Southern Baptist leaders coated up intercourse abuse, explosive report says

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

The findings of practically 300 pages include surprising new details about specific abuse circumstances and shine a light-weight on how denominational leaders for many years actively resisted requires abuse prevention and reform. Evidence within the report suggests leaders also lied to Southern Baptists over whether they could maintain a database of offenders to forestall more abuse when top leaders had been secretly holding a non-public checklist for years.

The report — the primary investigation of its form in an enormous Protestant denomination just like the SBC — is expected to ship shock waves throughout a conservative Christian neighborhood that has had intense inner battles over learn how to handle intercourse abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, together with different non secular institutions in the United States, has struggled with declining membership for the previous 15 years. Its leaders have lengthy resisted comparisons between its sexual abuse crisis and that of the Catholic Church, saying the entire number of abuse cases among Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for almost 20 years, survivors of abuse and other concerned Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Convention’s administrative arm to report alleged little one molesters and different accused abusers who were within the pulpit or employed as church staff members. Most of the instances referred to within the report had been thought of outside the statute of limitations, the time survivors can report intercourse abuse, so it’s unclear what number of abusers were criminally charged.

The report, compiled by an organization referred to as Guidepost Solutions at the request of Southern Baptists, states that abuse survivors’ calls and emails have been “solely 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 legal responsibility than from defending Southern Baptists from further abuse.

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

While the report focuses primarily on how leaders handled abuse points when survivors got here forward, it also states that a major Southern Baptist leader was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a woman just 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 vice president on the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a girl during a Panama City Seashore, Fla., vacation in 2010.

The report states that Hunt, in an interview with investigators, denied any physical contact with the woman but acknowledged that he had interactions together 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 anyone.”

Hunt resigned on May 13 from the North American Mission Board, based on an announcement by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell stated that before Could 13, he was not aware of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Generally, he known as the main points of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

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

Sex abuse survivors, lots of whom have been sharing their tales for years, anticipated Sunday’s launch would affirm the info round lots of the tales they've already shared, however many had been still surprised to see the sample of coverups by the best ranges of management.

“I knew it was rotten, however it’s astonishing and infuriating,” said Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was as soon as the highest-paid feminine executive at the SBC and whose story of sexual abuse at a Southern Baptist seminary is detailed in the report. “This can be a denomination that's through and thru about energy. It's misappropriated energy. It doesn't in any approach replicate 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, including three past presidents of the conference, 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. Although Southern Baptist churches operate independently from one another, the Nashville-based Government Committee distributes greater than $190 million cooperative program in its annual finances that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For many years, the findings present, Southern Baptists were informed the denomination could not put together a registry of sex offenders as a result of it might go against the denomination’s polity — or how it features. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained a list of offenders whereas holding it a secret to keep away from the potential for getting sued. The report also contains personal emails displaying how longtime leaders reminiscent of August Boto were dismissive about sexual abuse concerns, calling them “a satanic scheme to fully distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 e mail, the conference’s attorney despatched Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database may very well be applied according to SBC polity, saying “it might match our polity and current ministries to assist churches on this area of kid abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he really useful “instant action to signal the Convention’s desire that the [executive committee] and the entities begin a more aggressive effort in this space.” That very same year, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a motion for a database, Boto rejected the idea.

For a denomination designed to provide 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, including Boto and the convention’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to manage the national institutional response to intercourse abuse for many years. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, said he had not learn the report but. Makes an attempt to succeed in Boto on Sunday were unsuccessful.

“The report goes to validate so much about how they really 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 along. Now Southern Baptists have to carry the burden.”

During Govt Committee conferences in 2021, some members argued in opposition to waiving attorney-client privilege, which might give investigators access to data of conversations on legal matters 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 debate over waiving privilege upset a big swath of Southern Baptists, inflicting some to imagine 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 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 convention’s attorneys, who are named all through the report.

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Based on the report, Floyd informed SBC leaders in a 2019 electronic mail that he had received “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “growing concern about all of the emphasis on the sexual abuse disaster.” He then said: “Our precedence cannot be the newest cultural disaster.” Floyd did not 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 other 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 Executive Committee “turned his back to her throughout her speech and another chortled.”

“The Executive Committee betrayed not solely survivors who worked hard to attempt to make something happen, but betrayed the entire Southern Baptist Conference,” said Brown, who is a retired appellate attorney in Colorado. “They’ve made their own religion right into a complicit partner for their very own resolution to choose institutional safety over the protection of children and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists throughout its final annual assembly, comes simply weeks earlier than its next gathering in Anaheim, Calif., where members are expected discuss subsequent steps. Recommendations by Guidepost embrace offering devoted survivor advocacy support and a survivor compensation fund.

“We have to be ready to take significant steps to vary our culture because it pertains to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the current SBC president, stated in an announcement.

Since decades of sex abuse and coverups in the Catholic Church were reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have printed lists of priests they say have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to prevent the switch of abusers to different churches. In contrast to 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 Executive Committee presidents, in response to the report. He expressed his concerns that SBC leaders could be falling into a number of the identical patterns as Catholic leaders in not coping with clergy intercourse abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists ought to study from Catholic mistakes and take action early on to implement structural reforms so as to make children safer.

The report states that Frank Page, who was leading the Executive Committee at the time, responded to Doyle in a brief letter that “Southern Baptist leaders really don't have any authority over local churches” but that they would try to use their “influence” to supply protections. In an article, Page accused a survivor group of having a hidden agenda of organising the nation’s largest Protestant body for lawsuits. Page later resigned from his place in 2018 over having a “morally inappropriate relationship.” Page didn't 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 process pressure on the difficulty and mentioned that the report exhibits a need for establishments just like the SBC to hunt outdoors expertise on sex abuse.

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

The issue 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 & Spiritual Liberty Fee. Moore mentioned he expects Southern Baptists to receive Sunday’s report in a similar 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 in this report are breathtaking,” Moore said. “Individuals will say, ‘This isn't all Southern Baptists, take a look at all the nice we do.’ The report demonstrates a pattern of stonewalling, coverup, intimidation and retaliation.”

Moore mentioned he hopes the SBC will contemplate replacing 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 past two decades fighting for reform.