Southern Baptist leaders coated up sex abuse, explosive report says

Leaders in the Southern Baptist Convention on Sunday released a major 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 include surprising new details about particular abuse instances and shine a light on how denominational leaders for decades actively resisted calls for abuse prevention and reform. Evidence in the report suggests leaders also lied to Southern Baptists over whether or not they could preserve a database of offenders to stop more abuse when prime leaders had been secretly maintaining a personal listing for years.

The report — the first investigation of its type in an enormous Protestant denomination just like the SBC — is anticipated to ship shock waves throughout a conservative Christian community that has had intense internal battles over the best 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 previous 15 years. Its leaders have long resisted comparisons between its sexual abuse disaster and that of the Catholic Church, saying the overall number of abuse instances among Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for nearly twenty years, survivors of abuse and other concerned Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Convention’s administrative arm to report alleged child molesters and other accused abusers who were within the pulpit or employed as church staff members. Most of the cases referred to in the report had been considered 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 an organization called Guidepost Options at the request of Southern Baptists, states that abuse survivors’ calls and emails had been “only to be met, time and time again, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who were concerned extra with defending the institution from liability than from defending Southern Baptists from additional abuse.

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

While the report focuses primarily on how leaders handled abuse points when survivors came forward, it also states that a main Southern Baptist chief 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 woman during a Panama City Beach, Fla., vacation 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 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 anybody.”

Hunt resigned on Might 13 from the North American Mission Board, in line with 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 called the small print 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, a lot of whom have been sharing their tales for years, anticipated Sunday’s launch would affirm the info round lots of the tales they have already shared, but many had been nonetheless surprised to see the pattern of coverups by the best levels of management.

“I knew it was rotten, nevertheless it’s astonishing and infuriating,” mentioned Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was once 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 through and thru about energy. It's misappropriated power. It doesn't in any approach replicate the Jesus I see within 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 vp 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 Govt Committee, which handles monetary and administrative duties. Although Southern Baptist churches 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 decades, the findings present, Southern Baptists had been told the denomination could not put together a registry of intercourse offenders as a result of it will go against the denomination’s polity — or how it features. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained an inventory of offenders whereas keeping it a secret to keep away from the potential for getting sued. The report also includes personal emails showing how longtime leaders reminiscent of August Boto had been dismissive about sexual abuse considerations, calling them “a satanic scheme to fully distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 electronic mail, the convention’s lawyer sent Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database may very well be carried out in step with SBC polity, saying “it might 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 “speedy motion to signal the Conference’s need that the [executive committee] and the entities start a extra aggressive effort on this area.” That very same year, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a movement for a database, Boto rejected the concept.

For a denomination designed to offer more democratic energy to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to commission the third-party investigation, the report exhibits how lay Southern Baptists allowed a couple of key leaders, together with Boto and the conference’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to control the nationwide institutional response to sex abuse for decades. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, mentioned he had not learn the report but. Makes an attempt to achieve Boto on Sunday have been unsuccessful.

“The report is going to validate a lot about how they actually blindly selected to remain on the identical path all these years,” said 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 hold the burden.”

During Executive Committee conferences in 2021, some members argued against waiving attorney-client privilege, which might give investigators entry to data of conversations on legal issues among the many committee’s members and staffers. They said doing so went against the recommendation of convention lawyers 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 consider the Executive 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 Govt 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 additionally led to the resignation of the convention’s attorneys, who are 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 obtained “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “growing concern about all the emphasis on the sexual abuse crisis.” He then acknowledged: “Our priority cannot be the most recent cultural crisis.” Floyd didn't immediately return a request for remark.

Christa Brown, who told 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 Executive Committee “turned his back to her during her speech and one other chortled.”

“The Govt Committee betrayed not solely survivors who worked onerous to attempt to make one thing occur, but betrayed the entire Southern Baptist Convention,” said Brown, who's a retired appellate legal professional in Colorado. “They’ve made their very own faith into a complicit associate for their very own decision to decide on institutional protection over the safety of children and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists during its final annual assembly, comes just weeks before its next gathering in Anaheim, Calif., where members are expected focus on next steps. Suggestions by Guidepost embrace offering devoted survivor advocacy support and a survivor compensation fund.

“We should be ready to take significant steps to vary our tradition because it pertains to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the present SBC president, mentioned in a press release.

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 revealed lists of clergymen they are saying have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to prevent the transfer of abusers to other churches. 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 crisis, wrote to the SBC and Executive Committee presidents, according to the report. He expressed his considerations that SBC leaders could be falling into among the identical patterns as Catholic leaders in not dealing with clergy sex abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists ought to learn from Catholic errors and take action early on to implement structural reforms so as to make children safer.

The report states that Frank Page, who was main the Government Committee at the time, responded to Doyle in a brief letter that “Southern Baptist leaders truly have no authority over native churches” however that they might try to use their “affect” to provide protections. In an article, Page accused a survivor group of getting a hidden agenda of setting up the nation’s largest Protestant body for lawsuits. Web page later resigned from his position in 2018 over having a “morally inappropriate relationship.” 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 drive on the issue and stated that the report exhibits a need for institutions just like the SBC to seek outdoors expertise on intercourse abuse.

“It exhibits a level of coverup and harassment and resistance to reforms on an institutional level that has led to a long time of survivors being victimized and hurt,” Denhollander stated. “The query Southern Baptists need to ask is, ‘How might this happen?’”

The problem of intercourse 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 & Non secular Liberty Fee. Moore said he expects Southern Baptists to receive Sunday’s report in an identical method 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 in this report are breathtaking,” Moore stated. “People will say, ‘This is not 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 consider 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 fighting for reform.