Southern Baptist leaders covered up intercourse abuse, explosive report says

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

The findings of practically 300 pages include surprising new particulars about specific abuse cases and shine a light-weight on how denominational leaders for decades actively resisted requires abuse prevention and reform. Proof in the report suggests leaders additionally lied to Southern Baptists over whether or not they could maintain a database of offenders to prevent extra abuse when high leaders had been secretly maintaining a personal record for years.

The report — the first investigation of its sort in a large Protestant denomination just like the SBC — is predicted to send shock waves throughout a conservative Christian neighborhood that has had intense inside battles over the way to handle sex abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, along with different spiritual institutions in the USA, 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 whole variety of abuse cases amongst Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for almost twenty years, survivors of abuse and other involved Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Convention’s administrative arm to report alleged baby molesters and other accused abusers who had been within the pulpit or employed as church employees members. Lots of the cases referred to within the report were thought-about outside 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 called 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 had been concerned more with defending the establishment from legal responsibility than from protecting Southern Baptists from additional abuse.

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

Whereas the report focuses totally on how leaders dealt with abuse points when survivors came forward, it also states that a major Southern Baptist leader was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a lady just 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 chairman at the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a girl during a Panama Metropolis Beach, Fla., trip in 2010.

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

Hunt resigned on Might 13 from the North American Mission Board, in keeping with a press release by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell mentioned that before Could 13, he was not conscious of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Usually, he called the details of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

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

Sex abuse survivors, a lot of whom have been sharing their tales for years, anticipated Sunday’s launch would affirm the details round lots of the stories they have already shared, but many had been still shocked to see the pattern of coverups by the best ranges of management.

“I knew it was rotten, however it’s astonishing and infuriating,” mentioned Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was as soon as the highest-paid feminine executive on the SBC and whose story of sexual abuse at a Southern Baptist seminary is detailed in the report. “It is a denomination that is by and through about energy. It's misappropriated energy. It doesn't in any approach mirror the Jesus I see within the scriptures. I am so gutted.”

The report additionally names several senior SBC leaders who protected and even supported alleged abusers, together with three previous presidents of the convention, a former vice chairman and the previous head of the SBC’s administrative arm.

The third-party investigation into actions between 2000 and 2021 targeted on actions by the SBC’s Government Committee, which handles financial and administrative duties. Though Southern Baptist churches operate independently from one another, the Nashville-based Government Committee distributes greater than $190 million cooperative program in its annual price range that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For many years, the findings present, Southern Baptists had been told the denomination couldn't put collectively 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 while maintaining it a secret to avoid the possibility of getting sued. The report also consists of private emails displaying how longtime leaders resembling August Boto have been dismissive about sexual abuse concerns, calling them “a satanic scheme to fully distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 email, the convention’s legal professional despatched Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database might be applied in step with SBC polity, saying “it will match our polity and present ministries to help church buildings on this space of child abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he beneficial “rapid motion to signal the Convention’s want that the [executive committee] and the entities start a more aggressive effort in this space.” That same 12 months, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a motion 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 exhibits how lay Southern Baptists allowed a number of key leaders, together with Boto and the conference’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to regulate the national institutional response to sex abuse for decades. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, mentioned he had not learn the report but. Attempts to achieve Boto on Sunday had been unsuccessful.

“The report is going to validate a lot about how they actually 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 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 would give investigators access to data of conversations on legal issues among the many committee’s members and staffers. They mentioned doing so went in opposition to the recommendation of conference lawyers and will bankrupt the SBC by exposing it to lawsuits.

The debate over waiving privilege upset a big swath of Southern Baptists, inflicting some to consider 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 Executive Committee’s head, Ronnie Floyd, who additionally once 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're named throughout the report.

Newly leaked letter details allegations that Southern Baptist leaders mishandled sex abuse claims

In response to the report, Floyd advised SBC leaders in a 2019 e mail that he had acquired “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “growing concern about all of the emphasis on the sexual abuse disaster.” He then stated: “Our precedence cannot be the most recent cultural disaster.” Floyd did not immediately 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 other Southern Baptist churches 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 Executive Committee betrayed not only survivors who worked hard to try to make something occur, however betrayed the entire Southern Baptist Convention,” stated Brown, who's a retired appellate lawyer in Colorado. “They’ve made their very own faith right into a complicit accomplice for their own choice to decide on institutional protection over the safety of children and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists during its last annual assembly, comes just weeks earlier than its subsequent gathering in Anaheim, Calif., the place members are expected talk about subsequent steps. Recommendations by Guidepost embody offering devoted survivor advocacy assist and a survivor compensation fund.

“We should be able to take significant steps to alter our culture because it pertains to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the present SBC president, said in a statement.

Since a long time of intercourse abuse and coverups within the Catholic Church had been reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have printed lists of priests they are saying have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to forestall the transfer 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 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 few of the identical patterns as Catholic leaders in not dealing with clergy intercourse abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists ought to study from Catholic errors and take action early on to implement structural reforms in order to make kids safer.

The report states that Frank Page, who was leading the Executive Committee on the time, responded to Doyle in a short letter that “Southern Baptist leaders actually haven't any authority over native church buildings” however that they would try to use their “influence” to provide protections. In an article, Web page accused a survivor group of having a hidden agenda of establishing the nation’s largest Protestant body 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 comment.

Rachael Denhollander, a former USA gymnast who outed Larry Nassar’s serial sexual assaults, is an adviser on a Southern Baptist activity drive on the issue and mentioned that the report shows a necessity for establishments just like the SBC to seek outdoors experience on sex abuse.

“It shows a stage of coverup and harassment and resistance to reforms on an institutional level that has led to a long time of survivors being victimized and harm,” Denhollander said. “The question Southern Baptists need to ask is, ‘How might this occur?’”

The difficulty of sex abuse was a prominent 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 mentioned he expects Southern Baptists to obtain Sunday’s report in a similar 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 on this report are breathtaking,” Moore stated. “Folks 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 mentioned he hopes the SBC will contemplate 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 twenty years preventing for reform.