https://dir.md/article/
The roots of the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe go back 50 years, when zealots preaching a gospel of misogyny and homophobia—led by an accused sexual predator—took over America’s largest Protestant denomination.
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From the presidency of Ronald Reagan through that of Donald Trump, Southern Baptist leaders played influential roles in blessing Republican presidential candidacies, vetting Supreme Court justices, and shaping policy. Just as the SBC’s conservatives seized control of their own denomination, purging moderate pastors and churches, the religious right took over the GOP, playing a key role in turning it into today’s Trumpian party of white Christian nationalism.
After investigating this supposed transgression, Pressler said, he resolved to ensure that no one at the helm of any Southern Baptist institution would never again allow any suggestion that the Bible was not 100 percent true. He traveled the country, urging Southern Baptists to attend the denomination’s annual meeting and elect leaders who would “make the proper appointments to change the trustees so that the trustees could properly function in correcting the problems at their institutions.”
By 1979, the year the religious right was coalescing around the candidacy of Ronald Reagan (not a regular churchgoer) over the reelection bid of Jimmy Carter (a liberal Southern Baptist Sunday school teacher), the fundamentalist takeover of the SBC was complete. For Southern Baptists like Moyers, it was a travesty and “alien to my experience growing up” in his own church in Marshall, Tex. In his 1987 broadcast on the conservative resurgence, Moyers lamented the expulsions of more liberal-minded churches and officials from the denomination and the jettisoning of the Southern Baptist tradition of respecting the line between church and politics. The fundamentalists’ “determination to make one view of the Bible—their view—the test of religious and political truth,” Moyers said, was “radical, and for America it’s political dynamite, because how Baptists read the Bible affects how they cast their ballots.”
“No one in our lifetime has had a greater impact on the social and ethical attitudes and actions of Southern Baptists than Richard Land,” said Jimmy Draper, a former SBC president, in a keynote address at a 2013 dinner in Land’s honor.
Other Pressler protégés have become powerful figures in the ongoing effort to pull the Texas Republican Party ever rightward. Jared Woodfill began practicing law with Pressler in the mid-2000s, after Pressler retired from the bench. Pressler, Woodfill told me in 2017, introduced him to Steven Hotze, a doctor, a supplier of dietary supplements, and a Christian nationalist political activist; the pair have used their organization, Conservative Republicans of Texas, to attack those Republicans who were insufficiently right-wing and to condemn LGBTQ people as “perverts,” “deviants,” and “sodomites.” Woodfill and Hotze were the architects of a 2014 anti-trans campaign in Houston that provided a template for anti-trans activists across the country.
More recently, Hotze has embraced Trump’s lies and conspiracy theories about a stolen election. In April, he was indicted for a convoluted scheme in which he allegedly hired a former Houston police officer to root out supposed voter fraud in the 2020 election. Prosecutors said the former cop surveilled an air-conditioning repairman he falsely believed was carrying ballots in the back of his van and tried to run him off the road. Hotze has denied the allegations. Woodfill, who is representing Hotze, did not respond to a request for comment.
Under the dominance of the conservative resurgence, a deeply patriarchal orthodoxy on matters of gender roles took hold within the SBC. In 1987, the denomination adopted a resolution stating that while some women choose careers outside the home, homemakers “have shown…unwavering commitment to their families and to the Lord who has ordained the home as a workplace.” They deserved recognition because they had “pleased our God by honoring His purposes in their lives each day.”
In 1998, Southern Baptists amended their “Baptist Faith and Message” statement for the first time in 35 years in order to include a provision on wifely submission, written by Patterson’s wife, Dorothy. The new language stated that a wife should “submit herself graciously” to her husband, who “has the God-given responsibility to provide for, to protect and to lead his family.”
Regressive positions on gender roles were accompanied by increasingly extreme positions on abortion. In 1971, prior to the fundamentalist takeover, the SBC had called for “legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.” In 1976 it called for a limited government role in “a very serious moral and spiritual problem.” Once the takeover was underway, the resolutions progressed from calling for legislation banning abortion except to save the mother’s life (1980) to calling abortion a “national sin” (1984) to praying “for the day when the act of abortion will be not only illegal, but also unthinkable” (2003). By 2015, the SBC was officially calling abortion a “genocide.” At the 2019 annual meeting, then–SBC president J.D. Greear, widely seen as representing a break from the style of the conservative resurgence’s old guard, called abortion “the greatest moral crisis of our generation.”
