Southern Baptist leaders coated up intercourse abuse, explosive report says

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

The findings of almost 300 pages embrace surprising new details about specific abuse instances and shine a light-weight on how denominational leaders for decades actively resisted requires abuse prevention and reform. Evidence within the report suggests leaders additionally lied to Southern Baptists over whether they might preserve a database of offenders to prevent more abuse when high leaders have been secretly conserving a private listing for years.

The report — the primary investigation of its sort in a large Protestant denomination like the SBC — is anticipated to ship shock waves all through a conservative Christian community that has had intense inner battles over how you can deal with intercourse abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, together with other spiritual institutions in the USA, has struggled with declining membership for the past 15 years. Its leaders have long resisted comparisons between its sexual abuse disaster and that of the Catholic Church, saying the whole number of abuse instances amongst Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for nearly 20 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 other accused abusers who have been within the pulpit or employed as church employees members. Many of the circumstances referred to in the report had been thought of exterior the statute of limitations, the time survivors can report intercourse abuse, so it’s unclear what number of abusers were criminally charged.

The report, compiled by a corporation referred to as Guidepost Solutions at the request of Southern Baptists, states that abuse survivors’ calls and emails were “only to be met, time and time again, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who have been concerned extra with defending the establishment from liability than from defending Southern Baptists from additional abuse.

“Whereas tales of abuse have been minimized, and survivors have been ignored and even vilified, revelations got here to gentle lately that some senior SBC leaders had protected and even supported alleged abusers, the report states.

Whereas the report focuses totally on how leaders dealt with abuse points when survivors came ahead, it also states that a main Southern Baptist chief was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a woman 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 lady during a Panama City Seaside, Fla., trip in 2010.

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

Hunt resigned on May 13 from the North American Mission Board, in keeping with a press release by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell mentioned that earlier than Might 13, he was not conscious of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Usually, he referred to as the details of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

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Intercourse abuse survivors, a lot of whom have been sharing their tales for years, anticipated Sunday’s release would confirm the information round most of the stories they've already shared, but many had been nonetheless stunned to see the sample of coverups by the very best ranges of management.

“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 government at the SBC and whose story of sexual abuse at a Southern Baptist seminary is detailed in the report. “This can be a denomination that is via and through about power. It is misappropriated power. It doesn't in any manner reflect the Jesus I see in the scriptures. I am so gutted.”

The report also names several 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 targeted on actions by the SBC’s Government Committee, which handles financial and administrative duties. Though Southern Baptist church buildings function independently from each other, the Nashville-based Govt Committee distributes more than $190 million cooperative program in its annual funds that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For decades, the findings show, Southern Baptists were instructed the denomination couldn't put collectively a registry of sex offenders because 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 preserving it a secret to keep away from the possibility of getting sued. The report also consists of non-public emails displaying how longtime leaders comparable to August Boto have been dismissive about sexual abuse concerns, calling them “a satanic scheme to fully distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 e-mail, the convention’s lawyer sent Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database could possibly be carried out in keeping with SBC polity, saying “it might match our polity and present ministries to assist churches on this space of kid abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he advisable “immediate motion to sign the Conference’s want that the [executive committee] and the entities begin a more aggressive effort in this space.” That very same year, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a motion for a database, Boto rejected the concept.

For a denomination designed to give extra democratic power to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to commission the third-party investigation, the report exhibits how lay Southern Baptists allowed just a few key leaders, together with Boto and the conference’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to control the national institutional response to sex abuse for many years. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, stated he had not read the report but. Makes an attempt to reach Boto on Sunday were unsuccessful.

“The report is going to validate so much about how they actually blindly selected to remain on the same 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 along. Now Southern Baptists have to hold 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 authorized issues among the many committee’s members and staffers. They stated doing so went against the recommendation of convention legal professionals and will bankrupt the SBC by exposing it to lawsuits.

The controversy over waiving privilege upset a big swath of Southern Baptists, causing some to consider 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 as soon as served as SBC president and was on President Donald Trump’s evangelical advisory council. The decision over attorney-client privilege additionally led to the resignation of the convention’s attorneys, who are named all through the report.

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In line with the report, Floyd told SBC leaders in a 2019 email that he had obtained “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “growing concern about all of the emphasis on the sexual abuse disaster.” He then acknowledged: “Our priority can't be the most recent cultural disaster.” 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 other Southern Baptist churches 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 throughout her speech and another chortled.”

“The Executive Committee betrayed not solely survivors who labored arduous to attempt to make something occur, but betrayed the whole Southern Baptist Convention,” mentioned Brown, who is a retired appellate legal professional in Colorado. “They’ve made their own religion right into a complicit accomplice for their very own resolution to choose institutional protection over the safety of children and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists during its last annual meeting, comes just 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 help and a survivor compensation fund.

“We have to be able to take significant steps to alter our tradition because it pertains to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the current SBC president, mentioned in a press release.

Since many years of sex abuse and coverups in the Catholic Church were reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have revealed lists of clergymen they are saying have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to stop the switch of abusers to other churches. In contrast to 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, based on the report. He expressed his considerations that SBC leaders could be falling into some of the same 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 action early on to implement structural reforms so as to make kids safer.

The report states that Frank Web page, who was leading the Govt Committee at the time, responded to Doyle in a short letter that “Southern Baptist leaders actually don't have any authority over native churches” however that they would attempt to use their “affect” to provide protections. In an article, Page accused a survivor group of having a hidden agenda of setting up the nation’s largest Protestant physique for lawsuits. Web page later resigned from his place in 2018 over having a “morally inappropriate relationship.” 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 process drive on the issue and stated that the report exhibits a need for establishments just like the SBC to seek outdoors expertise on sex abuse.

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

The issue of intercourse abuse was a distinguished theme in leaked private letters written by Russell Moore, who left his place in 2021 as head of the SBC’s policy arm, the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. Moore stated he expects Southern Baptists to receive Sunday’s report in a similar 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 stated. “Individuals will say, ‘This is not all Southern Baptists, take a look at all the nice we do.’ The report demonstrates a sample 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 house state in 2016, with a statue of Christa Brown, the abuse survivor who spent the past two decades combating for reform.