Southern Baptist leaders covered up intercourse abuse, explosive report says

Leaders in the Southern Baptist Conference on Sunday released a major third-party investigation that discovered that intercourse abuse survivors were often ignored, minimized and “even vilified” by top clergy in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

The findings of almost 300 pages embrace stunning new details about specific abuse cases and shine a lightweight on how denominational leaders for many years actively resisted requires abuse prevention and reform. Proof in the report suggests leaders also lied to Southern Baptists over whether they might keep a database of offenders to stop more abuse when prime leaders had been secretly preserving a non-public list for years.

The report — the first investigation of its form in an enormous Protestant denomination like the SBC — is anticipated to ship shock waves all through a conservative Christian neighborhood that has had intense internal battles over easy methods to handle sex abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, along with different spiritual establishments in the USA, 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 amongst Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for nearly two decades, survivors of abuse and other concerned Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Convention’s administrative arm to report alleged baby molesters and different accused abusers who have been within the pulpit or employed as church staff members. Most of the instances referred to in the report were thought of outside the statute of limitations, the time survivors can report intercourse abuse, so it’s unclear how many abusers have been criminally charged.

The report, compiled by a company referred to as Guidepost Options on 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 have been involved more with protecting the institution from liability than from protecting Southern Baptists from additional abuse.

“Whereas stories of abuse have been minimized, and survivors were ignored or even vilified, revelations came to mild in recent times that some senior SBC leaders had protected and even supported alleged abusers, the report states.

Whereas the report focuses totally on how leaders handled abuse points when survivors got here forward, it additionally states that a main Southern Baptist leader 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 vp at the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a girl during a Panama City Seaside, Fla., trip in 2010.

The report states that Hunt, in an interview with investigators, denied any physical contact with the woman however acknowledged that he had interactions along with her. After the report was released, Hunt, who has not been charged over the alleged incident, posted a statement 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 Could 13 from the North American Mission Board, in accordance with an announcement by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell said that earlier than Could 13, he was not conscious of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Typically, he known as the details of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

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Intercourse abuse survivors, many of whom have been sharing their tales for years, anticipated Sunday’s release would verify the facts around many of the stories they have already shared, however many had been nonetheless stunned to see the sample of coverups by the very best ranges of leadership.

“I knew it was rotten, nevertheless 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 in the report. “It is a denomination that's via and thru about energy. It is misappropriated power. It does not in any means reflect the Jesus I see within the scriptures. I am 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 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 focused on actions by the SBC’s Government Committee, which handles financial and administrative duties. Although Southern Baptist church buildings operate independently from one another, the Nashville-based Govt Committee distributes greater than $190 million cooperative program in its annual finances that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For decades, the findings present, Southern Baptists had been advised 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 a list of offenders while conserving it a secret to avoid the opportunity of getting sued. The report also includes private emails exhibiting how longtime leaders comparable to August Boto had been dismissive about sexual abuse concerns, calling them “a satanic scheme to completely distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 electronic mail, the convention’s attorney sent Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database could be carried out according to SBC polity, saying “it would fit our polity and present ministries to assist churches in this space of kid abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he really useful “speedy action to sign the Conference’s need that the [executive committee] and the entities start a extra aggressive effort in this area.” That very same 12 months, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a movement for a database, Boto rejected the concept.

For a denomination designed to give 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 couple of key leaders, together with Boto and the conference’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to regulate the nationwide institutional response to intercourse abuse for many years. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, mentioned he had not learn the report yet. Attempts to succeed in Boto on Sunday had been unsuccessful.

“The report goes to validate so much about how they really blindly selected to remain on the same path all these years,” mentioned 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 load.”

Throughout Government Committee meetings in 2021, some members argued towards waiving attorney-client privilege, which would give investigators access to records of conversations on authorized matters among the committee’s members and staffers. They mentioned doing so went in opposition to the advice of conference legal professionals and will bankrupt the SBC by exposing it to lawsuits.

The debate over waiving privilege upset a large swath of Southern Baptists, causing 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 Executive 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 conference’s attorneys, who are named all through the report.

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In line with the report, Floyd informed SBC leaders in a 2019 e-mail that he had acquired “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “growing concern about all the emphasis on the sexual abuse crisis.” He then stated: “Our priority cannot be the newest cultural disaster.” 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 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 back to her throughout her speech and one other chortled.”

“The Govt Committee betrayed not only survivors who worked exhausting to try to make one thing occur, but betrayed the entire Southern Baptist Convention,” said Brown, who's a retired appellate lawyer in Colorado. “They’ve made their very own religion right into a complicit companion for their very own choice to decide on institutional safety over the protection of kids and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists during its last annual assembly, comes simply weeks earlier than its subsequent gathering in Anaheim, Calif., where members are anticipated talk about next steps. Suggestions by Guidepost embrace offering dedicated survivor advocacy assist and a survivor compensation fund.

“We should be able to take significant steps to change our culture as it relates to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the present SBC president, stated in a press release.

Since many years of intercourse abuse and coverups in the Catholic Church had been reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have published lists of monks they say have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to stop the switch of abusers to other churches. Unlike 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 Executive Committee presidents, according to the report. He expressed his concerns that SBC leaders could be falling into some of the identical patterns as Catholic leaders in not coping with clergy intercourse abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists ought to be taught from Catholic mistakes and take action early on to implement structural reforms in order to make children safer.

The report states that Frank Page, who was leading the Govt Committee at the time, responded to Doyle in a brief letter that “Southern Baptist leaders actually don't have any authority over local church buildings” however that they'd try to make use of their “influence” to offer protections. In an article, Web page accused a survivor group of having a hidden agenda of setting up the nation’s largest Protestant body for lawsuits. Web page later resigned from his position 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 task drive on the problem and stated that the report shows a necessity for institutions just like the SBC to seek exterior expertise on intercourse abuse.

“It reveals a stage of coverup and harassment and resistance to reforms on an institutional stage that has led to many years of survivors being victimized and hurt,” Denhollander mentioned. “The question Southern Baptists have to ask is, ‘How may this happen?’”

The difficulty of sex abuse was a distinguished theme in leaked non-public letters written by Russell Moore, who left his position in 2021 as head of the SBC’s policy arm, the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. Moore said he expects Southern Baptists to receive Sunday’s report in the same method 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. “People will say, ‘This isn't all Southern Baptists, look at all the good we do.’ The report demonstrates a sample of stonewalling, coverup, intimidation and retaliation.”

Moore mentioned he hopes the SBC will contemplate 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 two decades preventing for reform.