Southern Baptist leaders coated up sex abuse, explosive report says

Leaders in the Southern Baptist Conference on Sunday launched a major third-party investigation that found that intercourse abuse survivors were typically ignored, minimized and “even vilified” by prime clergy in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

The findings of nearly 300 pages include stunning new particulars about particular abuse instances and shine a light on how denominational leaders for decades actively resisted requires abuse prevention and reform. Evidence in the report suggests leaders also lied to Southern Baptists over whether or not they may preserve a database of offenders to prevent more abuse when prime leaders were secretly preserving a private listing for years.

The report — the first investigation of its type in an enormous Protestant denomination like the SBC — is anticipated to send shock waves all through a conservative Christian neighborhood that has had intense inside battles over the way to deal with sex abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, along with other non secular institutions in the United States, has struggled with declining membership for the past 15 years. Its leaders have lengthy resisted comparisons between its sexual abuse crisis and that of the Catholic Church, saying the full number of abuse cases amongst 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 child molesters and other accused abusers who have been in the pulpit or employed as church staff members. Lots of the circumstances referred to in the report have been considered outside the statute of limitations, the time survivors can report intercourse abuse, so it’s unclear how many abusers have been criminally charged.

The report, compiled by an organization called Guidepost Options at the request of Southern Baptists, states that abuse survivors’ calls and emails have been “only to be met, time and time again, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility” by leaders who were involved more with protecting the establishment from legal responsibility than from protecting Southern Baptists from further abuse.

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

While the report focuses primarily on how leaders handled abuse points when survivors got here ahead, it additionally states that a main Southern Baptist leader was credibly accused of sexually assaulting a woman 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 vp on the SBC’s missions arm, was credibly accused of assaulting a girl during a Panama Metropolis Seashore, Fla., trip in 2010.

The report states that Hunt, in an interview with investigators, denied any physical contact with the woman but acknowledged that he had interactions together with her. After the report was launched, 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've never abused anyone.”

Hunt resigned on Might 13 from the North American Mission Board, in line with a press release by NAMB President Kevin Ezell. Ezell said that earlier than May 13, he was not aware of alleged misconduct by Hunt. Typically, he called the details of the report “egregious and deeply disturbing.”

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

“I knew it was rotten, however it’s astonishing and infuriating,” said 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 is through and through about energy. It's misappropriated energy. It doesn't in any approach reflect the Jesus I see in 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 past presidents of the convention, a former vp and the former 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 operate independently from each other, the Nashville-based Government Committee distributes greater than $190 million cooperative program in its annual funds that funds its missions, seminaries and ministries.

For decades, the findings present, Southern Baptists had been instructed the denomination could not put together a registry of intercourse offenders as a result of it will go in opposition to the denomination’s polity — or how it features. What the report reveals is that leaders maintained an inventory of offenders while holding it a secret to keep away from the potential for getting sued. The report also includes personal emails showing how longtime leaders corresponding to August Boto were 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 may very well be implemented in keeping with SBC polity, saying “it would match our polity and current ministries to assist churches on this space of kid abuse and sexual misconduct.” The report states that he really helpful “instant action to signal the Conference’s desire that the [executive committee] and the entities start a more aggressive effort on this area.” That very same yr, after a Southern Baptist pastor made a movement for a database, Boto rejected the thought.

For a denomination designed to present more democratic power 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, including Boto and the conference’s longtime lawyer, James Guenther, to regulate the national institutional response to intercourse abuse for decades. Guenther, the longtime lawyer for the SBC, said he had not learn the report but. Attempts to achieve Boto on Sunday have been unsuccessful.

“The report is going to validate a lot about how they really blindly selected to remain 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 alongside. Now Southern Baptists have to hold the weight.”

During Government Committee conferences in 2021, some members argued against waiving attorney-client privilege, which would give investigators access to records of conversations on legal issues among the many committee’s members and staffers. They said doing so went against the advice of convention attorneys and will bankrupt the SBC by exposing it to lawsuits.

The debate over waiving privilege upset a big swath of Southern Baptists, causing some to imagine 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 additionally led to the resignation of the Govt 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 choice over attorney-client privilege additionally led to the resignation of the convention’s attorneys, who are named all through the report.

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In line with the report, Floyd told SBC leaders in a 2019 e 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 acknowledged: “Our precedence can't be the latest cultural crisis.” 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 other Southern Baptist churches 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 Executive Committee “turned his again to her during her speech and one other chortled.”

“The Executive Committee betrayed not solely survivors who labored onerous to try to make one thing occur, however betrayed the whole Southern Baptist Convention,” mentioned Brown, who is a retired appellate lawyer in Colorado. “They’ve made their very own faith right into a complicit accomplice for their very own decision to choose institutional protection over the protection of kids and congregants.”

The report, which was requested by Southern Baptists throughout its final annual assembly, comes simply weeks before its subsequent gathering in Anaheim, Calif., where members are expected focus on next steps. Recommendations by Guidepost embrace offering dedicated survivor advocacy help and a survivor compensation fund.

“We have to be able to take meaningful steps to change our tradition as it pertains to sexual abuse,” Ed Litton, the current SBC president, mentioned in a statement.

Since a long time of sex abuse and coverups within the Catholic Church have been reported by the Boston Globe in 2002, some U.S. dioceses have printed lists of clergymen they are saying have been credibly accused of sexual abuse to stop the transfer of abusers to other church buildings. In contrast to 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 disaster, wrote to the SBC and Govt Committee presidents, in response to the report. He expressed his considerations that SBC leaders may very well be falling into a few 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 errors and take action early on to implement structural reforms in order to make kids safer.

The report states that Frank Page, who was leading the Executive Committee on the time, responded to Doyle in a brief letter that “Southern Baptist leaders actually haven't any authority over local church buildings” but that they'd try to use their “affect” to offer protections. In an article, Web page accused a survivor group of getting a hidden agenda of organising the nation’s largest Protestant body for lawsuits. Web page later resigned from his position in 2018 over having a “morally inappropriate relationship.” Page didn't 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 job force on the issue and mentioned that the report shows a necessity for institutions like the SBC to seek outdoors expertise on intercourse abuse.

“It shows a degree of coverup and harassment and resistance to reforms on an institutional level that has led to decades of survivors being victimized and hurt,” Denhollander stated. “The query Southern Baptists need to ask is, ‘How could this occur?’”

The issue of intercourse abuse was a prominent 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 & Non secular Liberty Fee. Moore mentioned he expects Southern Baptists to obtain Sunday’s report in a similar strategy 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 on this report are breathtaking,” Moore said. “Folks will say, ‘This is not all Southern Baptists, take a look at all the nice we do.’ The report demonstrates a sample of stonewalling, coverup, intimidation and retaliation.”

Moore said he hopes the SBC will contemplate replacing 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 20 years preventing for reform.