“He pinned her down on the sofa, climbed on top of her and lifted her shirt”: the sexual abuse scandal in the Baptist Church in the USA
After suffering numerous sexual abuses when he was years ago, Debbie Vasquez became pregnant and was forced to apologize in front of her religious community, a church of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), the largest Protestant congregation in the US.
She was only asked to keep silent about one detail: who was the father of the baby…
To say that it was the congregation’s own pastor who had systematically raped her ” it would harm the Church”, they told him.
His testimony is part of dozens of cases published this week in an internal investigation into abuses within the Convention from the year 2010 to date.
The findings of the document, according to current and past directors of the SBC, have been “worse than expected”.
“Crisis is too small a word. It is an apocalypse”, wrote on the Christianity Today site Russell Moore, who directed the public policies of the SBC and left the organization after complaining that it covered up sexual abuse.
“Despite the dark vision I had from the SBC Executive Committee, the investigation uncovers a much more evil and systemic reality than I imagined it could be,” he added.
The seven-month investigation found that numerous survivors’ claims of abuses were ignored, or met with “resistance, obstruction and even open hostility” by religious authorities.
“Our investigation revealed that, for many years, some leaders (of the executive committee) , along with outside counsel, largely controlled the response to these abuse reports and were singularly focused on avoiding SBC liability,” the report says.
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In one example cited in the report, August Boto, a leader of the SBC, described the accusations as a “satanic scheme to completely distract us from the gospel”.
Cover-up
The text of 04 pages indicates in this sense that the religious leaders “protected or even supported the alleged abusers and refused to take action on the grounds that the SBC could not take any action “because of how the church works.”
Many victims reported that they tried to make their cases visible, but that they did not find answers, which sometimes led them to desperate emotional situations.
Christa Brown, another of the victims, assures that she was abused by a pastor when she was 16 years, which was followed by “countless encounters with Baptist leaders” who rejected her and did not believe her, leaving her with “a legacy of hate” that was a kind of “murder of her soul”.
The document revealed for the first time that the executive committee of the SBC maintained a list of more than 700 of his ministers who were facing accusations of abuse but, despite calls for a public database, kept its findings secret.
The organization’s leaders announced after a meeting on Tuesday to analyze the report that will reveal the list of names of the alleged abusers that had been hidden until now.
Lack of measures
The report indicates that there is no evidence that religious leaders have taken “any measure to ensure that the accused ministers were no longer in positions of power r”.
It also alleges that the abuses were carried out both by pastors of smaller communities and by popular religious leaders with great power within the Church.
One of the cases in the report is that of Johnny Hunt, a pastor from Georgia and former president of the SBC, who is accused of sexually abusing the wife of another pastor during a vacation in Florida in 2010.
The woman said that while she was talking to Hunt about a stressful situation she was going through, the pastor “proceeded to pull down her shorts, turn her around and look at her butt…and made sexual comments about her body and things that had imagined about her”.
The report then explains that Hunt “immobilized the woman on the sofa, lifted her shirt and sexually abused her”.
The pastor, who has denied the charges of sexual abuse al, resigned on from May to his position as vice president for evangelism and leadership of the North American Mission Board.
The report also proposes some recommendations to help the Church to combat cases of abuse within it.
Among them, it proposes the creation of an independent commission that would supervise the reforms in the management of inappropriate sexual conduct and restrict the use of agreements of confidentiality and civil agreements on the part of the accused.
The investigation, carried out for the SBC by an external company, was initiated as a result of the report of 2010 of the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News that exposed hundreds of alleged cases of sexual abuse within the church.
Amid internal divisions over how to handle the scandal, thousands of delegates at the SBC annual meeting last year they voted in favor of a review of the institution’s actions by a third party.
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