Southern Baptist leaders covered up sex abuse, explosive report says

Leaders within the Southern Baptist Conference on Sunday released a significant third-party investigation that discovered that sex abuse survivors have been often ignored, minimized and “even vilified” by prime clergy within the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

The findings of nearly 300 pages embrace stunning new details about specific abuse instances 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 could preserve a database of offenders to prevent more abuse when top leaders had been secretly protecting a personal listing for years.

The report — the first investigation of its variety in a large Protestant denomination just like the SBC — is expected to send shock waves throughout a conservative Christian community that has had intense internal battles over find out how to handle sex abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, together with different religious institutions in the USA, has struggled with declining membership for the previous 15 years. Its leaders have lengthy resisted comparisons between its sexual abuse crisis and that of the Catholic Church, saying the full variety of abuse circumstances among Southern Baptists was small.

The investigation finds that for almost twenty 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. Most of the cases referred to in the report had been thought of outside the statute of limitations, the time survivors can report sex abuse, so it’s unclear what number of abusers had been criminally charged.

The report, compiled by an organization known as Guidepost Solutions 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 have been concerned more with protecting the establishment from liability than from defending Southern Baptists from further abuse.

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

Whereas the report focuses totally on how leaders handled abuse issues when survivors got here forward, it also states that a main Southern Baptist chief was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a girl only 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 president at the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a woman during a Panama City 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 with her. After the report was launched, Hunt, who has not been charged over the alleged incident, posted a press release on Twitter, saying, “I vigorously deny the circumstances and characterizations set forth in the Guidepost report. I have by no means abused anyone.”

Hunt resigned on Could 13 from the North American Mission Board, in accordance with an announcement by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell said that earlier than 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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Sex abuse survivors, a lot of whom have been sharing their tales for years, anticipated Sunday’s launch would confirm the details around lots of the tales they have already shared, however many were nonetheless shocked to see the pattern of coverups by the best levels of leadership.

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

The report also names several senior SBC leaders who protected and even supported alleged abusers, including three past presidents of the conference, a former vice chairman and the former head of the SBC’s administrative arm.

The third-party investigation into actions between 2000 and 2021 targeted on actions by the SBC’s Executive Committee, which handles monetary and administrative duties. Though Southern Baptist church buildings function independently from one another, the Nashville-based Government Committee distributes greater than $190 million cooperative program in its annual funds that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For many years, the findings present, Southern Baptists were told the denomination could not put together a registry of sex offenders because it would go against the denomination’s polity — or how it capabilities. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained a list of offenders whereas conserving it a secret to keep away from the potential of getting sued. The report additionally contains personal emails displaying how longtime leaders equivalent to August Boto have been dismissive about sexual abuse concerns, calling them “a satanic scheme to utterly distract us from evangelism.”

In an April 2007 e-mail, the convention’s lawyer sent Boto a memo explaining how a SBC database might be carried out in step with SBC polity, saying “it might match our polity and present ministries to assist church buildings in this area of child abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he advisable “rapid action to signal the Convention’s desire that the [executive committee] and the entities begin a more aggressive effort in this space.” That same 12 months, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a movement for a database, Boto rejected the concept.

For a denomination designed to present extra democratic energy to its lay leaders or “messengers” who voted to fee the third-party investigation, the report shows how lay Southern Baptists allowed a number of key leaders, including 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, stated he had not read the report yet. Makes an attempt to achieve Boto on Sunday had been unsuccessful.

“The report goes to validate so much about how they actually blindly chose 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 alongside. Now Southern Baptists have to carry the burden.”

Throughout Govt Committee conferences in 2021, some members argued in opposition to waiving attorney-client privilege, which would give investigators access to information of conversations on legal issues among the committee’s members and staffers. They said doing so went towards the recommendation 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, causing 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 Government Committee’s head, Ronnie Floyd, who additionally as soon as served as SBC president and was on President Donald Trump’s evangelical advisory council. The decision over attorney-client privilege additionally led to the resignation of the conference’s attorneys, who are named throughout the report.

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Based on the report, Floyd advised SBC leaders in a 2019 e mail that he had obtained “some calls” from “key SBC pastors and leaders” expressing “rising concern about all the emphasis on the sexual abuse crisis.” He then acknowledged: “Our precedence can't be the most recent cultural disaster.” 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 churches in multiple 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 back to her during her speech and another chortled.”

“The Govt Committee betrayed not solely survivors who labored onerous to try to make something occur, but betrayed the whole Southern Baptist Convention,” said Brown, who is a retired appellate legal professional in Colorado. “They’ve made their own religion into a complicit accomplice for their own decision to decide on institutional safety over the safety of youngsters and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists throughout its last annual meeting, comes just weeks before its subsequent gathering in Anaheim, Calif., where members are anticipated discuss subsequent steps. Suggestions by Guidepost embrace providing dedicated survivor advocacy support and a survivor compensation fund.

“We should be able to take significant steps to change our culture because it relates to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the present SBC president, mentioned in a press release.

Since a long time of intercourse abuse and coverups in the Catholic Church have been reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have printed lists of priests 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 construction.

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 a number of the similar patterns as Catholic leaders in not coping with clergy sex abuse, and he urged that Southern Baptists should learn from Catholic errors and take motion early on to implement structural reforms so as to make children safer.

The report states that Frank Web page, who was leading the Government Committee at the time, responded to Doyle in a brief letter that “Southern Baptist leaders actually don't have any authority over native churches” however that they'd try to use their “influence” to supply protections. In an article, Web page accused a survivor group of getting a hidden agenda of setting up the nation’s largest Protestant body for lawsuits. Page later resigned from his place in 2018 over having a “morally inappropriate relationship.” Page did not 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 task drive on the issue and mentioned that the report shows a necessity for institutions like the SBC to hunt outdoors experience on intercourse abuse.

“It reveals 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 harm,” Denhollander stated. “The question Southern Baptists need to ask is, ‘How might this happen?’”

The issue of intercourse abuse was a distinguished theme in leaked personal letters written by Russell Moore, who left his position in 2021 as head of the SBC’s policy arm, the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. Moore mentioned he expects Southern Baptists to receive Sunday’s report in an identical solution 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 isn't all Southern Baptists, take a look at all the nice we do.’ The report demonstrates a sample of stonewalling, coverup, intimidation and retaliation.”

Moore mentioned he hopes the SBC will think about 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 previous two decades fighting for reform.