White Evangelicals May Not Recover From the SBC Sex Scandal

Make no mistake.  The Catholic Church has suffered greatly from the sex abuse scandal that has rocked the institution for two decades.  It has lost an unknown number of members and has paid out billions of dollars in settlements.  Yet, as a piece in The Economist, a venerable British publication, lays out, it has managed to salvage at least some ability to reclaim some level of diminished moral authority.  In contrast, white evangelicals and specifically the Southern Baptist Convention may find a similar recovery far more difficult.  Why is this importnat?  Simple put because white evangelicals are a core of the Republican Party and a driving force behind its quest to impose minority rule in America and support many of its most toxic agenda items ranging from bans on abortion to cuts to social programs, to voter suppression, to unfettered gun ownership. If America is to return to majority rule and the Republican Party's attacks on democracy, one necessary step is the crippling of white evangelicals as a political force.  The piece in The Economist argues that due to their partisanship and exclusionary mindset on race, sexuality and gender, evangelicals may be hastening their own fall (which in my view cannot occur soon enough).  Indeed, few things could be better for America than the collapse of white evangelical churches nationwide.  Here are article highlights:

In 1985 Gilbert Gauthe, a cowboy-boot-wearing showboat of a priest in southern Louisiana, was convicted of abusing dozens of altar boys. It was one of the first of the sexual-abuse scandals that for three decades have rippled through the Catholic Church, devastating the institution. Millions of Americans and Europeans have left it.

America’s biggest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptists, now faces the same reckoning. . . . . its national executive stonewalled and prevaricated, leading to demands for an independent investigation. Its findings, made public this week, are even more shocking than expected.

Abuses within the denomination appear to have been widespread, often committed by church leaders and systematically covered up. The report includes a “credible” allegation of sexual assault by a former president of the national executive, Johnny Hunt . . . It describes efforts by Southern Baptist officials to intimidate and denigrate as “opportunists” victims of assault and an overriding concern to stop them suing for compensation.

It amounts to a familiar story: of privileged men exercising power with grubby and sometimes criminal impunity, then denying having done so to protect their institution and themselves. Secular institutions have seen plenty of that, of course. But it is probably no coincidence that the Catholic and Southern Baptist churches are among the most male-chauvinist Christian traditions. Nor is it by chance that some of their most censorious figures have turned out to be among the biggest abusers.

Southern Baptists will discuss the report, which is already receiving pushback from conservatives, at their annual meeting in California next month. But even if their leadership accepts it contritely, the revelations seem likely to accentuate a decline in the white evangelical tradition that is already advanced.

Since 2006, when Southern Baptist membership peaked at 16.3m, the group has lost 2.6m members, including over a million in the past three years. Formerly seen as an American bulwark against irreligiosity, white evangelicalism, of which Southern Baptists are the dominant strain, now looks to have been a brief holdout. It has been losing congregants at the same rate as the Catholic and mainline Protestant churches. In 2006, almost a quarter of Americans were white evangelicals; only 14% are today.

The decline has been most pronounced among those aged 18-29. Anecdotal evidence suggests they dislike the partisan alignment as much as the scandals Messrs Patterson and Pressler have wrought. . . . People of my age are turned away by the positions on race, sexuality and gender.” And also, she adds, by white evangelicals’ embrace of Donald Trump, another alleged sexual predator. Southern Baptists “were supposed to be part of a moral majority”, she says.

They represent a plurality of the Republican coalition and are by far the country’s most powerful special interest. If America is about to lose the right to legal abortion, it will be by order of a conservative Supreme Court majority assembled to please them. Yet a cultural minority will struggle to win a culture war. And the damage white evangelicals’ political overreach is storing up is already obvious.

The Catholic church has survived the dire failures of its priesthood in part by emphasising other strengths, including the vigour of its charities, its growth in developing countries, and their ability to replenish dwindling rich-world vocations and congregations. In their partisan fury, America’s white evangelicals seem more intent on kicking their tradition’s crutches away.

[P]oliticisation has blunted them in favour of groupthink and hostility to outsiders. Black and immigrant Southern Baptists, possible sources of renewal, have joined progressives in the rush to the exit. Dissident thinkers such as Russell Moore, a critic of the church’s response to the abuse scandal, and Beth Moore (no relation), one of its few notable women, have been driven out. New baptisms are close to record lows.

The sexual-abuse scandal is emblematic of these wider institutional failures. Conscientious evangelicals consider it proof of the persistence of sin. An alternative reading is that it indicates an institution that has abused its power over its own vulnerable members, just as it has in the public square.