Southern Baptist leaders lined up intercourse abuse, explosive report says

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

The findings of nearly 300 pages embody surprising new particulars about specific abuse circumstances and shine a lightweight on how denominational leaders for decades actively resisted calls for abuse prevention and reform. Evidence in the report suggests leaders additionally lied to Southern Baptists over whether they could keep a database of offenders to prevent extra abuse when prime leaders have been secretly holding a personal list for years.

The report — the first investigation of its sort in an enormous Protestant denomination just like the SBC — is predicted to send shock waves throughout a conservative Christian neighborhood that has had intense internal battles over learn how to handle intercourse abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, along with other non secular institutions in america, has struggled with declining membership for the past 15 years. Its leaders have long resisted comparisons between its sexual abuse crisis and that of the Catholic Church, saying the total variety of abuse instances amongst Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for nearly two decades, survivors of abuse and other involved Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Conference’s administrative arm to report alleged youngster molesters and other accused abusers who had been within the pulpit or employed as church workers members. Most of the cases referred to in the report have been thought of exterior the statute of limitations, the time survivors can report intercourse abuse, so it’s unclear how many abusers have been criminally charged.

The report, compiled by a company referred to as Guidepost Solutions 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 protecting the institution from liability than from protecting Southern Baptists from additional abuse.

“While stories of abuse have been minimized, and survivors had been ignored and even vilified, revelations got here to light in recent times 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 forward, it also states that a main Southern Baptist leader was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a woman 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 at the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a lady during a Panama City Beach, Fla., trip in 2010.

The report states that Hunt, in an interview with investigators, denied any bodily contact with the woman however acknowledged that he had interactions along 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 within the Guidepost report. I've by no means abused anyone.”

Hunt resigned on May 13 from the North American Mission Board, in line with a press release by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell stated that before Might 13, he was not aware of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Generally, 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 tales for years, anticipated Sunday’s release would affirm the information round lots of the tales they've already shared, but many have been still shocked to see the pattern of coverups by the very best levels of leadership.

“I knew it was rotten, however it’s astonishing and infuriating,” mentioned 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 within the report. “This can be a denomination that's by and through about power. It is misappropriated power. It doesn't in any way reflect the Jesus I see within 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 previous presidents of the conference, a former vice chairman 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 Executive Committee, which handles financial and administrative duties. Though Southern Baptist churches operate independently from each other, the Nashville-based Executive Committee distributes greater than $190 million cooperative program in its annual finances that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For decades, the findings present, Southern Baptists had been told the denomination couldn't put together a registry of sex offenders as a result of it might go in opposition to the denomination’s polity — or the way it capabilities. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained a list of offenders while retaining it a secret to avoid the possibility of getting sued. The report also consists of non-public emails displaying how longtime leaders comparable to August Boto were dismissive about sexual abuse concerns, calling them “a satanic scheme to utterly distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 e-mail, the conference’s lawyer despatched Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database may very well be implemented consistent with SBC polity, saying “it could fit our polity and current ministries to assist church buildings on this space of child abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he beneficial “fast action to sign the Conference’s need that the [executive committee] and the entities begin a more aggressive effort on this area.” That same year, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a movement for a database, Boto rejected the concept.

For a denomination designed to offer extra democratic energy to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to fee the third-party investigation, the report reveals how lay Southern Baptists allowed a couple of key leaders, together with Boto and the conference’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to regulate the national institutional response to sex abuse for many years. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, stated he had not read the report but. Attempts to achieve Boto on Sunday were unsuccessful.

“The report is going to validate so much about how they actually blindly chose to stay on the same path all these years,” said 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 burden.”

Throughout Executive Committee meetings in 2021, some members argued against waiving attorney-client privilege, which might give investigators entry to data of conversations on legal matters among the many committee’s members and staffers. They mentioned doing so went in opposition to the recommendation of conference legal professionals and could bankrupt the SBC by exposing it to lawsuits.

The debate over waiving privilege upset a large swath of Southern Baptists, inflicting some to believe 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 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 are named throughout the report.

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In response 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 “growing concern about all the emphasis on the sexual abuse disaster.” He then stated: “Our precedence cannot be the newest cultural crisis.” Floyd did not instantly return a request for comment.

Christa Brown, who advised 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 Government Committee “turned his back to her throughout her speech and one other chortled.”

“The Govt Committee betrayed not solely survivors who labored exhausting to try to make one thing happen, however betrayed the whole Southern Baptist Conference,” mentioned Brown, who's a retired appellate lawyer in Colorado. “They’ve made their very own religion right into a complicit accomplice for their very own decision to choose institutional safety over the safety of youngsters and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists throughout its last annual meeting, comes just weeks earlier than its subsequent gathering in Anaheim, Calif., where members are expected focus on next steps. Recommendations by Guidepost embody offering dedicated survivor advocacy help and a survivor compensation fund.

“We have to be able to take meaningful steps to alter our culture because it relates to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the current SBC president, said in an announcement.

Since many years of intercourse abuse and coverups in the Catholic Church were 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 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 sex abuse crisis, wrote to the SBC and Govt Committee presidents, based on the report. He expressed his issues that SBC leaders could possibly be falling into some of the identical patterns as Catholic leaders in not dealing with clergy sex abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists should be taught from Catholic errors and take motion early on to implement structural reforms so as to make children safer.

The report states that Frank Page, who was leading the Government Committee on the time, responded to Doyle in a short letter that “Southern Baptist leaders truly haven't any authority over native church buildings” however that they would try to use their “affect” to provide protections. In an article, Page accused a survivor group of getting a hidden agenda of establishing the nation’s largest Protestant body for lawsuits. Web page later resigned from his position in 2018 over having a “morally inappropriate relationship.” Web page did not 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 job drive on the issue and mentioned that the report reveals a need for establishments like the SBC to hunt outdoors experience on intercourse abuse.

“It exhibits a level of coverup and harassment and resistance to reforms on an institutional degree that has led to decades of survivors being victimized and damage,” Denhollander mentioned. “The query Southern Baptists must ask is, ‘How could this happen?’”

The problem of intercourse abuse was a distinguished theme in leaked non-public letters written by Russell Moore, who left his place in 2021 as head of the SBC’s policy arm, the Ethics & Spiritual Liberty Commission. Moore stated he expects Southern Baptists to obtain Sunday’s report in an analogous approach 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. “Folks 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 stated he hopes the SBC will contemplate 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 20 years fighting for reform.