Southern Baptist leaders lined up intercourse abuse, explosive report says

Leaders in the Southern Baptist Convention on Sunday launched a serious third-party investigation that found that sex abuse survivors have been usually ignored, minimized and “even vilified” by high clergy within the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

The findings of practically 300 pages embody stunning new particulars about particular abuse circumstances and shine a light on how denominational leaders for decades actively resisted requires abuse prevention and reform. Evidence within the report suggests leaders additionally lied to Southern Baptists over whether they could keep a database of offenders to prevent extra abuse when prime leaders have been secretly protecting a personal listing for years.

The report — the first investigation of its variety in a large Protestant denomination like the SBC — is expected to ship shock waves all through a conservative Christian group that has had intense inside battles over find out how to deal with sex abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, together with different spiritual establishments in the USA, 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 cases among Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for almost 20 years, survivors of abuse and different involved Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Conference’s administrative arm to report alleged little one molesters and other accused abusers who have been within the pulpit or employed as church workers members. Lots of the circumstances referred to in the report had been considered outdoors 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 a company referred to as Guidepost Options on the request of Southern Baptists, states that abuse survivors’ calls and emails were “only to be met, time and time once more, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who have been involved more with defending the institution from legal responsibility than from protecting Southern Baptists from further abuse.

“While stories of abuse had been minimized, and survivors had been ignored and even vilified, revelations came to mild in recent times that some senior SBC leaders had protected and even supported alleged abusers, the report states.

Whereas the report focuses primarily on how leaders handled abuse points when survivors got here ahead, it additionally states that a major Southern Baptist leader was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a girl just 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 girl during a Panama City Beach, Fla., trip 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 together with her. After the report was launched, Hunt, who has not been charged over the alleged incident, posted an announcement on Twitter, saying, “I vigorously deny the circumstances and characterizations set forth within the Guidepost report. I've by no means abused anybody.”

Hunt resigned on Could 13 from the North American Mission Board, based on an announcement by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell mentioned that before May 13, he was not conscious of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Typically, he called the details of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

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

Intercourse abuse survivors, lots of whom have been sharing their tales for years, anticipated Sunday’s release would confirm the facts around many of the tales they have already shared, however many had been still surprised to see the sample of coverups by the highest levels of management.

“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 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 way of and thru about energy. It is misappropriated power. It doesn't in any approach reflect 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, together with three past presidents of the convention, a former vice president and the previous head of the SBC’s administrative arm.

The third-party investigation into actions between 2000 and 2021 targeted on actions by the SBC’s Govt Committee, which handles financial and administrative duties. Though Southern Baptist churches operate independently from each other, the Nashville-based Government Committee distributes more than $190 million cooperative program in its annual price range that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For many years, the findings show, Southern Baptists had been instructed the denomination couldn't put collectively a registry of sex offenders as a result of it could go against the denomination’s polity — or how it capabilities. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained an inventory of offenders whereas protecting it a secret to keep away from the potential for getting sued. The report additionally contains non-public emails exhibiting how longtime leaders equivalent to August Boto were dismissive about sexual abuse considerations, calling them “a satanic scheme to fully distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 electronic mail, the convention’s attorney sent Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database could possibly be carried out according to SBC polity, saying “it will fit our polity and current ministries to help church buildings on this area of child abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he beneficial “fast motion to sign the Conference’s desire that the [executive committee] and the entities begin a extra aggressive effort in this area.” That very same 12 months, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a motion for a database, Boto rejected the concept.

For a denomination designed to offer extra democratic power to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to fee the third-party investigation, the report exhibits how lay Southern Baptists allowed just a few key leaders, together with Boto and the convention’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to regulate the nationwide institutional response to intercourse abuse for many years. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, mentioned he had not learn the report yet. Attempts to reach Boto on Sunday were unsuccessful.

“The report goes to validate so much about how they actually blindly chose to stay on the identical path all these years,” said 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 records of conversations on legal matters among the many committee’s members and staffers. They stated doing so went against the advice of conference legal professionals and will bankrupt the SBC by exposing it to lawsuits.

The controversy over waiving privilege upset a big swath of Southern Baptists, causing some to believe 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 also led to the resignation of the Executive Committee’s head, Ronnie Floyd, who also 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're named all through the report.

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In response to the report, Floyd instructed SBC leaders in a 2019 email that he had acquired “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “growing concern about all the emphasis on the sexual abuse crisis.” He then said: “Our precedence cannot be the most recent 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 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 back to her during her speech and one other chortled.”

“The Executive Committee betrayed not solely survivors who labored arduous to try to make one thing occur, however betrayed the entire Southern Baptist Convention,” mentioned Brown, who's a retired appellate legal professional in Colorado. “They’ve made their very own faith right into a complicit associate for their own determination to decide on institutional protection over the safety of youngsters and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists throughout its final annual assembly, comes simply weeks earlier than its next gathering in Anaheim, Calif., where members are expected talk about subsequent steps. Suggestions by Guidepost embody providing devoted survivor advocacy support and a survivor compensation fund.

“We must be ready to take significant steps to change our tradition because 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 had been reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have printed lists of clergymen they are saying have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to stop the switch 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 intercourse abuse disaster, wrote to the SBC and Government Committee presidents, in accordance with the report. He expressed his issues that SBC leaders may very well be falling into among the identical patterns as Catholic leaders in not coping with clergy sex abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists ought to study from Catholic errors and take action early on to implement structural reforms so as to make kids safer.

The report states that Frank Page, who was main the Executive Committee at the time, responded to Doyle in a brief letter that “Southern Baptist leaders actually don't have any authority over local churches” however that they might try to use their “affect” to offer protections. In an article, Page accused a survivor group of having a hidden agenda of setting up 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 didn't 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 power on the difficulty and said that the report reveals a necessity for institutions just like the SBC to seek outside expertise on sex abuse.

“It shows 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 harm,” Denhollander mentioned. “The query Southern Baptists need to ask is, ‘How may this occur?’”

The issue of intercourse abuse was a distinguished theme in leaked non-public letters written by Russell Moore, who left his position in 2021 as head of the SBC’s coverage arm, the Ethics & Spiritual Liberty Commission. Moore stated he expects Southern Baptists to obtain Sunday’s report in the same technique 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 mentioned. “Individuals will say, ‘This is not all Southern Baptists, take a look at all the good we do.’ The report demonstrates a pattern of stonewalling, coverup, intimidation and retaliation.”

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