Does Sexual Abuse Require Intercourse? Some Southern Baptists Seem to Think So.

Former Southern Baptist Convention president Johnny Hunt seems to think sexual abuse requires sexual intercourse. Ditto for adultery—in his view, it requires intercourse.

This comes to light thanks to Hunt’s sworn deposition testimony in a lawsuit Hunt filed against Guidepost Solutions and the SBC Executive Committee, claiming that, in an investigatory report, they had defamed him by making public the story of what he described as a “brief, inappropriate, extramarital encounter with a married woman.”

“Encounter:” Hunt himself emphasizes that word, saying,

“It was not an affair; it was an encounter.”

Johnny Hunt (Baptist News Global photo)

In Hunt’s court filing, which rather nauseatingly referred to him as “Pastor Johnny,” Hunt acknowledged that the “encounter” involved “kissing and some awkward fondling” but asserted that this was a mere “private failing” and not abusive. Hunt claimed that he had been included in the investigatory report as a way “to deflect attention from the SBC’s historical failure to take aggressive steps to respond to reports of child sex abuse and other sex crimes.”

(As a side-note, I’ll just pause here to point out that Hunt was SBC president during years when many of those “historic failures” he references were occurring, and so it seems a bit bizarre that he’s now effectively confirming those “historic failures” while saying “look there”—at the failures while I was president—but don’t look at me. But I digress…)

The investigatory report included a description of that “encounter,” as it was reported by the woman. It says that Hunt “proceeded to pull her shorts down … made sexual remarks about her body and the things he had imagined about her… pinned her to the couch, got on top of her, and pulled up her shirt,” and “sexually assaulted her with his hands and mouth.”

The report further stated that Hunt “forced himself on her again by groping her…and violently kissing her.”

The report deemed the woman’s account credible and referenced corroborating statements from other witnesses. The investigators did not find Hunt to be credible, pointing out that he had given conflicting statements. And while Hunt initially denied any encounter with the woman, after the investigatory report was released, he changed his story to say that he’d had a consensual inappropriate encounter but that it was not abusive in nature.

So how is Hunt defining “abusive”? Here are some of his deposition answers:

Q. How would you define in your own words abuse?

A. When I think of abuse, I speak — I think of someone actually being physically hurt or — so abusive, which I guess it could have been verbal too. But that would be all I would have ever probably considered.

Q. And has your own opinion of what sexual abuse is or is not changed since 2010?

A. Yes. It’s changed since I now am able to see the legal definition of it. Absolutely.

Q. And what’s your understanding of the legal definition?

A. To use sexual abuse would be in the context of intercourse… So I see it in that context, but definitely not consensual.

Q. So I want to be clear, you think in order for there to be sexual abuse, there has to be intercourse? Under a legal definition?

A. That would be part of it.

Kinda slippery, eh? That’s exactly why the attorney was trying to nail down a definition.

The attorney then inquired of Hunt about how he defined “adultery.”

Q. “How do you define adultery?”

A. “Adultery is a man that is married and he has sexual intercourse with someone other than his wife.

Q. “So Bill Clinton did not commit adultery?”

A. “I don’t know his story.”

Q. “If it did not result in sexual intercourse, which we will define as a man’s penis being inserted into a woman’s vagina ….”

Hunt’s attorney interrupted at this point, and when the questioning resumed, Hunt tried to distinguish between being “unfaithful” and committing “adultery.”

Q. OK. When do you cross the line from being unfaithful to committing adultery?

A. When you have sex with her.

Q. And by ‘sex,’ you mean intercourse?

A. Intercourse. Exactly.

Q. So you could be unfaithful by going to a woman — not your wife’s — room and kiss her and that is not adultery?

A. That’s not adultery.

Then later in the deposition, there are these exchanges:

Q. So your definition of adultery is limited to sexual intercourse with someone not your spouse?

A. Yes.

… and

Q. So just to be clear, the sexual encounter was full breast exposure with kissing and fondling her breasts while they were exposed?

A. Correct. Correct.

Watching Hunt twist himself into a pretzel to insist that what he did wasn’t adultery is really something. Effectively he seems to think that he could do almost anything apart from intercourse and it wouldn’t constitute abuse or adultery.

His definition lets him have his cake and still deny having it.

I’m reminded of former U.S. President Bill Clinton’s famous statement: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”

Then, as facts unfolded, the whole world learned that, apparently, Bill Clinton didn’t consider oral sex as constituting “sexual relations.”

Like Hunt, Clinton was a Southern Baptist. And their view is definitely in the minority. In a 1998 poll, 87% of people said oral sex constituted “sexual relations,” and 69% said that touching in the genital area qualified.

I’m also reminded of things said by Tommy Gilmore, the pastor who sexually abused me when I was a kid—and he too was a Southern Baptist.

He said that so long as my hymen stayed intact—so long as I stayed a virgin—then what we were doing didn’t constitute “sex.” So, everything was okay—more than okay—it was God’s will.

At the time, I don’t think I even knew what a hymen was; I had never even used a tampon. But as with so much else, I simply believed what the pastor told me.

It was like a giant loophole in his brain—a loophole that allowed him to do whatever he wanted while simultaneously saying that it was all good and godly.

It seems similar to the kind of loophole that Johnny Hunt and Bill Clinton used.

So now I’m wondering… exactly how long has this loophole been around? At least for decades—that’s obvious.

And how did this loophole originate?

Expressly or implicitly, do they teach this loophole in Southern Baptist seminaries—that so long as there’s not intercourse, it’s not “sex,” “abuse” or “adultery”?

In effect, it’s a loophole that allows pastors to do almost anything they want while simultaneously preserving their self-righteousness.

How incredibly self-serving for abusive pastors and their cover-upping cronies.

My new memoir, Baptistland, is now available!