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 sex abuse survivors have been usually ignored, minimized and “even vilified” by top clergy within the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

The findings of nearly 300 pages embody surprising new particulars about particular abuse cases and shine a light-weight on how denominational leaders for many years actively resisted calls for abuse prevention and reform. Proof within the report suggests leaders also lied to Southern Baptists over whether they might maintain a database of offenders to prevent more abuse when top leaders had been secretly retaining a private listing for years.

The report — the first investigation of its form in an enormous Protestant denomination just like the SBC — is predicted to send shock waves all through a conservative Christian group that has had intense internal battles over how one can deal with sex abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, together with other spiritual institutions in the US, has struggled with declining membership for the previous 15 years. Its leaders have lengthy resisted comparisons between its sexual abuse disaster and that of the Catholic Church, saying the entire variety of abuse cases amongst Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for almost twenty 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 employees members. Many of the instances referred to within the report were thought of exterior the statute of limitations, the time survivors can report sex abuse, so it’s unclear how many abusers were criminally charged.

The report, compiled by an organization called Guidepost Options at the request of Southern Baptists, states that abuse survivors’ calls and emails were “only to be met, time and time once more, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who have been involved more with protecting the institution from legal responsibility than from protecting Southern Baptists from additional abuse.

“Whereas stories of abuse were minimized, and survivors have been ignored or even vilified, revelations came 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 dealt with abuse issues when survivors came forward, it also states that a major Southern Baptist chief was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a lady 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., 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 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 within the Guidepost report. I have by no means abused anybody.”

Hunt resigned on May 13 from the North American Mission Board, in keeping with a statement by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell said that earlier than Might 13, he was not aware of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Generally, he referred to as the small print of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

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Sex abuse survivors, lots of whom have been sharing their tales for years, anticipated Sunday’s release would verify the facts round lots of the stories they've already shared, but many had been still surprised to see the sample of coverups by the very best levels of leadership.

“I knew it was rotten, but it’s astonishing and infuriating,” stated Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was as soon as the highest-paid female govt at 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 thru about energy. It is misappropriated energy. It doesn't in any approach mirror 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 previous 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 targeted on actions by the SBC’s Govt Committee, which handles financial and administrative duties. Though Southern Baptist churches operate independently from one another, the Nashville-based Executive 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 advised the denomination couldn't put collectively a registry of intercourse offenders as a result of it might go in opposition to the denomination’s polity — or the way it features. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained a listing of offenders while protecting it a secret to keep away from the possibility of getting sued. The report also consists of non-public emails showing how longtime leaders corresponding to August Boto had been 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 could possibly be carried out consistent with SBC polity, saying “it might fit our polity and current ministries to help churches in this area of kid abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he beneficial “fast motion to signal the Convention’s want that the [executive committee] and the entities begin a extra aggressive effort on this area.” That very same year, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a motion for a database, Boto rejected the concept.

For a denomination designed to provide more democratic energy 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, together with Boto and the conference’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to control the national institutional response to intercourse abuse for many years. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, stated he had not read the report but. Attempts to succeed in Boto on Sunday were unsuccessful.

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

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

The talk over waiving privilege upset a big swath of Southern Baptists, causing some to imagine 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 Government 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're named throughout the report.

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In line with the report, Floyd informed SBC leaders in a 2019 electronic mail that he had received “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “rising concern about all the emphasis on the sexual abuse crisis.” He then stated: “Our precedence can't be the most recent cultural disaster.” Floyd did not immediately return a request for remark.

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 Govt Committee “turned his again to her during her speech and one other chortled.”

“The Executive Committee betrayed not solely survivors who labored hard to try to make one thing happen, however betrayed the whole Southern Baptist Conference,” mentioned Brown, who is a retired appellate attorney in Colorado. “They’ve made their very own faith right into a complicit accomplice for their very own resolution to choose institutional protection over the protection of kids and congregants.”

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

“We have to be ready to take significant steps to vary our tradition as it relates to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the current SBC president, mentioned in a statement.

Since a long time of intercourse abuse and coverups in 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 forestall the switch of abusers to other churches. Unlike 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 intercourse abuse crisis, wrote to the SBC and Executive Committee presidents, based on the report. He expressed his considerations that SBC leaders could possibly be falling into some of the similar patterns as Catholic leaders in not coping with clergy intercourse abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists should be taught from Catholic errors and take action early on to implement structural reforms so as to make children safer.

The report states that Frank Web page, who was leading the Govt Committee on the time, responded to Doyle in a brief letter that “Southern Baptist leaders actually have no authority over local churches” but that they'd attempt to make use of 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 body for lawsuits. Web 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 activity force on the problem and said that the report shows a need for establishments like the SBC to hunt outdoors expertise on intercourse 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 damage,” Denhollander stated. “The question Southern Baptists should ask is, ‘How may this occur?’”

The difficulty of sex abuse was a outstanding theme in leaked non-public letters written by Russell Moore, who left his position in 2021 as head of the SBC’s coverage arm, the Ethics & Spiritual Liberty Fee. Moore stated he expects Southern Baptists to receive Sunday’s report in the same solution 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. “Folks 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 said he hopes the SBC will contemplate replacing a statue of evangelist Billy Graham, which was moved from Nashville to Graham’s residence state in 2016, with a statue of Christa Brown, the abuse survivor who spent the previous 20 years fighting for reform.