Southern Baptists also led the way in injecting homophobic theology into public policy and legislative debates, wielding their influence as the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, with the theological clout to influence tens of millions of other evangelicals. In official denominational statements, they repeatedly condemned homosexuality as a “perversion,” “deviant behavior,” evidence “of a depraved nature,” and “an abomination and shameful before God.”
At a 2007 meeting, as Congress debated an anti-hate-crimes bill named for Matthew Shepard, the gay college student who was tortured to death in Wyoming in 1998, the SBC adopted a resolution urging lawmakers and then-President George W. Bush not to support the legislation because “the Bible is clear in its denunciation of homosexual behavior.” Because of such biblical teachings, they contended, “our Founding Fathers and early laws opposed its practice in American society.” The resolution also stated, invoking a well-worn trope, that a hate crimes law would be used “to actively punish Christians who peacefully voice their moral opposition to homosexual conduct.”
Bush responded by sending video greetings to the SBC gathering. “You’re living out the call to spread the Gospel and proclaim the Kingdom of God,” he said. “Thank you for your strong voice in the public square.” The Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Actdid not become law until 2009, when Barack Obama was president.
The sexual abuse—which dated back decades, to before the period covered by the Guidepost report—coincided with the conservative resurgence in the SBC. Christa Brown, a survivor and an advocate for survivors of SBC sex abuse, said that “there were many, many…who enabled these crimes and abuses, who turned a blind eye, and who participated in the mistreatment of survivors.” And, Brown emphasized, these were not isolated occurrences: “So pervasive was this conduct, and at the highest levels, that it seems a feature, not a bug.”
In 2018, seven months after Rollins filed his lawsuit against Pressler, an audio recording leaked in which Paige Patterson could be heard arguing that women abused by their husbands should not get divorced but rather “be submissive in every way that you can.” One month later, Patterson was ousted from his position as president of the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. The seminary’s leaders said Patterson had covered up for a rising star preacher who had sexually abused congregants, suppressed reports of sexual assault, blamed survivors, and tried to “break down” a woman who reported a rape. Patterson did not respond to a request for comment.
At the SBC’s 2019 annual meeting in Birmingham, the muscular Christianity group held a side conference titled “Mature Manhood in an Immature Age,” which featured some of the most openly misogynistic commentary I’ve witnessed in nearly two decades of covering the religious right. Ascol disparaged “soft men” as the “bane of a society,” because “they leave women and children without a protector.” He added that there was “nothing soft about Jesus,” who was never “triggered.” A “soft man,” he added, “has no business in the ministry.” Owen Strachan, who teaches at Grace Bible Theological Seminary, encouraged the audience to “train men in the image of the Warrior King Christ Jesus” and, “ideally,” to “train your daughter in submission.”
Ascol described Trump to me in an interview at the conference as a “pagan king” whom God had raised up and who had done “terrific” things in terms of the Supreme Court and on abortion and LGBTQ issues. More broadly, observers like Kaylor see Ascol’s caucus as trying to take the denomination in a more “Trumpian” direction, with or without Trump in office. Ascol and his supporters, Kaylor said, “are really obsessed with this idea that the SBC is becoming liberal and ‘woke,’ which is laughable.”
Brown told me that she had been raped in 1969 and that the leaders of her childhood church knew about it at the time. She went to the SBC in 2004 and then went public in 2005. She called for specific safeguards against abuse in 2006, some of which the denomination has still not adopted. For her, watching Trump rise with the support of prominent Southern Baptists was like a repeat of the sidelining and shaming of survivors, but on a much larger scale. When she saw leaders like Jeffress “giving support to a president who bragged about assaulting women,” Brown said, “it felt like déjà vu. Their minimization of horrific conduct was a pattern that we had already seen up close.”
Southern Baptist leaders spent decades working to impose their theological views of sex and gender on the country through law and policy, arguing that they represented a “Christian” or “moral” position. But to Brown, they “sacrificed all moral credibility. They normalized and minimized the sexual predations of a president in much the same way that they normalized and minimized the sexual predations of their clergy colleagues.” And, she added, “with nary a care, they left the rest of us—now the whole of our democracy—to deal with the fallout.”
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