According to an internal investigation issued on Sunday, reports of sexual abuse by pastors and employees in the Southern Baptist Convention, the biggest American Protestant denomination, have been either overlooked or kept under wraps by top clergy for decades, Reuters reports.
The roughly 300-page investigation describes how concerns were kept within the church as “closely guarded secrets” to prevent liability, “to the exclusion of all other considerations,” according to the report.
“In service to this goal, survivors and others who reported the abuse were ignored, disbelieved,” the report said.
It claimed that lawsuits against the church were dismissed as “opportunistic” and devoid of validity.
When a flood of concerns was made during the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual conference in June 2021, the Southern Baptist Convention launched a year-long inquiry. Sexual assault by pastors and volunteers was at the center of the charges, as was the religious body’s executive committee’s failure to respond.
“We are grieved by the findings of this investigation,” Rolland Slade, chairman of the executive committee of the church, said in a statement.
In the United States, the Southern Baptist Church Convention has more than 13 million members, with more than 40 million globally.
The crisis recalls a scandal that shook the Roman Catholic Church in 2002 when the Boston Globe newspaper exposed that the church hierarchy hushed-up sexual misbehavior by its clergy for decades.
According to BishopAccountability.org, an organization that monitors the matter, the United States Catholic Church has paid out an astounding $3.2 billion to settle clerical sexual abuse allegations.
More than 700 people were molested by pastors, leaders, and volunteers in Southern Baptist congregations, according to reports by the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News in 2019.
Guidepost Solutions LLC conducted the Southern Baptist inquiry.
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