Southern Baptist leaders covered up sex abuse, explosive report says

Leaders within the Southern Baptist Conference on Sunday released a major third-party investigation that discovered that sex abuse survivors have been usually ignored, minimized and “even vilified” by high clergy in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

The findings of almost 300 pages embody surprising new particulars about particular abuse cases and shine a light on how denominational leaders for decades actively resisted requires abuse prevention and reform. Proof within the report suggests leaders also lied to Southern Baptists over whether or not they may maintain a database of offenders to stop more abuse when high leaders were secretly preserving a private list for years.

The report — the first investigation of its variety in a large Protestant denomination like the SBC — is predicted to ship shock waves throughout a conservative Christian neighborhood that has had intense inside battles over tips on how to handle sex abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, together with other non secular establishments in the US, has struggled with declining membership for the previous 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 instances amongst Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for nearly twenty years, survivors of abuse and other involved Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Conference’s administrative arm to report alleged youngster molesters and other accused abusers who had been in the pulpit or employed as church employees members. Many of the circumstances referred to in the report were considered outdoors the statute of limitations, the time survivors can report sex abuse, so it’s unclear how many abusers had been criminally charged.

The report, compiled by a company called Guidepost Solutions on the request of Southern Baptists, states that abuse survivors’ calls and emails had been “only to be met, time and time once more, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who had been concerned extra with protecting the institution from liability than from defending Southern Baptists from further abuse.

“Whereas tales of abuse have been minimized, and survivors have been ignored and 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.

While the report focuses primarily on how leaders dealt with abuse points when survivors came ahead, it additionally states that a major Southern Baptist chief was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a girl 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 vice president on the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a lady throughout a Panama City Seaside, Fla., trip in 2010.

The report states that Hunt, in an interview with investigators, denied any physical contact with the lady but acknowledged that he had interactions along with her. After the report was released, 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've never abused anyone.”

Hunt resigned on Might 13 from the North American Mission Board, in response to a press release by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell said that before May 13, he was not aware of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Typically, he called the small print of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

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Intercourse abuse survivors, many of whom have been sharing their stories for years, anticipated Sunday’s launch would affirm the facts around many of the stories they have already shared, however many had been still stunned to see the pattern of coverups by the best levels of leadership.

“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 within the report. “It is a denomination that is via and through about energy. It's misappropriated energy. It doesn't in any method mirror the Jesus I see within the scriptures. I'm so gutted.”

The report also names a number of senior SBC leaders who protected and even supported alleged abusers, together with three past presidents of the convention, a former vice president 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 Govt Committee, which handles financial and administrative duties. Although Southern Baptist churches operate independently from one another, the Nashville-based Government Committee distributes more than $190 million cooperative program in its annual budget that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For decades, the findings show, Southern Baptists had been told the denomination couldn't put collectively a registry of sex offenders as a result of it will go towards the denomination’s polity — or the way it features. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained an inventory of offenders while protecting it a secret to keep away from the potential of getting sued. The report additionally includes private emails exhibiting how longtime leaders akin to August Boto had been dismissive about sexual abuse considerations, calling them “a satanic scheme to utterly distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 e-mail, the conference’s attorney sent Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database could be implemented in step with SBC polity, saying “it will fit our polity and current ministries to help church buildings on this space of child abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he recommended “quick action to sign the Conference’s desire that the [executive committee] and the entities begin a extra aggressive effort in this space.” That same year, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a movement for a database, Boto rejected the thought.

For a denomination designed to offer extra democratic energy to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to fee the third-party investigation, the report shows how lay Southern Baptists allowed a couple of key leaders, together with Boto and the convention’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to regulate the national institutional response to intercourse abuse for many years. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, mentioned he had not read the report but. Attempts to succeed in Boto on Sunday had been unsuccessful.

“The report is going to validate a lot about how they really blindly chose to remain 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 carry the weight.”

During Government Committee meetings in 2021, some members argued towards waiving attorney-client privilege, which would give investigators entry to information of conversations on legal issues among the committee’s members and staffers. They said doing so went in opposition to the recommendation of conference lawyers and could bankrupt the SBC by exposing it to lawsuits.

The talk 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 Executive Committee’s head, Ronnie Floyd, who also 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 conference’s attorneys, who are named all through the report.

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In response to the report, Floyd told SBC leaders in a 2019 email 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 can't be the latest cultural crisis.” Floyd did not immediately 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 church buildings in a number of 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 one other chortled.”

“The Government Committee betrayed not only survivors who labored hard to attempt to make one thing occur, but betrayed the entire Southern Baptist Conference,” mentioned Brown, who is a retired appellate attorney in Colorado. “They’ve made their own faith into a complicit partner for their own determination to choose institutional safety over the safety of children and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists throughout its final annual meeting, comes simply weeks before its next gathering in Anaheim, Calif., the place members are expected discuss subsequent steps. Suggestions by Guidepost embody providing devoted survivor advocacy assist and a survivor compensation fund.

“We have to be ready to take significant steps to change our culture because it relates to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the present SBC president, mentioned in a press release.

Since many years of intercourse abuse and coverups within the Catholic Church were reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have revealed lists of clergymen they say have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to prevent the transfer of abusers to other church buildings. Not like 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 issues that SBC leaders may very well be falling into among the similar patterns as Catholic leaders in not coping with clergy intercourse abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists ought to study from Catholic errors and take motion early on to implement structural reforms so as to make kids safer.

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

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

The difficulty of intercourse abuse was a outstanding theme in leaked private letters written by Russell Moore, who left his place in 2021 as head of the SBC’s coverage arm, the Ethics & Non secular Liberty Commission. Moore stated he expects Southern Baptists to receive Sunday’s report in the same 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 is not all Southern Baptists, look at all the great we do.’ The report demonstrates a sample of stonewalling, coverup, intimidation and retaliation.”

Moore mentioned he hopes the SBC will consider changing 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.