selected to stay on the identical path all these years,” mentioned 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 burden.”

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

The controversy over waiving privilege upset a big swath of Southern Baptists, inflicting some to consider 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 additionally as soon as served as SBC president and was on President Donald Trump’s evangelical advisory council. The decision over attorney-client privilege also led to the resignation of the convention’s attorneys, who are named throughout the report.

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In accordance with the report, Floyd instructed SBC leaders in a 2019 e-mail that he had received “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “growing concern about all the emphasis on the sexual abuse crisis.” He then stated: “Our precedence cannot be the most recent cultural crisis.” Floyd didn't instantly return a request for comment.

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 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 Govt Committee “turned his back to her throughout her speech and another chortled.”

“The Government Committee betrayed not solely survivors who worked hard to attempt to make something happen, but betrayed the entire Southern Baptist Conference,” stated Brown, who's a retired appellate lawyer in Colorado. “They’ve made their own religion right into a complicit companion for their very own determination to choose institutional safety over the protection of youngsters and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists during its last annual assembly, comes just weeks before its next gathering in Anaheim, Calif., the place members are expected focus on next steps. Recommendations by Guidepost embrace offering dedicated survivor advocacy assist and a survivor compensation fund.

“We must be ready to take significant steps to vary our tradition as it pertains to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the current SBC president, stated in an announcement.

Since many years of sex abuse and coverups within the Catholic Church had been reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have published lists of clergymen they say have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to prevent the switch of abusers to different churches. In contrast to 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 disaster, wrote to the SBC and Government Committee presidents, according to the report. He expressed his considerations that SBC leaders could possibly be falling into among the identical patterns as Catholic leaders in not dealing with clergy sex abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists ought to study from Catholic errors and take motion early on to implement structural reforms in order 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 truly don't have any authority over native churches” however that they'd try to use their “affect” to supply protections. In an article, 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 position in 2018 over having a “morally inappropriate relationship.” Page did not immediately 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 task force on the difficulty and mentioned that the report reveals a need for establishments just like the SBC to hunt exterior expertise on sex abuse.

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

The problem 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 policy arm, the Ethics & Religious Liberty Fee. Moore stated 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 on this report are breathtaking,” Moore said. “Folks will say, ‘This is not all Southern Baptists, look at all the great we do.’ The report demonstrates a sample of stonewalling, coverup, intimidation and retaliation.”

Moore stated he hopes the SBC will contemplate replacing 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 previous 20 years fighting for reform.