Southern Baptist leaders covered up intercourse abuse, explosive report says

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

The findings of nearly 300 pages embrace shocking new particulars about specific abuse cases and shine a light-weight on how denominational leaders for many years actively resisted requires abuse prevention and reform. Evidence in the report suggests leaders also lied to Southern Baptists over whether or not they might preserve a database of offenders to forestall more abuse when prime leaders were secretly retaining a private list for years.

The report — the primary investigation of its kind in a massive Protestant denomination like the SBC — is expected to send shock waves all through a conservative Christian community that has had intense internal battles over the right way to handle intercourse abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, together 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 entire number of abuse circumstances among 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 Conference’s administrative arm to report alleged baby molesters and different accused abusers who have been within the pulpit or employed as church staff members. Lots of the instances referred to in the report had been thought of exterior the statute of limitations, the time survivors can report intercourse abuse, so it’s unclear how many abusers had been criminally charged.

The report, compiled by a company referred to as 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 extra with protecting the establishment from legal responsibility than from protecting Southern Baptists from further abuse.

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

Whereas the report focuses primarily on how leaders dealt with abuse issues when survivors came 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 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 girl during a Panama Metropolis Seaside, 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 launched, Hunt, who has not been charged over the alleged incident, posted an announcement on Twitter, saying, “I vigorously deny the circumstances and characterizations set forth in the Guidepost report. I have never abused anyone.”

Hunt resigned on Could 13 from the North American Mission Board, according to a statement by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell stated that earlier than May 13, he was not aware of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Usually, he known as 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.

Intercourse abuse survivors, many 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, however many had been still shocked to see the pattern of coverups by the best levels of management.

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

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

The third-party investigation into actions between 2000 and 2021 centered on actions by the SBC’s Executive Committee, which handles monetary and administrative duties. Though Southern Baptist church buildings function independently from one another, the Nashville-based Govt Committee distributes more than $190 million cooperative program in its annual price range that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For decades, the findings show, Southern Baptists were instructed the denomination couldn't put together a registry of sex 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 list of offenders while conserving it a secret to avoid the potential for getting sued. The report additionally contains non-public emails displaying how longtime leaders reminiscent of August Boto were dismissive about sexual abuse concerns, calling them “a satanic scheme to utterly distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 email, the conference’s attorney despatched Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database might be implemented per SBC polity, saying “it will fit our polity and present ministries to assist church buildings in this area of kid abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he beneficial “rapid action to sign the Conference’s need that the [executive committee] and the entities begin a more aggressive effort in this area.” That same yr, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a motion 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 commission the third-party investigation, the report shows how lay Southern Baptists allowed just a few key leaders, including Boto and the convention’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 learn the report yet. Attempts to achieve Boto on Sunday had been unsuccessful.

“The report goes to validate so much about how they really blindly selected 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 along. Now Southern Baptists have to hold the load.”

During Govt Committee meetings in 2021, some members argued in opposition to waiving attorney-client privilege, which might give investigators access to data of conversations on authorized matters among the many committee’s members and staffers. They said 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 big swath of Southern Baptists, causing 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 also led to the resignation of the Executive Committee’s head, Ronnie Floyd, who also as soon as 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 conference’s attorneys, who're named throughout the report.

Newly leaked letter particulars allegations that Southern Baptist leaders mishandled intercourse abuse claims

In keeping with the report, Floyd told SBC leaders in a 2019 email that he had received “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 latest cultural crisis.” Floyd didn't instantly return a request for remark.

Christa Brown, who informed SBC leaders that she was abused by a youth pastor who went on to serve in other 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 Executive Committee “turned his back to her throughout her speech and one other chortled.”

“The Govt Committee betrayed not only survivors who worked hard to attempt to make something happen, however betrayed the whole Southern Baptist Conference,” stated Brown, who's a retired appellate lawyer in Colorado. “They’ve made their own faith into a complicit accomplice for their own determination to choose institutional protection over the protection of children and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists during its last annual assembly, comes simply weeks earlier than its next gathering in Anaheim, Calif., where members are anticipated focus on subsequent steps. Suggestions by Guidepost embody providing dedicated survivor advocacy assist and a survivor compensation fund.

“We should be ready to take meaningful steps to alter our tradition because it relates to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the current SBC president, stated in a statement.

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 priests they are saying 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 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 Govt Committee presidents, based on the report. He expressed his issues that SBC leaders could be falling into a few of the same patterns as Catholic leaders in not coping with clergy sex abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists should learn 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 Government Committee on the time, responded to Doyle in a short letter that “Southern Baptist leaders truly have no authority over local church buildings” however that they'd attempt to make use of 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. Web 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 process power on the issue and stated that the report shows a necessity for institutions just like the SBC to seek exterior experience on intercourse abuse.

“It shows a stage 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 stated. “The query Southern Baptists have to ask is, ‘How could this occur?’”

The issue of intercourse abuse was a distinguished theme in leaked personal letters written by Russell Moore, who left his place in 2021 as head of the SBC’s coverage arm, the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. Moore said he expects Southern Baptists to receive Sunday’s report in an identical 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. “People will say, ‘This is not all Southern Baptists, take a look at all the good we do.’ The report demonstrates a pattern of stonewalling, coverup, intimidation and retaliation.”

Moore stated he hopes the SBC will take into account 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 fighting for reform.