Southern Baptist leaders coated up intercourse abuse, explosive report says

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

The findings of nearly 300 pages include stunning new particulars about specific abuse cases and shine a light on how denominational leaders for decades actively resisted calls for abuse prevention and reform. Proof within the report suggests leaders also lied to Southern Baptists over whether they could preserve a database of offenders to stop extra abuse when prime leaders had been secretly conserving a personal record for years.

The report — the first investigation of its variety in an enormous Protestant denomination just like the SBC — is predicted to ship shock waves all through a conservative Christian neighborhood that has had intense inside battles over the right way to handle sex abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, along with other religious institutions in america, has struggled with declining membership for the past 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 nearly 20 years, survivors of abuse and different concerned Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Convention’s administrative arm to report alleged baby molesters and different accused abusers who had been within the pulpit or employed as church workers members. Lots of the circumstances referred to in the report have been thought-about 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 corporation referred to as Guidepost Options on the request of Southern Baptists, states that abuse survivors’ calls and emails were “solely to be met, time and time again, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who had been involved more with defending the institution from legal responsibility than from protecting Southern Baptists from additional abuse.

“Whereas stories of abuse had been minimized, and survivors were ignored and even vilified, revelations got here to light 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 points when survivors came ahead, it also states that a main 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 chairman at the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a woman during a Panama Metropolis Seaside, Fla., vacation in 2010.

The report states that Hunt, in an interview with investigators, denied any bodily contact with the woman but acknowledged that he had interactions 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 have by no means abused anybody.”

Hunt resigned on May 13 from the North American Mission Board, in keeping with an announcement by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell said that before Might 13, he was not conscious 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.

Sex abuse survivors, a lot of whom have been sharing their tales for years, anticipated Sunday’s release would affirm the info round lots of the tales they have already shared, but many had been still shocked to see the sample of coverups by the best ranges of leadership.

“I knew it was rotten, however it’s astonishing and infuriating,” stated Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was once the highest-paid female 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's by means of and through about power. It's misappropriated power. It does not in any method replicate 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 previous presidents of the conference, a former vice president 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 function independently from one another, the Nashville-based Executive Committee distributes greater than $190 million cooperative program in its annual price range that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For many years, the findings present, Southern Baptists had been told the denomination could not put collectively a registry of sex offenders as a result of it could go against the denomination’s polity — or how it features. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained a list of offenders while retaining it a secret to keep away from the opportunity of getting sued. The report additionally consists of non-public emails showing how longtime leaders equivalent to August Boto had 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 possibly be implemented in keeping with SBC polity, saying “it would match our polity and current ministries to assist churches on this space of kid abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he beneficial “quick action to sign the Convention’s want that the [executive committee] and the entities start a more 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 power to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to commission the third-party investigation, the report shows how lay Southern Baptists allowed a couple of key leaders, including Boto and the convention’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to control the national institutional response to sex abuse for decades. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, stated he had not learn the report but. Attempts to achieve Boto on Sunday had been unsuccessful.

“The report goes to validate a lot about how they actually blindly chose to stay on the identical path all these years,” mentioned 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 alongside. Now Southern Baptists have to hold the burden.”

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

The controversy over waiving privilege upset a large swath of Southern Baptists, inflicting some to believe 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 additionally 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 conference’s attorneys, who're named throughout the report.

Newly leaked letter details allegations that Southern Baptist leaders mishandled sex abuse claims

In response to the report, Floyd advised SBC leaders in a 2019 e mail that he had acquired “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “growing concern about all of the emphasis on the sexual abuse crisis.” He then said: “Our precedence can't be the latest cultural disaster.” Floyd didn't immediately 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 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 Executive Committee “turned his again to her throughout her speech and another chortled.”

“The Government Committee betrayed not solely survivors who worked arduous to attempt to make something occur, but betrayed the entire Southern Baptist Convention,” mentioned Brown, who is a retired appellate lawyer in Colorado. “They’ve made their very own religion right into a complicit associate for their very own decision to decide on institutional protection over the protection of kids and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists throughout its final annual meeting, comes just weeks before its subsequent gathering in Anaheim, Calif., the place members are expected focus on subsequent steps. Recommendations by Guidepost embrace providing dedicated survivor advocacy help and a survivor compensation fund.

“We have to be ready to take significant steps to vary our culture as it relates 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 have been 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 forestall the switch 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 Government Committee presidents, in accordance with the report. He expressed his concerns that SBC leaders might be falling into some of the identical patterns as Catholic leaders in not coping with clergy intercourse abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists should study from Catholic mistakes and take motion early on to implement structural reforms in order to make kids safer.

The report states that Frank Page, who was main the Government Committee at the time, responded to Doyle in a short letter that “Southern Baptist leaders really haven't any authority over local church buildings” however that they might attempt to use their “influence” to provide protections. In an article, Page accused a survivor group of getting 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.” Page didn't instantly return a request for remark.

Rachael Denhollander, a former USA gymnast who outed Larry Nassar’s serial sexual assaults, is an adviser on a Southern Baptist job drive on the issue and mentioned that the report exhibits a need for institutions just like the SBC to seek outdoors experience on intercourse abuse.

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

The issue of intercourse abuse was a prominent 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 mentioned he expects Southern Baptists to obtain Sunday’s report in an analogous 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 nice we do.’ The report demonstrates a pattern of stonewalling, coverup, intimidation and retaliation.”

Moore said he hopes the SBC will contemplate changing a statue of evangelist Billy Graham, which was moved from Nashville to Graham’s home state in 2016, with a statue of Christa Brown, the abuse survivor who spent the past 20 years fighting for reform.