Southern Baptist leaders coated up intercourse abuse, explosive report says

Leaders in the Southern Baptist Conference on Sunday released a significant third-party investigation that found that intercourse abuse survivors were often 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 circumstances and shine a light-weight on how denominational leaders for many years actively resisted calls for abuse prevention and reform. Evidence in the report suggests leaders additionally lied to Southern Baptists over whether or not they could preserve a database of offenders to stop more abuse when top leaders have been secretly conserving a personal record for years.

The report — the primary investigation of its kind in a large Protestant denomination like the SBC — is anticipated to ship shock waves throughout a conservative Christian community that has had intense inside battles over find out how to handle intercourse abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, together with other 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 instances among Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for nearly twenty years, survivors of abuse and other concerned Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Convention’s administrative arm to report alleged youngster molesters and other accused abusers who had been within the pulpit or employed as church workers members. Many of the circumstances referred to within the report had been considered exterior the statute of limitations, the time survivors can report sex abuse, so it’s unclear what number of abusers have been criminally charged.

The report, compiled by an organization referred to as Guidepost Options at the request of Southern Baptists, states that abuse survivors’ calls and emails have been “only to be met, time and time once more, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who had been concerned more with defending the establishment from legal responsibility than from defending Southern Baptists from further abuse.

“Whereas stories of abuse were minimized, and survivors have been ignored and even vilified, revelations got here to mild in recent times 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 forward, it also states that a major 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 president on the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a woman throughout a Panama Metropolis Seaside, Fla., trip in 2010.

The report states that Hunt, in an interview with investigators, denied any physical contact with the woman however acknowledged that he had interactions with her. After the report was released, Hunt, who has not been charged over the alleged incident, posted a statement 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 Might 13 from the North American Mission Board, in response to a press release by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell mentioned that earlier than Might 13, he was not aware of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Generally, he called the small print of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

Southern Baptists have been immersed in their own intercourse abuse scandals. Now, they’re debating their response.

Sex abuse survivors, many of whom have been sharing their tales for years, anticipated Sunday’s release would affirm the facts round many of the stories they have already shared, but many were still surprised to see the sample of coverups by the very best levels of leadership.

“I knew it was rotten, but it’s astonishing and infuriating,” mentioned Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was as soon as the highest-paid feminine government 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 by means of and through about energy. It's misappropriated energy. It does not in any means replicate the Jesus I see in the scriptures. I am so gutted.”

The report additionally names several senior SBC leaders who protected and even supported alleged abusers, including three past 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 focused on actions by the SBC’s Executive Committee, which handles financial and administrative duties. Although Southern Baptist church buildings function independently from each other, the Nashville-based Government 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 had been informed the denomination couldn't put collectively a registry of sex offenders because it would go in opposition to the denomination’s polity — or how it functions. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained a list of offenders while protecting it a secret to keep away from the potential for getting sued. The report additionally consists of private emails showing how longtime leaders equivalent to August Boto had been dismissive about sexual abuse concerns, calling them “a satanic scheme to fully distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 e-mail, the conference’s attorney sent Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database may very well be applied in keeping with SBC polity, saying “it would match our polity and present ministries to help churches in this space of kid abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he recommended “instant action to signal the Convention’s want that the [executive committee] and the entities start a extra aggressive effort on this area.” That same 12 months, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a motion for a database, Boto rejected the thought.

For a denomination designed to provide more democratic power to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to commission the third-party investigation, the report shows how lay Southern Baptists allowed a couple of key leaders, including Boto and the conference’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to regulate the nationwide institutional response to intercourse abuse for many years. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, said he had not read the report yet. Attempts to achieve Boto on Sunday had 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 within the report. “It buoys what we’ve been saying all alongside. 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 information of conversations on authorized issues among the many committee’s members and staffers. They said doing so went in opposition to the recommendation of convention attorneys and could bankrupt the SBC by exposing it to lawsuits.

The controversy over waiving privilege upset a large swath of Southern Baptists, causing some to imagine the Government 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 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 conference’s attorneys, who are named all through the report.

Newly leaked letter particulars allegations that Southern Baptist leaders mishandled sex abuse claims

Based on 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 said: “Our priority cannot be the latest cultural disaster.” Floyd did not 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 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 Govt Committee “turned his again to her throughout her speech and another chortled.”

“The Government Committee betrayed not solely survivors who worked laborious to attempt to make something occur, but betrayed the whole Southern Baptist Convention,” said Brown, who is a retired appellate lawyer in Colorado. “They’ve made their own faith into a complicit associate for their very own determination to choose institutional safety over the protection of youngsters and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists during its final annual meeting, comes just weeks earlier than its subsequent gathering in Anaheim, Calif., where members are anticipated discuss next steps. Recommendations by Guidepost include providing devoted survivor advocacy help and a survivor compensation fund.

“We should be ready to take meaningful steps to vary our tradition as it pertains to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the present SBC president, said in a press release.

Since many years of sex abuse and coverups within the Catholic Church have been reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have revealed lists of priests they say have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to forestall the transfer of abusers to other churches. In contrast to 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, in response to the report. He expressed his concerns that SBC leaders could possibly be falling into among the identical patterns as Catholic leaders in not dealing with clergy sex abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists ought to learn from Catholic errors and take motion early on to implement structural reforms in order to make children safer.

The report states that Frank Page, who was main the Executive Committee at the time, responded to Doyle in a short letter that “Southern Baptist leaders really have no authority over native churches” but that they would attempt to make use of their “affect” to offer protections. In an article, Web page accused a survivor group of getting a hidden agenda of organising the nation’s largest Protestant body for lawsuits. Page later resigned from his place in 2018 over having a “morally inappropriate relationship.” 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 process power on the problem and stated that the report shows a necessity for establishments just like the SBC to hunt outdoors experience on intercourse abuse.

“It shows a level of coverup and harassment and resistance to reforms on an institutional degree that has led to many years of survivors being victimized and damage,” Denhollander said. “The query Southern Baptists have to ask is, ‘How might this occur?’”

The issue of sex abuse was a distinguished 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 stated he expects Southern Baptists to obtain Sunday’s report in an identical approach 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. “Individuals will say, ‘This is not all Southern Baptists, look at all the great we do.’ The report demonstrates a sample of stonewalling, coverup, intimidation and retaliation.”

Moore stated 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 20 years preventing for reform.