Southern Baptist leaders lined up intercourse abuse, explosive report says

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

The findings of almost 300 pages embody stunning new details about specific abuse circumstances and shine a light-weight on how denominational leaders for many years actively resisted calls for 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 prevent more abuse when top leaders were secretly conserving a personal record for years.

The report — the primary investigation of its kind in a massive Protestant denomination just like the SBC — is anticipated to send shock waves throughout a conservative Christian neighborhood that has had intense inside battles over how you can deal with intercourse abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, together with different non secular establishments in the United States, has struggled with declining membership for the past 15 years. Its leaders have lengthy resisted comparisons between its sexual abuse disaster and that of the Catholic Church, saying the total variety of abuse instances among 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 Conference’s administrative arm to report alleged little one molesters and other accused abusers who have been in the pulpit or employed as church workers members. Many of the circumstances referred to within the report were thought of outside 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 Solutions at the request of Southern Baptists, states that abuse survivors’ calls and emails had been “only to be met, time and time again, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who had been concerned more with protecting the establishment from legal responsibility than from protecting Southern Baptists from further abuse.

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

While the report focuses primarily on how leaders handled abuse points when survivors came forward, it additionally states that a major Southern Baptist leader was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a girl only one month after he accomplished his two-year tenure as president of the convention. The report finds that Johnny Hunt, a beloved Georgia-based Southern Baptist pastor who has been a senior vp on the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a girl throughout a Panama City Seashore, Fla., vacation in 2010.

The report states that Hunt, in an interview with investigators, denied any bodily contact with the woman however acknowledged that he had interactions 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've never abused anyone.”

Hunt resigned on Might 13 from the North American Mission Board, based on a press release by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell mentioned that earlier than May 13, he was not aware of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Typically, he referred to 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, lots of whom have been sharing their stories for years, anticipated Sunday’s launch would confirm the information around most of the tales they have already shared, however many had been nonetheless surprised to see the sample of coverups by the highest ranges of management.

“I knew it was rotten, nevertheless it’s astonishing and infuriating,” said Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was once the highest-paid feminine govt on the SBC and whose story of sexual abuse at a Southern Baptist seminary is detailed in the report. “This is a denomination that is via and through about energy. It is misappropriated energy. It doesn't in any way 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 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 church buildings operate independently from each other, the Nashville-based Government 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 were informed the denomination couldn't put together a registry of sex offenders as a result of it would go against the denomination’s polity — or the way it capabilities. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained a list of offenders while maintaining it a secret to avoid the potential of getting sued. The report also contains private emails exhibiting how longtime leaders comparable 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 email, the convention’s attorney sent Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database may very well be carried out consistent with SBC polity, saying “it could match our polity and current ministries to help churches in this space of kid abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he recommended “instant motion to signal the Conference’s need that the [executive committee] and the entities start a extra aggressive effort in this space.” That same year, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a motion for a database, Boto rejected the idea.

For a denomination designed to offer more democratic energy to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to fee the third-party investigation, the report shows how lay Southern Baptists allowed just a few key leaders, together with Boto and the convention’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to manage the national institutional response to sex abuse for many years. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, mentioned he had not learn the report but. Attempts to achieve Boto on Sunday were unsuccessful.

“The report goes to validate a lot about how they actually blindly chose to remain on the identical path all these years,” stated 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 carry the load.”

Throughout Govt Committee meetings in 2021, some members argued against waiving attorney-client privilege, which might give investigators access to records of conversations on legal issues among the many committee’s members and staffers. They said doing so went in opposition to the advice of convention lawyers 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 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 Govt 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 choice over attorney-client privilege also led to the resignation of the conference’s attorneys, who are named all through the report.

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

In accordance with the report, Floyd instructed SBC leaders in a 2019 e-mail that he had acquired “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “rising concern about all the emphasis on the sexual abuse disaster.” He then said: “Our priority can't be the newest cultural crisis.” Floyd did not instantly return a request for comment.

Christa Brown, who told SBC leaders that she was abused by a youth pastor who went on to serve in different Southern Baptist church buildings in multiple 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 Government Committee “turned his back to her throughout her speech and another chortled.”

“The Executive Committee betrayed not solely survivors who worked hard to attempt to make one thing happen, but betrayed the whole Southern Baptist Convention,” mentioned Brown, who's a retired appellate lawyer in Colorado. “They’ve made their own religion into a complicit partner for their own choice to decide on institutional safety over the safety of kids and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists throughout its last annual meeting, comes simply weeks earlier than its next gathering in Anaheim, Calif., the place members are anticipated talk about subsequent steps. Recommendations by Guidepost embrace providing devoted survivor advocacy support and a survivor compensation fund.

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

Since many years of sex abuse and coverups within the Catholic Church had been reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have printed lists of priests they say have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to prevent the transfer of abusers to different churches. In contrast to 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 disaster, wrote to the SBC and Government Committee presidents, in keeping with the report. He expressed his issues that SBC leaders may very well be falling into among the identical patterns as Catholic leaders in not dealing with clergy intercourse abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists ought to learn from Catholic errors and take motion early on to implement structural reforms in order to make children safer.

The report states that Frank Page, who was main the Government Committee on the time, responded to Doyle in a short letter that “Southern Baptist leaders truly haven't any authority over native church buildings” but that they'd try 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 place in 2018 over having a “morally inappropriate relationship.” Web page didn't immediately 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 force on the difficulty and stated that the report reveals a necessity for establishments like the SBC to seek outdoors expertise on sex abuse.

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

The difficulty of sex abuse was a prominent theme in leaked non-public 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 stated he expects Southern Baptists to receive Sunday’s report in an analogous option 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, take a look at all the good we do.’ The report demonstrates a pattern of stonewalling, coverup, intimidation and retaliation.”

Moore said he hopes the SBC will think about replacing 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 20 years preventing for reform.