Southern Baptist leaders lined up sex abuse, explosive report says

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

The findings of practically 300 pages include surprising new particulars about specific abuse cases and shine a lightweight on how denominational leaders for many years actively resisted calls for abuse prevention and reform. Evidence in the report suggests leaders also lied to Southern Baptists over whether or not they may maintain a database of offenders to prevent extra abuse when prime leaders had been secretly protecting a non-public checklist for years.

The report — the first investigation of its kind in a massive Protestant denomination like the SBC — is expected to send shock waves throughout a conservative Christian group that has had intense internal battles over the way to deal with sex abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, along with different religious establishments in the US, 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 entire number of abuse circumstances amongst Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for nearly 20 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 were in the pulpit or employed as church workers members. Most of the instances referred to within the report have been thought-about exterior the statute of limitations, the time survivors can report intercourse abuse, so it’s unclear what number of abusers have been criminally charged.

The report, compiled by a company called Guidepost Options on the request of Southern Baptists, states that abuse survivors’ calls and emails were “solely to be met, time and time again, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who have been involved extra with protecting the establishment from liability than from defending Southern Baptists from additional abuse.

“Whereas stories of abuse have been minimized, and survivors have been ignored and even vilified, revelations got here to mild in recent years that some senior SBC leaders had protected or even supported alleged abusers, the report states.

While the report focuses primarily on how leaders dealt with abuse points when survivors came ahead, it also states that a major Southern Baptist leader was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a woman just 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 throughout a Panama Metropolis Seashore, Fla., vacation 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 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 by no means abused anybody.”

Hunt resigned on Could 13 from the North American Mission Board, according to an announcement by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell mentioned that before May 13, he was not aware of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Usually, he called 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 verify the details round many of the tales they have already shared, however many had been still stunned to see the pattern of coverups by the very best levels of leadership.

“I knew it was rotten, nevertheless it’s astonishing and infuriating,” mentioned Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was once the highest-paid female government on the SBC and whose story of sexual abuse at a Southern Baptist seminary is detailed in the report. “It is a denomination that's by and thru about power. It's misappropriated power. It doesn't in any approach replicate the Jesus I see in the scriptures. I'm so gutted.”

The report also names a number of senior SBC leaders who protected and even supported alleged abusers, together with three previous presidents of the convention, a former vice chairman 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 churches operate independently from one another, the Nashville-based Government Committee distributes more than $190 million cooperative program in its annual budget that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For decades, the findings show, Southern Baptists were told the denomination could not put together a registry of intercourse offenders as a result of it could go towards the denomination’s polity — or how it capabilities. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained a listing of offenders while conserving it a secret to keep away from the potential for getting sued. The report additionally includes private emails exhibiting how longtime leaders corresponding to August Boto had been dismissive about sexual abuse concerns, calling them “a satanic scheme to utterly distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 electronic mail, the conference’s attorney sent Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database may very well be applied consistent with SBC polity, saying “it will match our polity and present ministries to assist church buildings on this space of child abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he recommended “rapid motion to signal the Conference’s need that the [executive committee] and the entities start a more 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 more democratic energy to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to fee the third-party investigation, the report reveals how lay Southern Baptists allowed just a few key leaders, together with Boto and the convention’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to manage the nationwide institutional response to sex abuse for decades. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, mentioned he had not learn the report yet. Attempts to succeed in Boto on Sunday had been unsuccessful.

“The report is going to validate a lot about how they actually blindly selected to stay on the identical path all these years,” mentioned Tiffany Thigpen, whose story of sexual abuse in a Southern Baptist church is detailed in the report. “It buoys what we’ve been saying all alongside. Now Southern Baptists have to carry the load.”

Throughout Executive Committee conferences in 2021, some members argued in opposition to waiving attorney-client privilege, which would give investigators entry to data of conversations on authorized issues among the committee’s members and staffers. They said doing so went against the advice of convention lawyers and will bankrupt the SBC by exposing it to lawsuits.

The debate over waiving privilege upset a large swath of Southern Baptists, inflicting 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 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 also led to the resignation of the convention’s attorneys, who're named throughout the report.

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According to the report, Floyd instructed SBC leaders in a 2019 electronic mail that he had acquired “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “rising concern about all the emphasis on the sexual abuse crisis.” He then said: “Our priority can't 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 Government Committee “turned his again to her during her speech and one other chortled.”

“The Government Committee betrayed not only survivors who worked exhausting to attempt to make one thing happen, however betrayed the whole Southern Baptist Convention,” mentioned Brown, who is a retired appellate lawyer in Colorado. “They’ve made their own faith right into a complicit partner for their own determination to choose institutional protection over the safety of youngsters and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists during its last annual meeting, comes simply weeks before its subsequent gathering in Anaheim, Calif., the place members are expected focus on subsequent steps. Suggestions by Guidepost embody offering devoted survivor advocacy support and a survivor compensation fund.

“We should be able to take meaningful steps to vary our tradition as it relates to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the current SBC president, stated in a statement.

Since a long time of sex abuse and coverups in the Catholic Church have been 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 prevent 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 intercourse abuse disaster, wrote to the SBC and Govt Committee presidents, in keeping with the report. He expressed his issues that SBC leaders could possibly be falling into some of the same patterns as Catholic leaders in not coping with clergy intercourse abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists should study from Catholic mistakes and take action early on to implement structural reforms so as to make youngsters safer.

The report states that Frank Page, who was main the Government Committee at the time, responded to Doyle in a short letter that “Southern Baptist leaders actually have no authority over local church buildings” however that they'd attempt to make use of their “affect” to provide protections. In an article, Web page accused a survivor group of having a hidden agenda of organising the nation’s largest Protestant physique for lawsuits. Web page later resigned from his place in 2018 over having a “morally inappropriate relationship.” Page did not immediately 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 drive on the difficulty and stated that the report shows a necessity for institutions like the SBC to hunt outdoors expertise on sex abuse.

“It shows a degree 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 stated. “The question Southern Baptists must ask is, ‘How might this occur?’”

The problem of sex 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 coverage arm, the Ethics & Spiritual Liberty Commission. Moore stated he expects Southern Baptists to receive Sunday’s report in the same way 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 stated. “Folks will say, ‘This isn't all Southern Baptists, take a 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 think about replacing a statue of evangelist Billy Graham, which was moved from Nashville to Graham’s home state in 2016, with a statue of Christa Brown, the abuse survivor who spent the past 20 years fighting for reform.