Southern Baptist leaders coated up intercourse abuse, explosive report says

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

The findings of almost 300 pages embrace stunning new details about specific abuse instances 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 they might preserve a database of offenders to prevent extra abuse when prime leaders had been secretly maintaining a private list for years.

The report — the primary investigation of its kind in an enormous Protestant denomination like the SBC — is anticipated to send shock waves throughout a conservative Christian group that has had intense inside battles over handle sex abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, along with other religious establishments in the United States, has struggled with declining membership for the past 15 years. Its leaders have lengthy resisted comparisons between its sexual abuse crisis and that of the Catholic Church, saying the whole number of abuse cases amongst Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for nearly two decades, survivors of abuse and other concerned Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Convention’s administrative arm to report alleged baby molesters and different accused abusers who were in the pulpit or employed as church staff members. Lots of the instances referred to within the report had been thought-about exterior 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 corporation known as Guidepost Options on the request of Southern Baptists, states that abuse survivors’ calls and emails were “solely to be met, time and time again, 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 further abuse.

“Whereas tales of abuse have been minimized, and survivors had been ignored and even vilified, revelations came 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 handled abuse issues when survivors got here ahead, it also 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 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 Metropolis Seashore, Fla., trip in 2010.

The report states that Hunt, in an interview with investigators, denied any physical 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 a press release on Twitter, saying, “I vigorously deny the circumstances and characterizations set forth in the Guidepost report. I have by no means abused anybody.”

Hunt resigned on Could 13 from the North American Mission Board, based on a press release by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell said that earlier than Could 13, he was not conscious of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Typically, he known as the small print of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

Southern Baptists have been immersed in their very own sex abuse scandals. Now, they’re debating their response.

Sex abuse survivors, many of whom have been sharing their stories for years, anticipated Sunday’s release would affirm the details round many of the stories they have already shared, but many were still surprised 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 once the highest-paid feminine executive at the SBC and whose story of sexual abuse at a Southern Baptist seminary is detailed within the report. “This can be a denomination that is by way of and through about power. It's misappropriated energy. It doesn't in any approach replicate the Jesus I see in the scriptures. I'm so gutted.”

The report additionally names several senior SBC leaders who protected and even supported alleged abusers, together with three past presidents of the convention, a former vice president 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 operate independently from each other, the Nashville-based Govt Committee distributes greater 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 instructed the denomination couldn't put together a registry of sex offenders as a result of it would go in opposition to the denomination’s polity — or the way it features. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained a listing of offenders while conserving it a secret to keep away from the possibility of getting sued. The report additionally consists of non-public emails exhibiting how longtime leaders similar to August Boto have 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 lawyer sent Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database may very well be carried out per SBC polity, saying “it might fit our polity and present ministries to help churches in this area of child abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he beneficial “immediate motion to signal the Convention’s desire 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 motion for a database, Boto rejected the thought.

For a denomination designed to provide more democratic power to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to commission the third-party investigation, the report shows how lay Southern Baptists allowed a couple of key leaders, including Boto and the convention’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to regulate the nationwide institutional response to intercourse abuse for decades. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, mentioned he had not learn the report yet. Attempts to reach Boto on Sunday were unsuccessful.

“The report goes to validate a lot about how they actually blindly chose to remain 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 alongside. Now Southern Baptists have to carry the weight.”

Throughout Govt Committee meetings in 2021, some members argued against waiving attorney-client privilege, which would give investigators access to information of conversations on legal matters among the committee’s members and staffers. They stated doing so went towards the recommendation of convention legal professionals and could bankrupt the SBC by exposing it to lawsuits.

The controversy over waiving privilege upset a large swath of Southern Baptists, causing some to consider 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 also once served as SBC president and was on President Donald Trump’s evangelical advisory council. The choice over attorney-client privilege also led to the resignation of the convention’s attorneys, who're named all through the report.

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According to 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 stated: “Our priority can't be the latest cultural disaster.” Floyd didn't immediately 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 churches 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 Executive Committee “turned his again to her during her speech and one other chortled.”

“The Executive Committee betrayed not solely survivors who labored onerous to attempt to make one thing occur, however betrayed the entire Southern Baptist Conference,” stated Brown, who's a retired appellate lawyer in Colorado. “They’ve made their very own faith into a complicit companion for their very own decision to decide on institutional protection over the protection of children and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists throughout its final annual meeting, comes just weeks before its subsequent gathering in Anaheim, Calif., the place members are anticipated talk about next steps. Recommendations by Guidepost embody providing dedicated survivor advocacy support and a survivor compensation fund.

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

Since a long time of sex abuse and coverups within the Catholic Church have been reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have published lists of monks they are saying have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to forestall the switch of abusers to other 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 Govt Committee presidents, in line with the report. He expressed his issues that SBC leaders might be falling into a number of the same patterns as Catholic leaders in not dealing with clergy sex abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists should learn from Catholic errors and take motion early on to implement structural reforms in order to make children safer.

The report states that Frank Page, who was main the Govt Committee on the time, responded to Doyle in a brief letter that “Southern Baptist leaders actually have no authority over local churches” however that they would attempt to make use of their “influence” to supply protections. In an article, Web page accused a survivor group of having a hidden agenda of organising the nation’s largest Protestant physique for lawsuits. Page later resigned from his place in 2018 over having a “morally inappropriate relationship.” Web page didn't immediately 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 task power on the difficulty and stated that the report reveals a necessity for institutions just like the SBC to seek exterior expertise on intercourse abuse.

“It exhibits a degree of coverup and harassment and resistance to reforms on an institutional stage that has led to many years of survivors being victimized and harm,” Denhollander mentioned. “The question Southern Baptists have to ask is, ‘How may this happen?’”

The problem of sex abuse was a prominent theme in leaked non-public letters written by Russell Moore, who left his place in 2021 as head of the SBC’s coverage arm, the Ethics & Spiritual Liberty Fee. Moore mentioned he expects Southern Baptists to receive Sunday’s report in the same 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 on this report are breathtaking,” Moore stated. “People will say, ‘This isn't all Southern Baptists, have 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 dwelling state in 2016, with a statue of Christa Brown, the abuse survivor who spent the past twenty years preventing for reform.