Southern Baptist leaders covered up sex abuse, explosive report says

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

The findings of practically 300 pages embody surprising new particulars about specific abuse cases and shine a light on how denominational leaders for many years actively resisted calls for abuse prevention and reform. Proof within the report suggests leaders additionally lied to Southern Baptists over whether they could keep a database of offenders to prevent more abuse when top leaders have been secretly maintaining a non-public checklist for years.

The report — the primary investigation of its kind in a massive Protestant denomination like the SBC — is predicted to send shock waves throughout a conservative Christian neighborhood that has had intense inner battles over learn how to handle sex abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, along with different spiritual institutions in the USA, 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 whole variety of abuse cases among Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for almost two decades, survivors of abuse and different concerned Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Conference’s administrative arm to report alleged youngster molesters and different accused abusers who were within the pulpit or employed as church employees members. Most of the circumstances referred to in the report had been thought of outdoors the statute of limitations, the time survivors can report intercourse abuse, so it’s unclear what number of abusers had been criminally charged.

The report, compiled by a corporation called Guidepost Solutions at the request of Southern Baptists, states that abuse survivors’ calls and emails were “solely to be met, time and time once more, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who were concerned more with protecting the establishment from liability than from protecting Southern Baptists from additional abuse.

“While stories of abuse have been minimized, and survivors have been ignored or even vilified, revelations got here to gentle lately that some senior SBC leaders had protected and 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 major Southern Baptist leader 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 City Beach, Fla., vacation in 2010.

The report states that Hunt, in an interview with investigators, denied any bodily contact with the lady but acknowledged that he had interactions along with her. After the report was launched, 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 anyone.”

Hunt resigned on Could 13 from the North American Mission Board, in line with a press release by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell stated that earlier than Could 13, he was not aware of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Typically, he known as the main points of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

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Sex abuse survivors, a lot of whom have been sharing their tales for years, anticipated Sunday’s release would affirm the information round most of the tales they have already shared, but many had been nonetheless surprised to see the pattern of coverups by the highest 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 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 through and thru about energy. It's misappropriated energy. It does not in any means replicate 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, together with three past 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 focused on actions by the SBC’s Executive Committee, which handles financial and administrative duties. Though Southern Baptist churches function 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 many years, the findings show, Southern Baptists were informed the denomination could not put together a registry of sex offenders because it could go against the denomination’s polity — or how it capabilities. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained a listing of offenders while maintaining it a secret to keep away from the potential of getting sued. The report also contains private emails displaying how longtime leaders corresponding to August Boto have been dismissive about sexual abuse issues, calling them “a satanic scheme to utterly distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 electronic mail, the convention’s lawyer sent Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database may very well be carried out in step with SBC polity, saying “it will fit our polity and present ministries to assist churches on this space of child abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he really helpful “immediate action to signal the Conference’s want that the [executive committee] and the entities start a more aggressive effort in this space.” That very same yr, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a motion for a database, Boto rejected the idea.

For a denomination designed to provide extra democratic energy to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to commission the third-party investigation, the report reveals how lay Southern Baptists allowed a few key leaders, together with Boto and the conference’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to manage the nationwide institutional response to sex abuse for many years. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, stated he had not read the report yet. Attempts to succeed in Boto on Sunday have been unsuccessful.

“The report is going to validate a lot about how they really blindly selected to stay on the same path all these years,” stated 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 weight.”

During Executive Committee conferences in 2021, some members argued towards waiving attorney-client privilege, which would give investigators entry to records of conversations on authorized issues among the many committee’s members and staffers. They said doing so went in opposition to the recommendation of conference attorneys and could bankrupt the SBC by exposing it to lawsuits.

The debate over waiving privilege upset a big swath of Southern Baptists, inflicting 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 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 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 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 cannot be the latest cultural disaster.” Floyd didn't instantly 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 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 Govt Committee betrayed not only survivors who worked exhausting to try to make something happen, however betrayed the entire Southern Baptist Conference,” mentioned Brown, who's a retired appellate attorney in Colorado. “They’ve made their own religion right into a complicit associate for their very own determination to choose institutional protection over the safety of kids and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists throughout its final annual assembly, comes just weeks before its next gathering in Anaheim, Calif., where members are anticipated discuss next steps. Suggestions by Guidepost include providing devoted survivor advocacy assist and a survivor compensation fund.

“We must be ready to take significant steps to alter our tradition because it pertains to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the current SBC president, stated in an announcement.

Since a long time of sex abuse and coverups in the Catholic Church had been reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have published lists of clergymen they are saying have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to stop the transfer of abusers to different 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 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 a number of the identical patterns as Catholic leaders in not dealing with clergy intercourse abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists ought to be taught from Catholic errors and take motion early on to implement structural reforms in order to make youngsters safer.

The report states that Frank Page, who was main the Executive Committee on the time, responded to Doyle in a short letter that “Southern Baptist leaders actually have no authority over local churches” but that they might try 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. Page later resigned from his place in 2018 over having a “morally inappropriate relationship.” Web page did not 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 job force on the difficulty and mentioned that the report exhibits a necessity for establishments like the SBC to seek outside experience on sex abuse.

“It reveals a degree of coverup and harassment and resistance to reforms on an institutional stage that has led to a long time of survivors being victimized and hurt,” Denhollander mentioned. “The query Southern Baptists should ask is, ‘How might this happen?’”

The problem of sex abuse was a outstanding theme in leaked private letters written by Russell Moore, who left his place in 2021 as head of the SBC’s coverage arm, the Ethics & Non secular Liberty Fee. Moore stated he expects Southern Baptists to obtain Sunday’s report in an identical strategy 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. “Individuals will say, ‘This is not all Southern Baptists, take a 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 take into account 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 previous two decades combating for reform.