Southern Baptist leaders coated up sex abuse, explosive report says

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

The findings of practically 300 pages include stunning new details about particular abuse instances and shine a lightweight 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 might preserve a database of offenders to forestall more abuse when prime leaders have been secretly preserving a private record for years.

The report — the first investigation of its kind in an enormous Protestant denomination just like the SBC — is predicted to ship shock waves throughout a conservative Christian group that has had intense inside battles over methods to 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 lengthy resisted comparisons between its sexual abuse crisis and that of the Catholic Church, saying the entire variety of abuse instances 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 Convention’s administrative arm to report alleged youngster molesters and different accused abusers who have been in the pulpit or employed as church staff members. Many of the cases referred to within the report have been considered exterior 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 Solutions on 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 were involved more with protecting the establishment from liability than from protecting Southern Baptists from further abuse.

“Whereas tales of abuse have been minimized, and survivors have been ignored or even vilified, revelations came to gentle lately that some senior SBC leaders had protected or even supported alleged abusers, the report states.

Whereas the report focuses totally on how leaders handled abuse points when survivors got here forward, it also states that a main Southern Baptist leader was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a lady 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 vp at the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a lady during a Panama City Seaside, Fla., trip in 2010.

The report states that Hunt, in an interview with investigators, denied any bodily contact with the woman however acknowledged that he had interactions together 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 anybody.”

Hunt resigned on Might 13 from the North American Mission Board, according to a press release by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell mentioned that before Could 13, he was not aware of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Typically, he referred to as the small print of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

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Intercourse abuse survivors, a lot of whom have been sharing their tales for years, anticipated Sunday’s launch would affirm the facts around lots of the tales they've already shared, however many had been still surprised to see the sample of coverups by the best levels 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 female government at 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 through about energy. It is misappropriated power. It doesn't in any way 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 conference, 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 Executive Committee, which handles financial and administrative duties. Although Southern Baptist church buildings operate independently from each other, the Nashville-based Government Committee distributes greater than $190 million cooperative program in its annual funds that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For decades, the findings present, Southern Baptists have been instructed the denomination could not put collectively a registry of sex offenders as a result of it would go towards the denomination’s polity — or how it features. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained a listing of offenders while holding it a secret to avoid the possibility of getting sued. The report also consists of personal emails exhibiting how longtime leaders corresponding to August Boto were dismissive about sexual abuse concerns, calling them “a satanic scheme to completely distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 email, the convention’s legal professional despatched Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database may very well be carried out in keeping with SBC polity, saying “it would fit our polity and present ministries to help church buildings in this space of kid abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he recommended “quick action to signal the Conference’s want that the [executive committee] and the entities start a more aggressive effort in this space.” That same year, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a movement for a database, Boto rejected the concept.

For a denomination designed to provide more 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 number of key leaders, including Boto and the conference’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to control the nationwide institutional response to sex abuse for decades. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, said he had not learn the report yet. Attempts to succeed in Boto on Sunday were unsuccessful.

“The report goes 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 within the report. “It buoys what we’ve been saying all along. Now Southern Baptists have to hold the burden.”

Throughout Executive Committee conferences in 2021, some members argued against waiving attorney-client privilege, which would give investigators access to records of conversations on authorized matters among the committee’s members and staffers. They stated 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 large 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 Government 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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Based on the report, Floyd advised 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 disaster.” He then said: “Our priority can't be the newest cultural crisis.” Floyd did not immediately 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 churches 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 again to her during her speech and one other chortled.”

“The Government Committee betrayed not only survivors who labored hard to attempt to make something occur, but betrayed the whole Southern Baptist Conference,” said Brown, who's a retired appellate lawyer in Colorado. “They’ve made their very own religion right into a complicit accomplice for their own resolution to decide on institutional safety over the safety of youngsters and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists throughout its last annual assembly, comes simply weeks earlier than its subsequent gathering in Anaheim, Calif., where members are anticipated focus on subsequent steps. Suggestions by Guidepost embody providing dedicated survivor advocacy help and a survivor compensation fund.

“We should be ready to take meaningful steps to change our culture as it relates to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the current SBC president, mentioned in an announcement.

Since a long time of intercourse 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 say have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to prevent the transfer 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 intercourse abuse crisis, wrote to the SBC and Executive Committee presidents, in response to the report. He expressed his issues that SBC leaders might be falling into some of the similar patterns as Catholic leaders in not coping with clergy sex abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists ought to study from Catholic mistakes and take action early on to implement structural reforms in order to make children safer.

The report states that Frank Page, who was leading the Govt Committee on the time, responded to Doyle in a brief letter that “Southern Baptist leaders actually don't have any authority over native church buildings” but that they would attempt to make use of their “affect” to provide protections. In an article, Page accused a survivor group of getting a hidden agenda of establishing the nation’s largest Protestant physique for lawsuits. Web page later resigned from his place in 2018 over having a “morally inappropriate relationship.” Web page did not instantly 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 task pressure on the problem and mentioned that the report exhibits a need for establishments like the SBC to seek exterior experience on sex abuse.

“It shows a stage of coverup and harassment and resistance to reforms on an institutional stage that has led to decades of survivors being victimized and harm,” Denhollander said. “The question Southern Baptists must ask is, ‘How could this occur?’”

The issue of intercourse abuse was a outstanding theme in leaked personal 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 stated he expects Southern Baptists to obtain Sunday’s report in the same method 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 mentioned. “Individuals will say, ‘This isn't all Southern Baptists, have a 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 contemplate changing 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 fighting for reform.