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 discovered that intercourse abuse survivors have been usually ignored, minimized and “even vilified” by top clergy in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

The findings of practically 300 pages include shocking new details about particular abuse instances and shine a light on how denominational leaders for decades actively resisted requires abuse prevention and reform. Evidence in the report suggests leaders also lied to Southern Baptists over whether or not they could keep a database of offenders to forestall more abuse when top leaders had been secretly holding a private checklist for years.

The report — the first investigation of its form in a massive Protestant denomination like the SBC — is predicted to ship shock waves all through a conservative Christian group that has had intense inside battles over how you can handle sex abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, together with different non secular institutions in the US, has struggled with declining membership for the previous 15 years. Its leaders have long resisted comparisons between its sexual abuse disaster and that of the Catholic Church, saying the entire number of abuse instances amongst Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for nearly 20 years, survivors of abuse and different concerned Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Conference’s administrative arm to report alleged little one molesters and different accused abusers who had been in the pulpit or employed as church employees members. Many of the cases referred to within the report have been considered outdoors the statute of limitations, the time survivors can report intercourse abuse, so it’s unclear what number of abusers have been criminally charged.

The report, compiled by a company called Guidepost Options 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 have been concerned extra with defending the institution from legal responsibility than from protecting Southern Baptists from further abuse.

“While tales of abuse were minimized, and survivors have been 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.

While the report focuses primarily on how leaders dealt with abuse issues when survivors got here ahead, it also states that a major Southern Baptist leader was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a lady just 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 president at the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a girl during a Panama Metropolis Beach, Fla., vacation in 2010.

The report states that Hunt, in an interview with investigators, denied any physical contact with the girl 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 in the Guidepost report. I've never abused anybody.”

Hunt resigned on Could 13 from the North American Mission Board, in accordance with a statement by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell mentioned that before Might 13, he was not aware of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Generally, he referred to as the details of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

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Intercourse abuse survivors, lots of whom have been sharing their stories for years, anticipated Sunday’s release would confirm the details round many of the stories they have already shared, but many had been still shocked to see the pattern of coverups by the very best ranges of management.

“I knew it was rotten, nevertheless it’s astonishing and infuriating,” stated Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was as soon as 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 thru about power. It's misappropriated power. It does not in any means replicate the Jesus I see in the scriptures. I'm so gutted.”

The report also names a number of senior SBC leaders who protected and even supported alleged abusers, including three previous presidents of the conference, a former vice president and the former 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 financial and administrative duties. Although Southern Baptist churches function independently from each other, the Nashville-based Executive Committee distributes more than $190 million cooperative program in its annual funds that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For decades, the findings present, Southern Baptists had been advised the denomination could not put collectively a registry of sex offenders as a result of it will go in opposition to the denomination’s polity — or the way it functions. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained a list of offenders while retaining it a secret to avoid the potential of getting sued. The report also consists of non-public emails displaying how longtime leaders reminiscent of August Boto have been dismissive about sexual abuse issues, 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 may very well be implemented in line with SBC polity, saying “it could match our polity and present ministries to help churches on this area of kid abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he advisable “immediate motion to signal the Convention’s need that the [executive committee] and the entities start a extra aggressive effort on this space.” That same yr, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a motion for a database, Boto rejected the idea.

For a denomination designed to offer more democratic power to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to fee the third-party investigation, the report reveals how lay Southern Baptists allowed a number of key leaders, together with Boto and the conference’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to control the nationwide institutional response to sex abuse for many years. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, stated he had not learn the report but. Makes an attempt to reach 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,” 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 alongside. Now Southern Baptists have to carry the load.”

During Government Committee conferences in 2021, some members argued towards waiving attorney-client privilege, which would give investigators access to information of conversations on authorized matters among the many committee’s members and staffers. They stated doing so went towards the advice of convention lawyers and could bankrupt the SBC by exposing it to lawsuits.

The controversy over waiving privilege upset a large swath of Southern Baptists, inflicting some to believe 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 additionally led to the resignation of the Govt Committee’s head, Ronnie Floyd, who additionally once 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 convention’s attorneys, who are named all through the report.

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In keeping with the report, Floyd told SBC leaders in a 2019 e mail that he had received “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 can't be the latest cultural crisis.” 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 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 Executive Committee “turned his again to her throughout her speech and another chortled.”

“The Government Committee betrayed not solely survivors who labored laborious to attempt to make one thing 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 decision to decide on institutional protection over the protection of youngsters and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists during its final annual assembly, comes simply weeks before its subsequent gathering in Anaheim, Calif., where members are expected talk about next steps. Suggestions by Guidepost include offering devoted survivor advocacy help and a survivor compensation fund.

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

Since decades of sex abuse and coverups within the Catholic Church have been reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have published lists of priests they are saying have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to forestall the switch 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 intercourse abuse disaster, wrote to the SBC and Govt Committee presidents, based on the report. He expressed his concerns that SBC leaders may very well be falling into a number of the same patterns as Catholic leaders in not coping with clergy sex abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists should study from Catholic mistakes and take action early on to implement structural reforms so as to make youngsters safer.

The report states that Frank Web page, who was main the Executive Committee at the time, responded to Doyle in a brief letter that “Southern Baptist leaders actually have no authority over native church buildings” however that they'd try to make use of their “affect” to offer protections. In an article, Page accused a survivor group of getting a hidden agenda of establishing the nation’s largest Protestant body for lawsuits. Page later resigned from his place in 2018 over having a “morally inappropriate relationship.” Web page did not immediately 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 process drive on the issue and mentioned that the report shows a need for institutions just like the SBC to hunt outdoors 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 hurt,” Denhollander stated. “The query Southern Baptists have to ask is, ‘How may this occur?’”

The difficulty of sex abuse was a prominent theme in leaked private letters written by Russell Moore, who left his position in 2021 as head of the SBC’s coverage arm, the Ethics & Religious Liberty Fee. Moore said he expects Southern Baptists to obtain Sunday’s report in an analogous 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 isn't all Southern Baptists, look at all the good we do.’ The report demonstrates a pattern of stonewalling, coverup, intimidation and retaliation.”

Moore stated he hopes the SBC will think about changing a statue of evangelist Billy Graham, which was moved from Nashville to Graham’s home state in 2016, with a statue of Christa Brown, the abuse survivor who spent the past 20 years combating for reform.