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Southern Baptists Convention: theological misogyny wins again in US [1]
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Date: 2023-06
In his appeal against the ban, Warren stressed that Southern Baptists had a long history of agreeing to disagree on many issues in order to work together. As The New York Times reported, he claimed to be “99.99999999% in agreement” with the SBC’s theological prescriptions and asked, “Isn’t that close enough?” At that point, “The crowd shouted back at him, ‘No!’”
Warren’s decision to challenge the SBC on women’s leadership just before he retired certainly suggests he has concerns about his legacy. His candid apology to women, three days before the convention, for “misinterpreting” the Bible on their roles for most of his career strongly suggests the shift is sincere (though, as a good conservative evangelical, he still believes the Bible is “inerrant”).
In the aftermath of last week’s vote, Warren had some choice words for the SBC. “I wanted to speak up for millions of Southern Baptist women, […] I believe their spiritual gifts and their leadership gifts and talents are being wasted,” he said.
He accused the SBC delegates of voting “for conformity and uniformity rather than unity”, adding: “It’s not really smart, when you’re losing half a million members a year, to intentionally kick out people who want to fellowship with you.”
Warren also claimed to be aware of 2,000 SBC churches (out of more than 47,000 in the denomination) with women in some sort of pastoral role, and predicted that the SBC would pursue an “inquisition” in this area – a prediction that seems likely to play out.
After all, the SBC’s ‘messengers’ went on to overwhelmingly pass a constitutional amendment explicitly barring women from being pastors or elders in SBC churches. Such amendments must win a vote by a two-thirds majority, two years in a row, to be finalised, but it is highly implausible that the SBC will do an U-turn on this issue by next summer.
Male leadership, misogynistic doctrine
Many commentators have contrasted the zeal with which the radical right-wing denominational leadership has mobilised to defend exclusively male church leadership with the same leadership’s decades of cover-up and reluctance to address the pervasive problem of sexual abuse in the SBC.
These include Beth Allison Barr, a history professor at Baylor University in Texas (a Baptist institution) and an advocate for women’s equality in evangelicalism. Barr – the author of ‘The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth’ – was rightly offended by the fact that it took a male Southern Baptist pastor fighting for women’s ordination in the SBC to get a female Southern Baptist pastor’s voice heard at all.
This is because it wasn’t only Saddleback whose expulsion from the SBC was confirmed last Tuesday. Pastor Linda Barnes Popham also showed up to appeal the executive committee’s decision to disfellowship the church she heads, Fern Creek Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky.
The vote against Popham’s church – 9,700 to 806 – was even more lopsided than the vote against Saddleback, in yet another striking illustration of the theologically ‘justified’ misogyny that pervades the SBC.
For years, I have been among those calling attention to the incongruity between adhering to such misogynistic, hierarchical doctrine as the literal word of God and thinking that it will be possible to effectively address sexual abuse and misconduct by powerful SBC men.
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/us-southern-baptist-convention-rick-warren-women-pastors-banned/
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