Southern Baptist leaders covered up intercourse abuse, explosive report says

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

The findings of practically 300 pages include shocking new details about specific abuse cases and shine a light-weight on how denominational leaders for many years actively resisted calls for abuse prevention and reform. Proof within the report suggests leaders additionally lied to Southern Baptists over whether or not they may keep a database of offenders to forestall extra abuse when top leaders were secretly maintaining a personal record for years.

The report — the primary investigation of its form in an enormous Protestant denomination just like the SBC — is predicted to ship shock waves throughout a conservative Christian community that has had intense internal battles over how you can handle sex abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, together with other religious institutions in america, 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 whole variety of abuse instances among Southern Baptists was small.

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

The report, compiled by a company called Guidepost Solutions at the request of Southern Baptists, states that abuse survivors’ calls and emails were “only to be met, time and time again, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who were involved more with protecting the institution from legal responsibility than from defending Southern Baptists from additional abuse.

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

While the report focuses totally on how leaders dealt with abuse issues when survivors came ahead, 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 convention. 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 City 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 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 never abused anybody.”

Hunt resigned on Could 13 from the North American Mission Board, in line with a press release by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell stated that earlier than May 13, he was not conscious of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Usually, he known as the details of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

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Intercourse abuse survivors, lots of whom have been sharing their stories for years, anticipated Sunday’s release would verify the information round lots of the stories they have already shared, however many have been nonetheless surprised to see the pattern of coverups by the highest levels of leadership.

“I knew it was rotten, but it surely’s astonishing and infuriating,” mentioned Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was as soon as the highest-paid feminine executive at the SBC and whose story of sexual abuse at a Southern Baptist seminary is detailed within the report. “This can be a denomination that's by way of and through about energy. It's misappropriated power. It doesn't in any method mirror the Jesus I see within the scriptures. I'm so gutted.”

The report additionally names a number of senior SBC leaders who protected and even supported alleged abusers, including three previous 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 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 Executive Committee distributes more than $190 million cooperative program in its annual funds that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For decades, the findings present, Southern Baptists were instructed the denomination couldn't put collectively a registry of intercourse offenders as a result of it would go in opposition to the denomination’s polity — or how it functions. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained a listing of offenders whereas preserving it a secret to keep away from the opportunity of getting sued. The report also consists of personal emails displaying how longtime leaders reminiscent of August Boto had been dismissive about sexual abuse considerations, calling them “a satanic scheme to completely distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 e mail, the convention’s legal professional sent Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database may very well be applied in keeping with SBC polity, saying “it could fit our polity and present ministries to assist churches in this space of child abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he recommended “speedy motion to signal the Convention’s want that the [executive committee] and the entities start 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 present 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 a couple of key leaders, together with Boto and the conference’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to manage the national institutional response to sex abuse for many years. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, said he had not learn the report yet. Attempts to reach Boto on Sunday had been unsuccessful.

“The report is going to validate so much about how they actually blindly selected to remain on the identical 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 weight.”

During Government Committee conferences in 2021, some members argued in opposition to waiving attorney-client privilege, which would give investigators entry to information of conversations on legal matters among the many committee’s members and staffers. They said doing so went against the recommendation of convention lawyers 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 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 as soon as 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 convention’s attorneys, who're named throughout the report.

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In accordance with the report, Floyd told SBC leaders in a 2019 email that he had obtained “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “growing concern about all the emphasis on the sexual abuse crisis.” He then stated: “Our priority cannot be the newest cultural crisis.” Floyd didn't 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 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 Government Committee “turned his again to her during her speech and another chortled.”

“The Executive Committee betrayed not solely survivors who labored hard to try to make one thing occur, however betrayed the entire Southern Baptist Conference,” said Brown, who is a retired appellate lawyer in Colorado. “They’ve made their very own faith into a complicit partner for their very own choice to decide on institutional protection over the safety of children and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists during its final annual meeting, comes simply weeks earlier than its subsequent gathering in Anaheim, Calif., the place members are expected discuss next steps. Recommendations by Guidepost embrace providing devoted survivor advocacy support and a survivor compensation fund.

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

Since a long time of intercourse abuse and coverups within the Catholic Church have been reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have printed lists of monks they say have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to forestall the transfer of abusers to different church buildings. Unlike 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 Govt Committee presidents, in response to the report. He expressed his considerations that SBC leaders could possibly be falling into a few of the similar patterns as Catholic leaders in not coping with clergy intercourse abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists ought to learn 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 Govt Committee at the time, responded to Doyle in a short letter that “Southern Baptist leaders truly have no authority over local churches” but that they'd attempt to use their “influence” to offer protections. In an article, Page accused a survivor group of having a hidden agenda of setting up the nation’s largest Protestant body for lawsuits. Web page later resigned from his position 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 job pressure on the problem and stated that the report reveals a need for institutions like the SBC to hunt exterior expertise on intercourse abuse.

“It exhibits a level of coverup and harassment and resistance to reforms on an institutional level that has led to a long time of survivors being victimized and hurt,” Denhollander stated. “The question Southern Baptists should ask is, ‘How could this happen?’”

The issue of sex abuse was a distinguished theme in leaked personal letters written by Russell Moore, who left his place in 2021 as head of the SBC’s policy arm, the Ethics & Non secular Liberty Commission. Moore said he expects Southern Baptists to receive Sunday’s report in an analogous 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 in this report are breathtaking,” Moore stated. “Individuals will say, ‘This is not all Southern Baptists, have a look at all the great we do.’ The report demonstrates a pattern of stonewalling, coverup, intimidation and retaliation.”

Moore mentioned he hopes the SBC will contemplate changing 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 two decades fighting for reform.