Southern Baptist leaders lined up sex abuse, explosive report says

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

The findings of almost 300 pages embody shocking new details about particular abuse cases and shine a light on how denominational leaders for decades actively resisted requires abuse prevention and reform. Proof within the report suggests leaders additionally lied to Southern Baptists over whether they might keep a database of offenders to forestall extra abuse when prime leaders have been secretly preserving a non-public list for years.

The report — the first investigation of its type in an enormous Protestant denomination just like the SBC — is expected to send shock waves throughout a conservative Christian neighborhood that has had intense inside battles over methods to deal with sex abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, along with different religious establishments 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 entire variety of abuse circumstances among Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for almost 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 other accused abusers who had been in the pulpit or employed as church workers members. Lots of the circumstances referred to in the report were considered 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 company called Guidepost Options at the request of Southern Baptists, states that abuse survivors’ calls and emails have been “only to be met, time and time once more, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who had been concerned more with defending the institution from liability than from defending Southern Baptists from additional abuse.

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

While the report focuses totally on how leaders handled abuse points when survivors came ahead, it additionally states that a major Southern Baptist leader was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a woman 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 vice president on the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a girl throughout a Panama Metropolis Seashore, Fla., vacation in 2010.

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

Hunt resigned on May 13 from the North American Mission Board, based on an announcement by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell mentioned that before May 13, he was not conscious of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Generally, he called the small print of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

Southern Baptists have been immersed in their 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 verify the facts round lots of the stories they have already shared, but many were still surprised to see the pattern of coverups by the very best ranges of leadership.

“I knew it was rotten, nevertheless it’s astonishing and infuriating,” stated Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was once the highest-paid female government on the SBC and whose story of sexual abuse at a Southern Baptist seminary is detailed in the report. “This is a denomination that's via and through about energy. It's misappropriated power. It doesn't in any method reflect the Jesus I see in the scriptures. I am so gutted.”

The report additionally names a number of senior SBC leaders who protected and even supported alleged abusers, including three past presidents of the conference, 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 Govt Committee, which handles financial and administrative duties. Although Southern Baptist churches function independently from one another, the Nashville-based Govt Committee distributes greater than $190 million cooperative program in its annual finances that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For decades, the findings show, Southern Baptists were advised the denomination could not put together a registry of intercourse offenders as a result of it might go against the denomination’s polity — or how it functions. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained a listing of offenders whereas conserving it a secret to keep away from the opportunity of getting sued. The report additionally includes private emails displaying how longtime leaders resembling August Boto have been dismissive about sexual abuse issues, calling them “a satanic scheme to completely distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 electronic mail, the convention’s legal professional despatched Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database could possibly be carried out according to SBC polity, saying “it will match our polity and current ministries to help church buildings in this area of kid abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he beneficial “instant action to signal the Convention’s want that the [executive committee] and the entities begin a more aggressive effort in this space.” That same yr, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a movement for a database, Boto rejected the idea.

For a denomination designed to give more democratic power to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to fee the third-party investigation, the report shows how lay Southern Baptists allowed a couple of key leaders, including Boto and the conference’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to control the national institutional response to sex abuse for many years. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, stated he had not read the report yet. Makes an attempt to reach Boto on Sunday have been unsuccessful.

“The report goes to validate a lot about how they really blindly chose to stay on the same path all these years,” stated 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 alongside. Now Southern Baptists have to carry the load.”

During Executive Committee meetings in 2021, some members argued in opposition to waiving attorney-client privilege, which would give investigators entry 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 will bankrupt the SBC by exposing it to lawsuits.

The talk 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 also led to the resignation of the Government 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 also led to the resignation of the conference’s attorneys, who are named throughout the report.

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In response to the report, Floyd told SBC leaders in a 2019 electronic mail that he had obtained “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “growing concern about all of the emphasis on the sexual abuse crisis.” He then acknowledged: “Our priority can't be the most recent cultural disaster.” Floyd didn't instantly return a request for remark.

Christa Brown, who advised SBC leaders that she was abused by a youth pastor who went on to serve in different Southern Baptist churches 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 again to her during her speech and another chortled.”

“The Govt Committee betrayed not only survivors who worked onerous to try to make one thing happen, however betrayed the whole Southern Baptist Convention,” stated Brown, who's a retired appellate attorney in Colorado. “They’ve made their very own religion right into a complicit accomplice for their own resolution to choose institutional protection over the safety of kids and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists throughout its last annual assembly, comes just weeks before its subsequent gathering in Anaheim, Calif., the place members are anticipated discuss next steps. Recommendations by Guidepost embody offering devoted survivor advocacy help and a survivor compensation fund.

“We must be able to take meaningful steps to alter our tradition as it relates to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the present SBC president, mentioned in an announcement.

Since many years of sex abuse and coverups within the Catholic Church were reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have published lists of clergymen they are saying have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to stop the switch of abusers to different churches. 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 Executive Committee presidents, in line with the report. He expressed his considerations that SBC leaders may very well be falling into a number of the same patterns as Catholic leaders in not coping with clergy intercourse abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists should study from Catholic mistakes and take action early on to implement structural reforms in order to make children 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 haven't any authority over native churches” however that they might attempt to use their “influence” to offer protections. In an article, Web page accused a survivor group of getting a hidden agenda of setting up the nation’s largest Protestant physique for lawsuits. Page later resigned from his position in 2018 over having a “morally inappropriate relationship.” Web page did not instantly 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 process force on the problem and stated that the report exhibits a necessity for establishments like the SBC to hunt outside expertise on sex abuse.

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

The difficulty of intercourse abuse was a outstanding theme in leaked private 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 stated he expects Southern Baptists to obtain Sunday’s report in an analogous 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 mentioned. “Individuals will say, ‘This isn't all Southern Baptists, look at all the great we do.’ The report demonstrates a pattern of stonewalling, coverup, intimidation and retaliation.”

Moore said 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 previous twenty years preventing for reform.