Southern Baptist leaders lined up sex abuse, explosive report says

Leaders in the Southern Baptist Conference on Sunday released a serious third-party investigation that discovered that sex abuse survivors had been usually ignored, minimized and “even vilified” by top 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 many years actively resisted requires abuse prevention and reform. Evidence within the report suggests leaders additionally lied to Southern Baptists over whether or not they may maintain a database of offenders to forestall extra abuse when top leaders have been secretly conserving a personal listing for years.

The report — the first investigation of its kind in a large Protestant denomination just like the SBC — is anticipated to ship shock waves throughout a conservative Christian group that has had intense internal battles over the right way to handle intercourse abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, together with different religious institutions in the US, 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 total number of abuse cases among Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for nearly 20 years, survivors of abuse and other involved Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Convention’s administrative arm to report alleged child molesters and other accused abusers who were in the pulpit or employed as church employees members. Lots of the circumstances referred to in the report have been considered 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 an organization known as Guidepost Options at the request of Southern Baptists, states that abuse survivors’ calls and emails had been “solely to be met, time and time once more, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who were concerned extra with defending the establishment from liability than from protecting Southern Baptists from further abuse.

“While tales of abuse had been minimized, and survivors were ignored or even vilified, revelations got here to mild in recent years 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 came ahead, it also states that a major Southern Baptist chief 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 vice president on the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a girl throughout a Panama City Seaside, Fla., vacation in 2010.

The report states that Hunt, in an interview with investigators, denied any bodily contact with the girl but acknowledged that he had interactions together with her. After the report was released, 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 within the Guidepost report. I've never abused anybody.”

Hunt resigned on May 13 from the North American Mission Board, in line with a statement by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell mentioned that before May 13, he was not conscious of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Typically, he referred to as the details of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

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Sex abuse survivors, lots of whom have been sharing their stories for years, anticipated Sunday’s release would affirm the facts round most of the tales they have already shared, but many had been nonetheless shocked to see the pattern of coverups by the highest ranges of leadership.

“I knew it was rotten, however it’s astonishing and infuriating,” mentioned Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was once the highest-paid female govt on the SBC and whose story of sexual abuse at a Southern Baptist seminary is detailed in the report. “This can be a denomination that is via and through about power. It's misappropriated energy. It does not in any way replicate the Jesus I see in the scriptures. I am so gutted.”

The report also names several 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 centered on actions by the SBC’s Executive Committee, which handles monetary and administrative duties. Though Southern Baptist churches operate independently from one another, the Nashville-based Govt Committee distributes more than $190 million cooperative program in its annual finances that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For decades, the findings show, Southern Baptists had been informed the denomination couldn't put together a registry of intercourse offenders as a result of it will go towards the denomination’s polity — or how it capabilities. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained a listing of offenders while conserving it a secret to avoid the potential for getting sued. The report additionally consists of non-public emails displaying how longtime leaders such as August Boto have been dismissive about sexual abuse issues, calling them “a satanic scheme to completely distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 email, the conference’s legal professional despatched Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database could be applied in line with SBC polity, saying “it might fit our polity and present ministries to assist churches in this space of child abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he really useful “immediate action to sign the Conference’s need that the [executive committee] and the entities start a extra aggressive effort in this space.” That very same year, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a motion for a database, Boto rejected the thought.

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 few key leaders, together with Boto and the conference’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to regulate the national institutional response to intercourse abuse for many years. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, said he had not read the report but. Makes an attempt to reach Boto on Sunday have been unsuccessful.

“The report is going to validate so much about how they actually blindly selected 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 hold the burden.”

During Govt Committee conferences in 2021, some members argued towards waiving attorney-client privilege, which would give investigators entry to information of conversations on legal matters among the committee’s members and staffers. They mentioned doing so went in opposition to the recommendation of convention attorneys and will bankrupt the SBC by exposing it to lawsuits.

The debate over waiving privilege upset a large 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 additionally led to the resignation of the Government Committee’s head, Ronnie Floyd, who additionally as soon as 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're 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 obtained “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “rising concern about all the emphasis on the sexual abuse disaster.” He then said: “Our precedence can't be the newest cultural crisis.” Floyd didn't 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 other Southern Baptist churches in multiple 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 Govt Committee “turned his back to her during her speech and another chortled.”

“The Government Committee betrayed not solely survivors who worked hard to attempt to make one thing happen, but betrayed the whole Southern Baptist Conference,” stated Brown, who is a retired appellate attorney in Colorado. “They’ve made their very own religion into a complicit companion 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 final annual meeting, comes just weeks earlier than its next gathering in Anaheim, Calif., the place members are expected discuss next steps. Suggestions by Guidepost embody offering devoted survivor advocacy help and a survivor compensation fund.

“We must be ready to take meaningful steps to alter our culture as it pertains to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the current SBC president, mentioned in an announcement.

Since a long time of intercourse abuse and coverups within the Catholic Church were reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have printed lists of clergymen they are saying have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to stop 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 intercourse abuse crisis, wrote to the SBC and Government Committee presidents, based on the report. He expressed his considerations that SBC leaders might be falling into some of the same 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 motion early on to implement structural reforms so as to make children safer.

The report states that Frank Page, who was leading the Govt Committee on the time, responded to Doyle in a brief letter that “Southern Baptist leaders truly haven't any authority over local churches” but that they would attempt to use their “influence” to provide protections. In an article, Web page accused a survivor group of having a hidden agenda of organising the nation’s largest Protestant physique for lawsuits. 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 activity force on the issue and stated that the report shows a need for establishments like the SBC to hunt outside expertise on sex abuse.

“It shows a degree of coverup and harassment and resistance to reforms on an institutional stage that has led to a long time of survivors being victimized and damage,” Denhollander mentioned. “The question Southern Baptists must ask is, ‘How might this happen?’”

The problem of sex 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 policy arm, the Ethics & Non secular Liberty Commission. Moore said he expects Southern Baptists to receive Sunday’s report in an identical 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 said. “Folks will say, ‘This isn't all Southern Baptists, 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 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 20 years preventing for reform.