The Southern Baptist Horror

The shock waves from the new report disclosing in great detail the moral bankruptcy of the leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention ("SBC") continue to reverberate.  The stories of sexual abuse and deliberate cover up of crimes is but a re-write of the Catholic Church abuse scandal that began to be disclosed 20 years ago.   Both denominations - and many others yet to be scrutinized - are male dominated where women are subjugated (if not viewed as temptresses), those with differing beliefs belittled or worse,  and blind submission to patriarchal authority is demanded.  It is the perfect setting for abuse and in many ways should surprise no one.  Equally disturbing is the reality that the SBC leadership and similarly minded reactionary Catholics on the U.S. Supreme Court want to impose thie toxic beliefs and dogma on all of society.  With luck, as more horrific details continue to emerge the SBC - like the Catholic Church - will lose any moral authority and see a much deserved exodus of members.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the report and its findings.  Here are excerpts:

The report is a calamity. My friend Russell Moore, a former president of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, called it an “apocalypse.” The report says that “for almost two decades, survivors of abuse and other concerned Southern Baptists” contacted its executive committee “to report child molesters and other abusers who were in the pulpit or employed as church staff.”

And what was the reaction they received? A select group of executive-committee leaders “largely controlled” the committee’s response to abuse reports, and they “were singularly focused on avoiding liability for the SBC to the exclusion of other considerations.” According to Guidepost, this meant that survivors and others who reported abuse “were ignored, disbelieved, or met with the constant refrain that the SBC could take no action due to its policy regarding church autonomy—even if it meant that convicted molesters continued in ministry with no notice or warning to their current church or congregation.”

[A]]t the same time that senior leaders refused to take action, they compiled a private list of “accused ministers” in Baptist churches. There is no evidence that they shared this list “or took any action to ensure that the accused ministers were no longer in positions of power at SBC churches.”

Executive-committee leaders also “turned against” survivors and others reporting abuse. The report states that survivors of abuse at the hands of SBC clergy, employees, and volunteers were denigrated as “opportunistic,” having a “hidden agenda of lawsuits,” wanting to “burn things to the ground,” and acting as a “professional victim.”

Not only did senior Baptist leaders ignore abuse and disparage those who reported abuse, but a shocking number were implicated in misconduct themselves, including several of the most powerful and influential men in modern Baptist history.

The list just keeps going. Paige Patterson, a former SBC president and former president of the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (one of the denomination’s most important schools), was fired by the seminary after he told a student not to report a rape and after he “emailed his intention to meet with another student who had reported an assault, with no other officials present, so he could ‘break her down.’”

In 2018, executive-committee President and CEO Frank Page resigned after he admitted to what he called a “consensual affair” with an adult woman.

Another SBC giant, former Vice President Paul Pressler—one of the architects of the so-called conservative resurgence that remade the modern SBC—is now a defendant in a civil lawsuit brought by a man who alleges that Pressler began abusing him when he was 14 years old. Two other men have “submitted separate affidavits in the case also accusing Judge Pressler of sexual misconduct.”

During the investigation, an SBC pastor and his wife “came forward to report that SBC President Johnny Hunt (2008–2010) had sexually assaulted the wife on July 25, 2010.” Guidepost included the allegation in the report because the allegation was corroborated by multiple witnesses . . .

Page after grim page reveals crushing scandal after crushing scandal. One abuse survivor, a woman named Christa Brown, said that an executive-committee member turned his back to her when she addressed the committee in 2007. Another member allegedly chortled at her. Brown described the emotional impact of the moment:

I ask you to try to imagine what it’s like to speak about something so painful to a room in which men disrespect you in such a way. And I hope that you will also try to imagine the long-lasting impact this had on me—to speak about this horrific trauma of having my pastor repeatedly rape me as a child, only to have religious leaders behave in this way and to have not a single other person who thought it mattered enough to speak up.

I remember when the Catholic abuse scandals started lighting up the media. Those reports were similarly hard to read, and while I’m not a Catholic, I had a hard time believing that the evangelical Church was any different. I’d seen multiple scandals during my own time in church, and my own wife, Nancy, was abused by a vacation-Bible-school teacher when she was only 12. The decentralization of American Protestantism has meant that it’s hard to grasp the scale of the crisis. But this much we know—abuse is occurring across the length and breadth of the evangelical Church.

Last year, Nancy and I detailed a horrific scandal at one of the largest Christian camps in America, Kanakuk Kamps, where leaders ignored red flag after red flag (including multiple reports of nudity with young boys) and promoted a young counselor to the position of camp director. The director, a man named Pete Newman, was a superpredator, and when he was finally caught and convicted, the camp bought the silence of victims, bullied their families, and even to this day threatens those who have exposed its horrific negligence.

Also last year, the evangelical world learned that the late Ravi Zacharias, one of its most beloved and influential apologists, or defenders of the faith, was a serial sexual predator. Even worse, whistleblowers inside the organization he ran described a ministry culture that protected Zacharias from accountability and retaliated against employees who raised justified concerns.

And we can’t forget the series of scandals that have rocked Liberty University, one of the largest Christian universities in the world. . . . . 12 students filed a federal lawsuit claiming, among other things, that the university promoted “a tacit but widely observed policy that condoned sexual violence, especially by male student athletes.”

Earlier this month Liberty entered into a confidential settlement with the plaintiffs, announced a series of multimillion-dollar security upgrades on campus, and stated that it was “strengthening” its Title IX department’s “policies and procedures.”

I highlight reports of abuse in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, in one of its largest Christian camps, in one of its largest Christian universities, and in its most prominent apologetics ministry because it is past time to recognize that the culture of American evangelicalism is broken at a fundamental level.

But the responsibility does not rest with Baptists alone. Christians have created a culture that all too often celebrates male power at the expense of female dignity. Our churches frequently follow charismatic leaders even when they wave red flags in our face. And when other churches fail and other leaders fall, we shake our heads and say, “Thank God we’re not like them.”