Southern Baptist leaders coated up intercourse abuse, explosive report says

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

The findings of nearly 300 pages include shocking new details about particular abuse circumstances and shine a light-weight on how denominational leaders for many years actively resisted requires abuse prevention and reform. Proof within the report suggests leaders additionally lied to Southern Baptists over whether they might maintain a database of offenders to forestall more abuse when top leaders have been secretly conserving a non-public checklist for years.

The report — the first investigation of its variety in a large Protestant denomination just like the SBC — is anticipated to ship shock waves throughout a conservative Christian neighborhood that has had intense inside battles over tips on how to deal with intercourse abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, together with different non secular establishments in america, has struggled with declining membership for the previous 15 years. Its leaders have long resisted comparisons between its sexual abuse crisis and that of the Catholic Church, saying the full number 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 Convention’s administrative arm to report alleged baby molesters and different accused abusers who had been in the pulpit or employed as church workers members. Many of the cases referred to within the report had been thought of outside 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 an organization known as Guidepost Options at the request of Southern Baptists, states that abuse survivors’ calls and emails had been “solely to be met, time and time once more, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who had been involved more with defending the establishment from liability than from defending Southern Baptists from additional abuse.

“While tales of abuse have been minimized, and survivors were ignored and even vilified, revelations came to mild lately 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 issues when survivors got here forward, it additionally states that a main Southern Baptist chief was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a girl only one month after he accomplished 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 on the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a woman during a Panama City Seashore, Fla., vacation in 2010.

The report states that Hunt, in an interview with investigators, denied any bodily contact with the girl 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 in the Guidepost report. I have by no means abused anyone.”

Hunt resigned on Could 13 from the North American Mission Board, in keeping with a press release by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell said that earlier than May 13, he was not aware of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Usually, he called 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.

Intercourse abuse survivors, many of whom have been sharing their tales for years, anticipated Sunday’s release would affirm the info around many of the tales they've already shared, however 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,” said Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was once the highest-paid female govt at the SBC and whose story of sexual abuse at a Southern Baptist seminary is detailed within the report. “This is a denomination that is through and through about energy. It is misappropriated power. It doesn't in any approach mirror the Jesus I see within the scriptures. I am so gutted.”

The report also names several senior SBC leaders who protected and even supported alleged abusers, together with 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 focused on actions by the SBC’s Government Committee, which handles financial and administrative duties. Though Southern Baptist church buildings operate independently from one another, the Nashville-based Govt Committee distributes greater than $190 million cooperative program in its annual price range that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For decades, the findings show, Southern Baptists were instructed the denomination could not put together a registry of intercourse offenders because it will go in opposition to the denomination’s polity — or the way it functions. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained a listing of offenders while maintaining it a secret to avoid the possibility of getting sued. The report also includes personal emails displaying how longtime leaders comparable to August Boto had been dismissive about sexual abuse issues, calling them “a satanic scheme to utterly distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 e mail, the convention’s lawyer despatched Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database might be applied per SBC polity, saying “it could fit our polity and present ministries to assist churches on this area of child abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he advisable “immediate action to signal the Conference’s want that the [executive committee] and the entities start a more aggressive effort on this space.” That very same yr, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a motion for a database, Boto rejected the thought.

For a denomination designed to present extra democratic power to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to fee the third-party investigation, the report shows how lay Southern Baptists allowed a number of key leaders, including Boto and the conference’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to control the nationwide institutional response to intercourse abuse for decades. 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 goes to validate so much about how they actually blindly chose to remain on the same path all these years,” mentioned 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 alongside. Now Southern Baptists have to hold the load.”

Throughout Executive Committee conferences in 2021, some members argued towards waiving attorney-client privilege, which might give investigators access to information of conversations on authorized matters among the committee’s members and staffers. They said doing so went towards the recommendation of convention legal professionals and will bankrupt the SBC by exposing it to lawsuits.

The controversy over waiving privilege upset a large swath of Southern Baptists, causing 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 also led to the resignation of the Govt 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 choice over attorney-client privilege also led to the resignation of the conference’s attorneys, who are named throughout the report.

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According to the report, Floyd told SBC leaders in a 2019 electronic mail that he had obtained “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “rising concern about all the emphasis on the sexual abuse crisis.” He then stated: “Our priority cannot be the latest cultural disaster.” Floyd didn't immediately return a request for comment.

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

“The Government Committee betrayed not solely survivors who labored onerous to attempt to make something happen, but betrayed the entire Southern Baptist Convention,” stated Brown, who's a retired appellate lawyer in Colorado. “They’ve made their own faith right into a complicit partner for their own resolution to choose institutional protection over the protection of children and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists during its last annual meeting, comes just weeks before its next gathering in Anaheim, Calif., the place members are expected discuss next steps. Recommendations by Guidepost embody offering devoted survivor advocacy help and a survivor compensation fund.

“We should be ready to take meaningful steps to change our culture as it pertains to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the current SBC president, mentioned in a press release.

Since decades of intercourse abuse and coverups within the Catholic Church were reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have revealed lists of monks they are saying have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to prevent the switch of abusers to different 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 disaster, wrote to the SBC and Govt Committee presidents, in keeping with the report. He expressed his concerns that SBC leaders could possibly be falling into a few of the similar patterns as Catholic leaders in not coping with clergy sex abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists should be taught from Catholic mistakes and take motion early on to implement structural reforms so as to make youngsters safer.

The report states that Frank Page, who was leading the Executive Committee on the time, responded to Doyle in a short letter that “Southern Baptist leaders actually haven't any authority over native churches” however that they might attempt to use their “affect” to provide protections. In an article, Page accused a survivor group of getting a hidden agenda of organising the nation’s largest Protestant physique for lawsuits. Page later resigned from his position 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 job drive on the issue and said that the report exhibits a necessity for establishments just like the SBC to seek outdoors expertise on intercourse abuse.

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

The problem of intercourse 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 policy arm, the Ethics & Religious Liberty Fee. Moore said he expects Southern Baptists to obtain Sunday’s report in a similar 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, look at all the good we do.’ The report demonstrates a sample of stonewalling, coverup, intimidation and retaliation.”

Moore said he hopes the SBC will consider 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 preventing for reform.