Southern Baptist leaders covered up sex abuse, explosive report says

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

The findings of almost 300 pages embody shocking new details about specific abuse cases and shine a light-weight 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 they may maintain a database of offenders to stop extra abuse when prime leaders were secretly protecting a personal checklist for years.

The report — the first investigation of its form in a large Protestant denomination like the SBC — is anticipated to send shock waves throughout a conservative Christian group that has had intense inner battles over the way to handle sex abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, along with other spiritual institutions in the USA, 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 overall variety of abuse instances among Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for nearly 20 years, survivors of abuse and different concerned Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Conference’s administrative arm to report alleged child molesters and other accused abusers who have been within the pulpit or employed as church staff members. Lots of the cases referred to within the report have been thought-about exterior the statute of limitations, the time survivors can report sex abuse, so it’s unclear what number of abusers have 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 were “solely to be met, time and time once more, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who had been concerned extra with defending the institution from legal responsibility than from protecting Southern Baptists from additional abuse.

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

While the report focuses totally on how leaders dealt with abuse issues when survivors came forward, it additionally states that a major 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 woman throughout a Panama Metropolis Seashore, Fla., trip in 2010.

The report states that Hunt, in an interview with investigators, denied any bodily contact with the lady 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 never abused anyone.”

Hunt resigned on Might 13 from the North American Mission Board, according to an announcement by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell said that before Might 13, he was not aware of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Usually, he called the small print of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

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Intercourse abuse survivors, lots of whom have been sharing their stories for years, anticipated Sunday’s release would confirm the info round most of the tales they have already shared, but many were nonetheless shocked to see the sample of coverups by the best levels of management.

“I knew it was rotten, but it surely’s astonishing and infuriating,” stated Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was as soon as the highest-paid female govt 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 way of and through about energy. It is misappropriated energy. It doesn't in any method replicate the Jesus I see within the scriptures. I am so gutted.”

The report also names a number of senior SBC leaders who protected and even supported alleged abusers, together with three previous presidents of the convention, a former vp 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 Govt Committee, which handles monetary and administrative duties. Though Southern Baptist churches operate independently from one another, the Nashville-based Executive Committee distributes more than $190 million cooperative program in its annual finances that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For many years, the findings present, Southern Baptists had been advised the denomination could not put together a registry of sex offenders as a result of it could go against the denomination’s polity — or how it capabilities. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained a listing of offenders whereas conserving it a secret to avoid the opportunity of getting sued. The report also includes private emails displaying how longtime leaders resembling August Boto were dismissive about sexual abuse issues, calling them “a satanic scheme to fully distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 e-mail, the convention’s lawyer despatched Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database could be implemented according to SBC polity, saying “it might fit our polity and present ministries to assist churches in this area of child abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he beneficial “instant motion to signal the Convention’s desire that the [executive committee] and the entities start a extra aggressive effort on this area.” That same 12 months, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a motion for a database, Boto rejected the concept.

For a denomination designed to provide extra democratic energy to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to commission the third-party investigation, the report reveals how lay Southern Baptists allowed a number of key leaders, together with Boto and the convention’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to control the nationwide institutional response to intercourse abuse for decades. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, mentioned he had not read the report but. Attempts to reach Boto on Sunday had been unsuccessful.

“The report goes to validate a lot about how they actually blindly selected to remain on the identical path all these years,” said Tiffany Thigpen, whose story of sexual abuse in a Southern Baptist church is detailed in the report. “It buoys what we’ve been saying all along. Now Southern Baptists have to carry the burden.”

Throughout Government Committee meetings in 2021, some members argued towards waiving attorney-client privilege, which might give investigators entry to information of conversations on authorized matters among the committee’s members and staffers. They said doing so went against the recommendation of conference lawyers and could bankrupt the SBC by exposing it to lawsuits.

The debate over waiving privilege upset a large 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 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 choice over attorney-client privilege additionally led to the resignation of the convention’s attorneys, who are named throughout the report.

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According to the report, Floyd informed SBC leaders in a 2019 email that he had obtained “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “rising concern about all the emphasis on the sexual abuse disaster.” He then stated: “Our priority cannot be the latest cultural crisis.” Floyd did not instantly return a request for remark.

Christa Brown, who instructed 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 again to her throughout her speech and one other chortled.”

“The Govt Committee betrayed not only survivors who labored laborious to try to make one thing occur, but betrayed the entire Southern Baptist Conference,” said Brown, who is a retired appellate attorney in Colorado. “They’ve made their own faith into a complicit accomplice for their own decision to choose institutional safety over the protection of kids and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists during its last annual meeting, comes simply weeks earlier than its subsequent gathering in Anaheim, Calif., the place members are anticipated talk about subsequent steps. Suggestions by Guidepost embody providing devoted survivor advocacy help and a survivor compensation fund.

“We must be ready to take significant steps to change our tradition because it relates to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the present SBC president, said in a press release.

Since decades of intercourse abuse and coverups in the Catholic Church had been reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have printed lists of monks they say 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 construction.

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 Executive Committee presidents, in keeping with the report. He expressed his considerations that SBC leaders could 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 learn from Catholic errors and take action early on to implement structural reforms so as to make youngsters safer.

The report states that Frank Web page, who was main the Govt Committee at the time, responded to Doyle in a short letter that “Southern Baptist leaders truly have no authority over native churches” however that they would try to use their “influence” to supply protections. In an article, Page accused a survivor group of having a hidden agenda of setting up the nation’s largest Protestant physique for lawsuits. Web 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 job force on the difficulty and said that the report exhibits a need for establishments like the SBC to hunt outdoors experience on intercourse abuse.

“It exhibits a stage of coverup and harassment and resistance to reforms on an institutional level that has led to many years of survivors being victimized and hurt,” Denhollander stated. “The question Southern Baptists must ask is, ‘How might this happen?’”

The difficulty of sex abuse was a distinguished theme in leaked private letters written by Russell Moore, who left his position in 2021 as head of the SBC’s coverage arm, the Ethics & Non secular Liberty Fee. Moore said he expects Southern Baptists to receive Sunday’s report in the same option 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 stated. “People will say, ‘This is not all Southern Baptists, look at all the good we do.’ The report demonstrates a sample of stonewalling, coverup, intimidation and retaliation.”

Moore stated he hopes the SBC will think about changing a statue of evangelist Billy Graham, which was moved from Nashville to Graham’s house state in 2016, with a statue of Christa Brown, the abuse survivor who spent the previous 20 years preventing for reform.