Southern Baptist leaders coated up intercourse abuse, explosive report says

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

The findings of practically 300 pages embrace shocking new particulars about particular abuse instances and shine a lightweight on how denominational leaders for decades actively resisted calls for abuse prevention and reform. Evidence within the report suggests leaders additionally lied to Southern Baptists over whether or not they might preserve a database of offenders to prevent extra abuse when high leaders had been secretly keeping a non-public checklist for years.

The report — the primary investigation of its kind in a large Protestant denomination like the SBC — is anticipated to send shock waves all through a conservative Christian community that has had intense inside battles over easy methods to deal with intercourse abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, together with different non secular institutions in the US, 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 whole variety of abuse cases amongst Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for almost two decades, survivors of abuse and different concerned Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Convention’s administrative arm to report alleged little one molesters and other accused abusers who have been within the pulpit or employed as church staff members. Most of the instances referred to in the report have been thought-about outside the statute of limitations, the time survivors can report sex abuse, so it’s unclear how many abusers had been criminally charged.

The report, compiled by a corporation referred to 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 establishment from liability than from defending Southern Baptists from further abuse.

“Whereas stories of abuse have been minimized, and survivors had been ignored or even vilified, revelations came to mild in recent times 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 main Southern Baptist chief was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a girl 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 vp on the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a woman during a Panama Metropolis Seaside, 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 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 Might 13 from the North American Mission Board, in line with a statement by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell stated that earlier than May 13, he was not conscious of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Generally, he referred to as the details of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

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Sex abuse survivors, a lot of whom have been sharing their stories for years, anticipated Sunday’s launch would affirm the info round most of the stories they've already shared, but many had been nonetheless shocked to see the sample of coverups by the best ranges of management.

“I knew it was rotten, nevertheless 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. “It is a denomination that's by means of and through about energy. It's misappropriated power. It doesn't in any way replicate 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, including three past presidents of the conference, a former vp and the former 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 financial and administrative duties. Though Southern Baptist church buildings function 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 many years, the findings present, Southern Baptists had been told the denomination couldn't put together a registry of intercourse offenders as a result of it might go in opposition to the denomination’s polity — or how it features. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained a list of offenders while protecting it a secret to keep away from the opportunity of getting sued. The report additionally contains non-public emails displaying how longtime leaders reminiscent of August Boto had been dismissive about sexual abuse considerations, calling them “a satanic scheme to utterly distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 email, the convention’s attorney despatched Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database could possibly be applied in keeping with SBC polity, saying “it could fit our polity and current ministries to help church buildings in this space of child abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he recommended “instant action to signal the Convention’s want that the [executive committee] and the entities begin a extra aggressive effort on this space.” That same yr, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a movement for a database, Boto rejected the thought.

For a denomination designed to present more democratic power to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to fee the third-party investigation, the report reveals how lay Southern Baptists allowed just a few key leaders, together with Boto and the conference’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to regulate the national institutional response to intercourse abuse for many years. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, stated he had not learn the report but. Attempts to reach Boto on Sunday have been unsuccessful.

“The report is going to validate so much about how they really blindly selected 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 along. Now Southern Baptists have to hold the load.”

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

The controversy over waiving privilege upset a big swath of Southern Baptists, causing some to imagine the Govt 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 decision over attorney-client privilege additionally led to the resignation of the convention’s attorneys, who are named all through the report.

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In keeping with the report, Floyd instructed SBC leaders in a 2019 e mail that he had obtained “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 latest cultural disaster.” Floyd didn't instantly return a request for comment.

Christa Brown, who instructed SBC leaders that she was abused by a youth pastor who went on to serve in other Southern Baptist church buildings in multiple 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 again to her during her speech and one other chortled.”

“The Executive Committee betrayed not solely survivors who labored laborious to try to make something occur, however betrayed the entire Southern Baptist Convention,” stated Brown, who is a retired appellate attorney in Colorado. “They’ve made their very own faith right into a complicit companion for their own choice to choose institutional safety over the safety of kids and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists throughout its last annual meeting, comes simply weeks before its subsequent gathering in Anaheim, Calif., the place members are expected talk about subsequent steps. Recommendations by Guidepost embrace providing dedicated survivor advocacy assist and a survivor compensation fund.

“We should be able to take significant steps to change our culture as it pertains to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the present SBC president, stated in an announcement.

Since a long time of sex abuse and coverups within the Catholic Church were reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have printed lists of monks they are saying have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to stop the transfer 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 keeping with the report. He expressed his considerations that SBC leaders could be falling into a number of the similar patterns as Catholic leaders in not dealing with clergy intercourse abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists should be taught from Catholic mistakes and take action early on to implement structural reforms so as to make children safer.

The report states that Frank Web page, who was main the Executive Committee on the time, responded to Doyle in a brief letter that “Southern Baptist leaders actually have no authority over local church buildings” but that they might attempt to make use of their “influence” to offer protections. In an article, Web page accused a survivor group of having a hidden agenda of setting up the nation’s largest Protestant body for lawsuits. Web page later resigned from his place in 2018 over having a “morally inappropriate relationship.” Page didn't 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 activity power on the issue and stated that the report shows a need for establishments like the SBC to seek outdoors expertise on intercourse abuse.

“It exhibits a degree of coverup and harassment and resistance to reforms on an institutional stage that has led to a long time of survivors being victimized and harm,” Denhollander stated. “The question Southern Baptists must ask is, ‘How might this occur?’”

The issue of sex abuse was a distinguished theme in leaked private letters written by Russell Moore, who left his place in 2021 as head of the SBC’s policy arm, the Ethics & Spiritual Liberty Fee. Moore said he expects Southern Baptists to obtain Sunday’s report in an analogous method 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. “Individuals 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 take into account 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 past twenty years fighting for reform.