I grew up as a Southern Baptist kid, in the north for most of my childhood. The small churches my family attended nurtured me and were our primary source of community. My involvement in the programs this denomination sponsored on my college campus helped me become a better human being and to determine my vocation. When I graduated from college the denomination sent me to teach elementary school in Africa for two years. I had never been on an airplane until I flew from Chicago to Richmond for that job interview, six months before moving to a new continent. The great paradox is that a religious tradition born in support of slavery and steeped in ugly racism was providing me a pathway out of that narrow view of the world.
Over the next decade I would also earn two graduate degrees from the denominations premier educational institution. All the while a sinister plot was taking place. Two men had come to realize that the rules of the Southern Baptist Convention provided a pathway for seizing control of its institutions and levers of power. A judge from Texas named Paul Pressler and a seminary student named Paige Patterson began the plot called the “conservative resurgence” or the “fundamentalist takeover,” depending the side one chose. By the time my education was finished, the process was nearly complete, and I was left on the outside – banished. I got as far as an interview for what would have been the dream job for someone with my credentials. I was cut from the list because I would not endorse a fundamentalist agenda. I supported the full participation of women in positions of leadership within the church, the full acceptance and equality of gay and lesbian persons inside and outside the church, and reproductive rights for women in American society. It was a hat-trick of unacceptability. The Southern Baptist “controversy” would define the parameters of my adult life.
In my early thirties I was at sea in a very small boat. I worked hard, had a lot of help, and got lucky. Over the next quarter century new opportunities came along, and I managed to construct a decent career in academia. I carry wounds from that battle, but many of my friends were hurt more seriously. They are scattered about, many in other religious traditions now, and some having left behind the church altogether. Their courage and character has often been the one true thing I could see in the world and the force that has kept me moving forward.
All of this happened because two evil men figured out how to get power, including how to manipulate the majority of the Southern Baptist Convention using fear, ignorance, and hatred.
This story has taken a surprising turn in the last year or so. Paul Pressler turned out to be a serial abuser of young men. All of the railing against homosexuality in Southern Baptist life turned out to be a twisted external expression of his own internal struggle.
Some of the sordid story is here.
The list of men accusing a former Texas state judge and leading figure of the Southern Baptist Convention of sexual misconduct continues to grow.
In separate court affidavits filed this month, two men say Paul Pressler molested or solicited them for sex in a pair of incidents that span nearly 40 years. Those accusations were filed as part of a lawsuit filed last year by another man who says he was regularly raped by Pressler.
Pressler’s newest accusers are another former member of a church youth group and a lawyer who worked for Pressler’s former law firm until 2017.
Paige Patterson turned out to be an unrepentant misogynist, who enabled and participated in violence against countless women. All the railing against feminism and women preachers turned out to be an external drama that reflected his own internal hatred of women and his pathological need to control them.
Some of the sordid story is here.
In a bombshell announcement Friday night, leaders of a Southern Baptist seminary explained the reasons they decided two days earlier to fire their president, a longtime leader of the denomination. In a statement, they asserted that Paige Patterson lied about his treatment of an alleged rape victim in 2003, and that in 2015 he tried to meet, with no other officials present, with another woman who had reported a sexual assault so he could “break her down.”
Concerns surrounding the behavior of Patterson, who until a few weeks ago was a towering figure in the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest U.S. Protestant denomination, with about 15 million members, have roiled conservative evangelical circles since recorded remarks surfaced this year that were viewed by many as demeaning toward women. They included Patterson’s advice to a woman to return to her abusive husband.
From the time these two became prominent figures in Southern, often held up as paragons of virtue, it took nearly forty years for all of this to come out in the full light of the truth. Vindication came too late for some, and it cannot take away the scars that many bear, but those of us still standing can say for them, “We knew the truth all along, and now the whole world sees. There it is.”
Our nation has been following a parallel, sometimes intersecting path over those decades, and this one is not yet fully exposed. Craven men continue to project their internal monsters onto an external stage, manipulating the masses with fear, ignorance, and hatred. It has been a long, hard road, and we are not at the end of it yet, but we will get there. If you are fortunate to be one who is still standing, say it with me for those who are not, “We have known the truth all along, and soon the whole world will see it. There it is.”