Mark Woods: A biblical downfall for pillars of Southern Baptist Convention

I’ve been thinking about Dad recently — partly because Father’s Day is coming up, partly because of the news involving Baptists.

Dad was a Baptist minister — an American Baptist minister — for nearly 40 years, serving in several churches, a Native American reservation in Nevada and, finally, a hospital in Wisconsin. The year after he died, American Baptist Churches posthumously honored him as “Chaplain of the Year.”

A few years after that, in 2004, the Southern Baptist Convention — America’s largest Protestant body with 16.3 million members at the time — voted to end a 99-year relationship with a global federation of more than 200 Baptist denominations.

One of the primary reasons: the American Baptists.

Local connection: Southern Baptist sex abuse list includes names of 10 accused Jacksonville-area ministers

Mark Woods: For a preacher's kid, an invitation to be like Dad

Once upon a time, these two denominations were one. In 1845, the Southern Baptists split with northern Baptists (now American Baptists) over the issue of slavery. Citing biblical texts, the Southern Baptists supported the enslavement of African-Americans, with some leaders saying it was a “God-ordained institution.”

More than 150 years later, when Southern Baptist leaders said they were leaving the World Baptist Alliance, it largely was over another issue involving American Baptists.

The Rev. Paige Patterson, a towering pillar in the denomination, explained that the American Baptists had some “gay-friendly congregations.”

There weren’t any American Baptist churches performing gay weddings. But, to the horror of Patterson and others, some churches had opened their doors to gay people. Didn’t even demand that they stay in the closet or pledge to pray the gay out.

I think I know where Dad would’ve stood on this. While our congregation growing up was quite homogeneous, he believed a church should welcome anyone and everyone. If someone noted that the Bible says homosexuality is a sin, an abomination, he might’ve noted that there are more than 600 sins in the Bible, many that some supposedly devout Christians don’t seem to pay much attention to. And he also might've noted that you don’t have to go far down the list of abominations  — a proud look, a lying tongue ... — to find ones serially committed by some Bible-touting politicians and preachers.

It turns out that at the same time Rev. Patterson was pointing at the American Baptists as part of the moral decay of America, a woman at a North Carolina seminary where he had been president alleged she had been raped. The woman reported this to seminary leaders. She says Patterson encouraged her not to go to police, to forgive the man who she said raped her at gunpoint.

More than a decade later, in 2018, Patterson was fired by a Texas seminary because of revelations that he lied about how he had handled that rape allegation and, after another rape allegation in 2015, had sent an email to the seminary security director saying he wanted to meet the victim alone so he could “break her down.”

These were not isolated incidents.

This SBC pillar was not alone.

Report: decades of abuse and coverups

For decades, top Southern Baptist leaders repeatedly ignored, minimized and “even vilified” victims of sex abuse.

This was the damning finding of a third-party investigation — commissioned by delegates at last year’s SBC annual meeting, determined to get to the bottom of what they believed to be inaction on a crisis.

The seven-month investigation led to the May 22 release of a nearly 300-page report topped with a warning about the graphic details included in it.

— “For almost two decades, survivors of abuse and other concerned Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) Executive Committee (EC) to report child molesters and other abusers who were in the pulpit or employed as church staff,” it began. “They made phone calls, mailed letters, sent emails, appeared at SBC and EC meetings, held rallies, and contacted the press…only to be met, time and time again, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility from some within the EC.”

— “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 polity regarding church autonomy — even if it meant that convicted molesters continued in ministry with no notice or warning to their current church or congregation.”

— The report revealed that Southern Baptist leaders — who had been saying they could not put together a registry of sex offenders — had been doing exactly that. The secret list included hundreds of ministers and church workers accused of sexual abuse.

Current leaders released that entire list, organized alphabetically, starting with a minister who went to prison for production of child pornography and first-degree sodomy of multiple 8-to-12-year-old males.

The list ends 205 pages later with a youth pastor who was arrested at an Orlando youth conference for soliciting prostitution with an underage teenage girl.

In between, there are the names of 10 current or former Jacksonville-area ministers (not all from Southern Baptist churches).

“This list is being made public for the first time as an initial, but important, step towards addressing the scourge of sexual abuse and implementing reform in the Convention,” wrote the interim leaders of the SBC Executive Committee, Willie McLaurin and Rolland Slade. “Each entry in this list reminds us of the devastation and destruction brought about by sexual abuse. Our prayer is that the survivors of these heinous acts find hope and healing, and that churches will utilize this list proactively to protect and care for the most vulnerable among us.”

'Crisis is too small a word'

While there are plenty of villains in this story, there also are heroes. The victims who spoke up. The lay leaders, or “messengers,” who pushed for the investigation. The recent SBC president who called for truth and transparency. The former officials, like Russell Moore, forced out of his leadership of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.

After reading the report, Moore wrote his reaction for Christianity Today.

“They were right. I was wrong to call sexual abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention a crisis,” he began. “Crisis is too small a word. It is an apocalypse. ... The investigation uncovers a reality far more evil and systemic than I imagined it could be."

As I read the report, I couldn’t help but think about how during this 20-year period, some of the same SBC leaders cited in it were pointing judgmental fingers at American Baptist churches for having some congregations with gay members. And how in recent years some Americans gobbled up crazy QAnon conspiracy theories about underground pedophilia rings involving pizza parlors but ignored a 2019 newspaper report about Southern Baptist churches. And how we’ve reached the point in 2022 where some with bully pulpits and actual pulpits are quick to call critics “groomers” — and yet slow to distance themselves from people who actually fit that definition.

There is so much irony and hypocrisy.

And yet when I read the report, I also couldn’t help but wonder what my father’s reaction would have been — and think that it wouldn’t have been satisfaction or schadenfreude.

I think he’d be sad. For the victims, first and foremost. But also for faith in America.

He was worried about religion in America. He’d get angry about the charlatans and hypocrites, about televangelists lining their pockets, about politicians who felt like the living embodiment of the seven deadly sins, holding up the Bible as a prop.

But he also still believed in faith as a powerfully positive force for individuals and communities. And he worried that while some Americans blindly saw no evil in places of worship, others saw no good.

So I think he’d see the good in this awful news. He’d applaud the Southern Baptists who pushed for the investigation and those who released the unflinching report, pledging that this was just the first step down a path to change.

mwoods@jacksonville.com, (904) 359-4212

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Damning report of sexual abuse in Southern Baptist Convention