Southern Baptist leaders lined up sex abuse, explosive report says

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

The findings of practically 300 pages embrace surprising new details about particular abuse instances and shine a lightweight on how denominational leaders for decades actively resisted calls for abuse prevention and reform. Evidence in the report suggests leaders also lied to Southern Baptists over whether they might preserve a database of offenders to stop extra abuse when top leaders were secretly conserving a non-public checklist for years.

The report — the first investigation of its form in an enormous Protestant denomination like the SBC — is expected to send shock waves all through a conservative Christian community that has had intense internal battles over deal with sex abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, along with different non secular institutions in america, has struggled with declining membership for the past 15 years. Its leaders have long resisted comparisons between its sexual abuse disaster and that of the Catholic Church, saying the overall number of abuse instances amongst Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for nearly two decades, survivors of abuse and other involved Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Convention’s administrative arm to report alleged baby molesters and different accused abusers who have been in the pulpit or employed as church employees members. Most of the circumstances referred to in the report were considered outside the statute of limitations, the time survivors can report sex abuse, so it’s unclear how many abusers had been criminally charged.

The report, compiled by a company known as Guidepost Solutions at 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 were concerned more with defending the institution from legal responsibility than from defending Southern Baptists from additional abuse.

“Whereas stories of abuse were minimized, and survivors have been ignored and even vilified, revelations got here 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 dealt with abuse issues when survivors came forward, it additionally states that a main Southern Baptist leader was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a woman only 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 chairman on the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a woman throughout a Panama Metropolis Seaside, Fla., vacation in 2010.

The report states that Hunt, in an interview with investigators, denied any physical contact with the lady however acknowledged that he had interactions along 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 within the Guidepost report. I have never abused anyone.”

Hunt resigned on Could 13 from the North American Mission Board, in accordance with a press release by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell said that before Might 13, he was not conscious of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Generally, he known as the main points of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

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Intercourse abuse survivors, a lot of whom have been sharing their stories for years, anticipated Sunday’s release would verify the info round many of the tales they've already shared, however many had been nonetheless stunned to see the pattern of coverups by the highest ranges of management.

“I knew it was rotten, however it’s astonishing and infuriating,” stated Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was once the highest-paid female executive on the SBC and whose story of sexual abuse at a Southern Baptist seminary is detailed in the report. “It is a denomination that is by and thru about power. It is misappropriated energy. It doesn't in any manner mirror 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, including three previous presidents of the conference, a former vice president 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 Government Committee, which handles monetary and administrative duties. Though Southern Baptist church buildings function independently from one another, the Nashville-based Government Committee distributes more than $190 million cooperative program in its annual finances that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For many years, the findings present, Southern Baptists have been advised the denomination could not put together a registry of sex offenders because it would go against the denomination’s polity — or the way it capabilities. 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 additionally contains non-public emails displaying how longtime leaders comparable to August Boto have been dismissive about sexual abuse considerations, calling them “a satanic scheme to utterly distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 electronic mail, the convention’s legal professional despatched Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database might be carried out in keeping with SBC polity, saying “it might fit our polity and current ministries to assist church buildings in this space of kid abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he recommended “quick motion to signal the Conference’s need that the [executive committee] and the entities start a extra aggressive effort in this space.” That same 12 months, 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 commission the third-party investigation, the report shows how lay Southern Baptists allowed just a few key leaders, together with Boto and the convention’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to manage the national institutional response to sex abuse for many years. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, stated he had not read the report yet. Attempts to succeed in Boto on Sunday were unsuccessful.

“The report is going to validate so much about how they really blindly selected to stay on the same 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 along. Now Southern Baptists have to carry the burden.”

Throughout Government Committee meetings in 2021, some members argued in opposition to waiving attorney-client privilege, which would give investigators entry to records of conversations on authorized matters among the many committee’s members and staffers. They mentioned doing so went towards the advice of conference legal professionals and could bankrupt the SBC by exposing it to lawsuits.

The controversy over waiving privilege upset a big swath of Southern Baptists, inflicting some to consider 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 Executive 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 additionally led to the resignation of the convention’s attorneys, who are named throughout the report.

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Based on the report, Floyd informed SBC leaders in a 2019 electronic mail that he had acquired “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “growing concern about all of the emphasis on the sexual abuse disaster.” He then acknowledged: “Our priority can't be the newest cultural disaster.” Floyd did not immediately return a request for remark.

Christa Brown, who instructed 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 Government Committee “turned his back to her during her speech and one other chortled.”

“The Government Committee betrayed not solely survivors who worked hard to try to make one thing occur, but betrayed the whole Southern Baptist Convention,” said Brown, who is a retired appellate legal professional in Colorado. “They’ve made their own faith right into a complicit associate for their own resolution to decide on institutional protection over the protection of kids and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists during its last annual assembly, comes simply weeks earlier than its subsequent gathering in Anaheim, Calif., where members are expected discuss next steps. Suggestions by Guidepost include providing dedicated survivor advocacy support and a survivor compensation fund.

“We have to be able to take significant steps to vary our culture as it pertains to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the current SBC president, mentioned in an announcement.

Since a long time of intercourse abuse and coverups within the Catholic Church were reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have published lists of monks they say have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to forestall the transfer of abusers to different church buildings. In contrast to 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 sex abuse disaster, wrote to the SBC and Government Committee presidents, in line with the report. He expressed his concerns that SBC leaders might be falling into some of the same 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 in order to make kids safer.

The report states that Frank Web page, who was main the Government Committee at the time, responded to Doyle in a short letter that “Southern Baptist leaders actually haven't any authority over native churches” but that they'd try to make use of their “influence” to provide protections. In an article, Page accused a survivor group of getting a hidden agenda of setting up the nation’s largest Protestant body 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 comment.

Rachael Denhollander, a former USA gymnast who outed Larry Nassar’s serial sexual assaults, is an adviser on a Southern Baptist activity pressure on the problem and mentioned that the report exhibits a need 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 level 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 prominent theme in leaked non-public letters written by Russell Moore, who left his place in 2021 as head of the SBC’s coverage arm, the Ethics & Spiritual Liberty Fee. Moore said he expects Southern Baptists to obtain Sunday’s report in the same 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 in this report are breathtaking,” Moore mentioned. “People will say, ‘This isn't all Southern Baptists, take a look at all the great we do.’ The report demonstrates a pattern 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 past two decades combating for reform.