Southern Baptist leaders lined up sex abuse, explosive report says

Leaders within the Southern Baptist Conference on Sunday launched a serious third-party investigation that discovered that sex abuse survivors had been typically ignored, minimized and “even vilified” by high clergy within the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

The findings of almost 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. Proof in the report suggests leaders also lied to Southern Baptists over whether or not they might maintain a database of offenders to forestall more abuse when prime leaders had been secretly keeping a non-public list for years.

The report — the primary investigation of its form in an enormous Protestant denomination like the SBC — is anticipated to ship shock waves all through a conservative Christian community that has had intense inner battles over how one can handle intercourse abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, together with other non secular institutions in the USA, 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 full variety of abuse cases amongst Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for nearly 20 years, survivors of abuse and other 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 workers members. Most of the instances referred to in the report were thought of outside the statute of limitations, the time survivors can report intercourse abuse, so it’s unclear what number of abusers had been criminally charged.

The report, compiled by a company referred to as Guidepost Solutions at the request of Southern Baptists, states that abuse survivors’ calls and emails have been “only to be met, time and time again, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who have been concerned extra with defending the establishment from legal responsibility than from protecting Southern Baptists from additional abuse.

“While stories of abuse were minimized, and survivors had been ignored or even vilified, revelations got here to gentle lately 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 leader was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a lady only one month after he completed 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 vice president at the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a woman throughout a Panama Metropolis Seaside, Fla., vacation in 2010.

The report states that Hunt, in an interview with investigators, denied any bodily 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 an announcement on Twitter, saying, “I vigorously deny the circumstances and characterizations set forth in the Guidepost report. I have never abused anyone.”

Hunt resigned on Could 13 from the North American Mission Board, based on an announcement by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell said that before May 13, he was not aware of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Typically, he known as the details of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

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Intercourse abuse survivors, many of whom have been sharing their stories for years, anticipated Sunday’s launch would verify the information round many of the tales they've already shared, but many had been nonetheless surprised to see the pattern of coverups by the best levels of leadership.

“I knew it was rotten, nevertheless it’s astonishing and infuriating,” mentioned Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was once the highest-paid female government 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 via and thru about energy. It's misappropriated energy. It does not in any means mirror the Jesus I see within 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 conference, a former vp 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 monetary and administrative duties. Though Southern Baptist church buildings function independently from one another, the Nashville-based Government Committee distributes more than $190 million cooperative program in its annual price range that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For decades, the findings show, Southern Baptists were informed the denomination could not put collectively a registry of intercourse offenders as a result of it could go towards the denomination’s polity — or how it functions. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained a list of offenders whereas maintaining it a secret to keep away from the potential of getting sued. The report additionally contains non-public emails displaying how longtime leaders akin to August Boto had been dismissive about sexual abuse concerns, 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 be carried out according to SBC polity, saying “it would match our polity and current ministries to help churches in this space of kid abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he recommended “instant action to sign the Convention’s desire that the [executive committee] and the entities begin a extra aggressive effort in this area.” That very same yr, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a motion for a database, Boto rejected the concept.

For a denomination designed to offer extra democratic power to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to commission 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 nationwide institutional response to sex abuse for many years. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, said 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 actually 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 along. Now Southern Baptists have to carry the load.”

During Executive Committee conferences in 2021, some members argued in opposition to waiving attorney-client privilege, which would give investigators entry to records of conversations on legal issues among the many committee’s members and staffers. They mentioned doing so went in opposition to the advice of conference attorneys 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 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 Govt Committee’s head, Ronnie Floyd, who additionally once 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're named all through the report.

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In line with the report, Floyd instructed SBC leaders in a 2019 email 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 acknowledged: “Our precedence cannot be the most recent cultural crisis.” Floyd did not instantly return a request for remark.

Christa Brown, who told 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 Executive Committee “turned his back to her throughout her speech and another chortled.”

“The Govt Committee betrayed not solely survivors who labored exhausting to attempt to make one thing occur, but betrayed the entire Southern Baptist Convention,” said Brown, who's a retired appellate attorney in Colorado. “They’ve made their own faith into a complicit associate for their very own resolution to choose institutional safety over the safety of children and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists during its last annual assembly, comes simply weeks earlier than its next gathering in Anaheim, Calif., where members are anticipated talk about subsequent steps. Suggestions by Guidepost include offering dedicated survivor advocacy help and a survivor compensation fund.

“We must be ready to take significant steps to vary our tradition because it pertains to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the current SBC president, mentioned in a statement.

Since decades of sex abuse and coverups within the Catholic Church have 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 transfer of abusers to different church buildings. Unlike 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 sex abuse disaster, wrote to the SBC and Govt Committee presidents, in response to the report. He expressed his issues that SBC leaders may very well be falling into a few of the same patterns as Catholic leaders in not dealing with clergy intercourse abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists ought to learn from Catholic mistakes and take motion early on to implement structural reforms in order to make kids safer.

The report states that Frank Page, who was leading the Government Committee at the time, responded to Doyle in a brief letter that “Southern Baptist leaders actually don't have any authority over native churches” but that they'd attempt to use their “influence” to supply 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. Web 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 drive on the issue and stated that the report exhibits a need for institutions like the SBC to hunt outside 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 harm,” Denhollander mentioned. “The query Southern Baptists must ask is, ‘How could this happen?’”

The problem 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 & Religious Liberty Commission. Moore said he expects Southern Baptists to obtain Sunday’s report in an analogous way 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 isn't all Southern Baptists, take a look at all the great we do.’ The report demonstrates a pattern 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 home state in 2016, with a statue of Christa Brown, the abuse survivor who spent the past 20 years fighting for reform.