Southern Baptist leaders lined up sex abuse, explosive report says

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

The findings of almost 300 pages embrace shocking new details about specific abuse instances and shine a light on how denominational leaders for many years actively resisted calls for abuse prevention and reform. Proof in the report suggests leaders also lied to Southern Baptists over whether or not they may preserve a database of offenders to stop extra abuse when prime leaders had been secretly preserving a non-public listing for years.

The report — the first investigation of its variety in a massive Protestant denomination like the SBC — is expected to ship shock waves all through a conservative Christian community that has had intense inside battles over how one can handle sex abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, together with other non secular establishments in america, 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 number of abuse circumstances among Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for nearly 20 years, survivors of abuse and other involved Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Conference’s administrative arm to report alleged child molesters and different accused abusers who have been in the pulpit or employed as church employees members. Most of the instances referred to within the report were considered exterior the statute of limitations, the time survivors can report sex abuse, so it’s unclear how many abusers have 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 “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 institution from liability than from defending Southern Baptists from additional abuse.

“While tales of abuse have been minimized, and survivors had been ignored or even vilified, revelations came to gentle 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 handled abuse points when survivors got here ahead, it also 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 vice president on the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a lady during a Panama Metropolis Seashore, Fla., vacation in 2010.

The report states that Hunt, in an interview with investigators, denied any physical contact with the woman 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 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 accordance with a press release by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell mentioned that earlier than Might 13, he was not aware of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Typically, he called the details 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 launch would confirm the details round most of the stories they've already shared, however many had been still surprised to see the sample of coverups by the highest levels of leadership.

“I knew it was rotten, nevertheless it’s astonishing and infuriating,” said 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 is by means of and through about power. It's misappropriated energy. It doesn't in any way mirror the Jesus I see within the scriptures. I'm so gutted.”

The report also names several senior SBC leaders who protected and even supported alleged abusers, including three previous presidents of the convention, a former vp 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 Govt Committee, which handles monetary and administrative duties. Although Southern Baptist church buildings function independently from each other, the Nashville-based Govt Committee distributes greater than $190 million cooperative program in its annual budget that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For many years, the findings show, Southern Baptists have been instructed the denomination couldn't put together a registry of sex offenders because it will go in opposition to the denomination’s polity — or how it functions. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained a listing of offenders while protecting it a secret to keep away from the opportunity of getting sued. The report additionally contains personal emails exhibiting how longtime leaders comparable to August Boto have been dismissive about sexual abuse issues, calling them “a satanic scheme to fully distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 electronic mail, the conference’s legal professional despatched Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database could be implemented in line with SBC polity, saying “it will fit our polity and current ministries to help church buildings on this space of child abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he really helpful “rapid action to sign the Conference’s desire that the [executive committee] and the entities begin a more aggressive effort on this area.” That same yr, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a motion for a database, Boto rejected the thought.

For a denomination designed to present more democratic energy to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to fee the third-party investigation, the report reveals how lay Southern Baptists allowed just a few key leaders, together with Boto and the conference’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to manage the nationwide institutional response to intercourse abuse for many years. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, said he had not learn the report but. Makes an attempt to succeed in Boto on Sunday have been unsuccessful.

“The report goes to validate a lot about how they really blindly chose to remain on the identical 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 along. Now Southern Baptists have to carry the load.”

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

The debate over waiving privilege upset a big swath of Southern Baptists, causing some to believe 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 Govt Committee’s head, Ronnie Floyd, who also once 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're named throughout the report.

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According to the report, Floyd advised SBC leaders in a 2019 email that he had obtained “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “rising concern about all of the emphasis on the sexual abuse crisis.” He then stated: “Our precedence cannot be the most recent cultural disaster.” Floyd didn't 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 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 Govt Committee “turned his again to her during her speech and one other chortled.”

“The Executive Committee betrayed not solely survivors who worked hard to attempt to make something occur, however betrayed the whole Southern Baptist Conference,” said Brown, who's a retired appellate legal professional in Colorado. “They’ve made their very own religion right into a complicit partner for their very own determination to choose institutional safety over the safety of children and congregants.”

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

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

Since a long time of intercourse abuse and coverups within the Catholic Church have been reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have printed lists of priests they are saying have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to forestall the transfer of abusers to other church buildings. 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 sex abuse crisis, wrote to the SBC and Executive Committee presidents, according to the report. He expressed his considerations that SBC leaders could possibly be falling into a few of the identical patterns as Catholic leaders in not dealing with clergy intercourse abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists ought to study from Catholic errors and take motion early on to implement structural reforms so as to make kids safer.

The report states that Frank Web page, who was main the Executive Committee on the time, responded to Doyle in a brief letter that “Southern Baptist leaders really haven't any authority over local church buildings” but that they would try to use their “influence” to provide 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.” 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 process power on the problem and said that the report exhibits a need for institutions just like the SBC to hunt outside expertise on sex abuse.

“It exhibits a stage of coverup and harassment and resistance to reforms on an institutional level that has led to a long time of survivors being victimized and damage,” Denhollander stated. “The question Southern Baptists must ask is, ‘How might this happen?’”

The issue of intercourse 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 & Religious Liberty Fee. Moore mentioned he expects Southern Baptists to receive Sunday’s report in the same way 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 said. “Individuals 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 stated 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 past two decades combating for reform.