Southern Baptist leaders covered up sex abuse, explosive report says

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

The findings of practically 300 pages embody surprising new particulars about specific abuse cases and shine a light-weight on how denominational leaders for decades actively resisted calls for abuse prevention and reform. Evidence within the report suggests leaders additionally lied to Southern Baptists over whether they might preserve a database of offenders to forestall extra abuse when high leaders have been secretly holding a non-public listing for years.

The report — the primary investigation of its kind in a massive Protestant denomination like the SBC — is expected to ship shock waves all through a conservative Christian group that has had intense inside battles over how one can deal with intercourse abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, together with different non secular 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 overall number of abuse cases amongst 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 Conference’s administrative arm to report alleged youngster molesters and other accused abusers who were in the pulpit or employed as church workers members. Lots of the cases referred to in the report were considered exterior the statute of limitations, the time survivors can report sex abuse, so it’s unclear how many abusers were criminally charged.

The report, compiled by a corporation known as Guidepost Options 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 had been concerned extra with defending the institution from legal responsibility than from defending Southern Baptists from further abuse.

“Whereas stories of abuse have been minimized, and survivors were ignored or 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 primarily on how leaders handled abuse issues when survivors came forward, it also states that a main Southern Baptist chief was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a girl just one month after he completed 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 Metropolis Seaside, Fla., vacation in 2010.

The report states that Hunt, in an interview with investigators, denied any physical contact with the girl 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 an announcement on Twitter, saying, “I vigorously deny the circumstances and characterizations set forth within the Guidepost report. I have never abused anybody.”

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

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Sex abuse survivors, lots of whom have been sharing their tales for years, anticipated Sunday’s release would verify the information round many of the stories they've already shared, however many were nonetheless shocked to see the pattern of coverups by the very best ranges of management.

“I knew it was rotten, but it’s astonishing and infuriating,” said 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. “It is a denomination that is by means of and through about power. It's misappropriated energy. It does not in any way mirror the Jesus I see within 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 past presidents of the conference, a former vice president and the former 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 financial and administrative duties. Though Southern Baptist church buildings operate independently from one another, the Nashville-based Executive Committee distributes more than $190 million cooperative program in its annual funds that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For many years, the findings show, Southern Baptists were instructed the denomination couldn't put collectively a registry of sex offenders as a result of it might go towards the denomination’s polity — or the way it features. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained a listing of offenders while conserving it a secret to keep away from the opportunity of getting sued. The report additionally includes non-public emails displaying how longtime leaders akin to August Boto were dismissive about sexual abuse issues, calling them “a satanic scheme to fully distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 e-mail, the convention’s lawyer despatched Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database could possibly be applied per SBC polity, saying “it will match our polity and present ministries to assist church buildings in this area of child abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he beneficial “quick motion to signal the Conference’s desire that the [executive committee] and the entities start a more aggressive effort in this area.” That very same yr, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a motion for a database, Boto rejected the concept.

For a denomination designed to give more democratic energy to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to fee the third-party investigation, the report exhibits how lay Southern Baptists allowed a couple of key leaders, together with Boto and the conference’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to control the nationwide institutional response to sex abuse for many years. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, stated he had not learn the report yet. Makes an attempt to succeed in Boto on Sunday had been unsuccessful.

“The report goes to validate so much about how they actually blindly chose to remain on the same 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 hold the weight.”

Throughout Executive Committee conferences in 2021, some members argued in opposition to waiving attorney-client privilege, which might give investigators access to data of conversations on authorized issues among the committee’s members and staffers. They mentioned doing so went towards the recommendation of convention legal professionals and will bankrupt the SBC by exposing it to lawsuits.

The talk over waiving privilege upset a large swath of Southern Baptists, causing some to imagine 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 additionally 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 conference’s attorneys, who're named throughout the report.

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According to the report, Floyd instructed SBC leaders in a 2019 e-mail that he had acquired “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 disaster.” Floyd didn't immediately return a request for comment.

Christa Brown, who told SBC leaders that she was abused by a youth pastor who went on to serve in other Southern Baptist church buildings in multiple 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 Govt Committee betrayed not solely survivors who labored exhausting to attempt to make one thing happen, but betrayed the entire Southern Baptist Convention,” said Brown, who's a retired appellate legal professional in Colorado. “They’ve made their very own religion into a complicit partner for their own decision 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 talk about subsequent steps. Recommendations by Guidepost embrace providing dedicated survivor advocacy assist and a survivor compensation fund.

“We should be ready to take significant steps to vary our tradition because it relates to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the present SBC president, said in a press release.

Since a long time of sex abuse and coverups within the Catholic Church had been reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have revealed lists of clergymen they say have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to forestall the transfer of abusers to different churches. 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 crisis, wrote to the SBC and Executive Committee presidents, in line with the report. He expressed his concerns that SBC leaders may very well be falling into among the similar patterns as Catholic leaders in not coping with clergy sex abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists ought to be taught from Catholic errors and take motion early on to implement structural reforms in order to make kids safer.

The report states that Frank Page, who was leading the Govt Committee at the time, responded to Doyle in a short letter that “Southern Baptist leaders really don't have any authority over local church buildings” but that they'd try to make use of their “influence” to supply protections. In an article, Page accused a survivor group of getting 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.” 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 drive on the difficulty and said that the report shows a need for establishments like the SBC to seek outdoors experience on intercourse abuse.

“It reveals a stage of coverup and harassment and resistance to reforms on an institutional stage that has led to decades of survivors being victimized and damage,” Denhollander said. “The query Southern Baptists need to ask is, ‘How could this happen?’”

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 policy arm, the Ethics & Non secular Liberty Fee. Moore stated he expects Southern Baptists to obtain Sunday’s report in an analogous 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 said. “People will say, ‘This is not all Southern Baptists, look at all the great we do.’ The report demonstrates a sample 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 dwelling state in 2016, with a statue of Christa Brown, the abuse survivor who spent the past 20 years combating for reform.