INDIANAPOLIS (IN)
Ms. Magazine [Arlington VA]
June 27, 2024
By Christa Brown, Susan Shaw
The Southern Baptist Convention just took yet another step toward a dystopian handmaid’s society for Southern Baptist women.
In its June annual meeting, the Southern Baptist Convention rejected a proposed amendment to its constitution that would have designated any church that had “any kind” of a woman pastor as no longer in “friendly cooperation” with the SBC. Those churches could have then been expelled from the SBC.
Some might express surprise at this vote and wonder if Southern Baptists are changing direction on women’s issues—if they’re becoming more accepting of women in leadership.
They’re not. This vote wasn’t at all about supporting women.
Instead, delegates to the annual meeting (“messengers” in Southern Baptist terminology) argued that, in a 2000 doctrinal statement and a 1984 resolution, the convention had already affirmed that only men could be pastors, thereby making the proposed constitutional amendment a redundancy. And these mechanisms were obviously working, as evidenced by last year’s ouster of the denomination’s largest church, Saddleback Church in California, for ordaining two women pastors on their staff.
Also at stake was something Baptists call the “autonomy of the local church.” In Southern Baptist life, local churches are independent, self-governing bodies. Many thought an amendment to the constitution was a step too far in infringing on autonomy.
Thus, no one should imagine that rejection of the amendment means the SBC has gone soft on women. Meredith Stone, executive director of Baptist Women in Ministry, explained the reality: “Even though the amendment failed, women who serve as pastors in Southern Baptist churches will continue to be diminished, demeaned and denigrated. Southern Baptists will continue to silence women.”
In typical fashion, Southern Baptists demonstrated the truth of Stone’s words by showing their contempt for women in a number of other ways at this annual meeting. Of course, they would argue that they’re just being biblical. We would argue that they’re being misogynistic.
Kicking Out Churches
One of the first items of business was for this year’s meeting to kick out the First Baptist Church of Alexandria, Va., for its “egalitarian beliefs.” In practice, the church currently has a man as senior pastor, but it has a woman pastor on staff, and it refused to back down from affirming its belief that women could serve in any role in the church, including as senior pastor. This got the church ousted, with a vote of 92 percent in favor.
Once upon a time, Southern Baptists lived with these kinds of differences and still found ways to cooperate. Since the fundamentalist takeover of the denomination in the 1980s, however, more and more authoritarian and doctrinaire leaders have seized power, imposing their particular beliefs on the Convention, especially regarding women’s issues.
That backlash against women’s progress through the 1960s, ’70s and early ’80s was at the heart of the SBC’s fundamentalist takeover—as Susan (co-author of this column) has previously argued in her book on Southern Baptist women, God Speaks to Us, Too: Southern Baptist Women on Church, Home, and Society. And the late Karen McCarthy Brown, an anthropologist of religion, taught that one of the characteristics of any fundamentalism is a need to control women as the “other” in their midst.
Since the takeover, the SBC has consistently sought to control women. It has passed resolutions opposing abortion and women’s pastoral leadership and resolutions supporting women’s submission and men’s “headship.” Now, with Roe v. Wade overturned, this year, the SBC took the next logical step in the control of women. It passed a resolution opposing in vitro fertilization procedures.
Condemning IVF
In condemning the use of IVF, Southern Baptists declared it to be “dehumanizing” and urged that the government should restrain the practice as being “inconsistent with the dignity and value of every human being, which necessarily includes frozen embryonic human beings.”
The resolution was put forward by Southern Baptist seminary president Al Mohler, who has also thrown his weight behind the “abortion abolitionist” movement by voicing his support for the criminal prosecution of women who have abortions. (Recent reporting disclosed that, among women in Southern Baptist churches, 1 in 3 have had an abortion. It’s unclear whether Mohler realizes just how much his position would empty out the pews of Southern Baptist churches.)
The legality of IVF has overwhelming support in the United States at large, but because the SBC is the nation’s largest Protestant faith group and is widely viewed as a bellwether for white evangelicalism as a whole, the SBC’s anti-IVF resolution helps shift a fringe position to the forefront. It also erodes the line between church and state and signals a further move to the hard right in evangelical efforts to restrict reproductive healthcare based on extreme religious beliefs.
Failing (Yet Again) to Take Serious Action on Sexual Abuse
The SBC made no meaningful progress toward addressing its rampant crisis of clergy sex abuse and church cover-ups—a systemic crisis that was confirmed five and a half years ago by a journalistic investigatory series and re-confirmed two years ago by an independent investigatory report of the SBC’s top leadership body. Despite massive documentation, and the SBC’s own secret list of accused abusive pastors having finally been brought to light, the SBC still refuses earnestly to reckon with the harms done by its male pastors.
The SBC’s Abuse Reform Implementation Task Force disbanded, having implemented almost nothing. It failed to implement a system for denominational record-keeping on pastors credibly accused of sexual abuse, and despite being a billion-dollar organization, the SBC couldn’t come up with funding for abuse reforms.
This institutional recalcitrance on abuse reform should come as no surprise, given the SBC’s determination to tamp down women’s voices. A faith group that sacralizes male authority and female submission is a faith group that assures women’s voices will always be viewed as lesser. So, when women seek to report abuse or to urge reforms, their concerns are systematically silenced as the status quo power structure prevails—a structure that fosters impunity for male pastors.
Because of the SBC’s deeply embedded misogyny, many women pastors have long ago left the institution. Those who remain are few in number and, typically they work as associate pastors or children’s pastors under the supervision of a male senior pastor. Yet, though they posed no threat to male power, women pastors were still used as props in the SBC’s male dominance display at its annual meeting.
Focusing on women pastors, however, provided a convenient distraction from the unabated horror of the denomination’s clergy sex abuse crisis. A denomination focused on ousting all women in pastoral leadership is one that can avoid a crisis centered almost exclusively on the appalling behavior of men. The message is clear: the SBC would rather see abusive men in power than faithful women.
No, that’s definitely not progress for women in the SBC. In fact, it seems more a further step toward a dystopian handmaid’s society for Southern Baptist women.
Even more frightening is the political weight Southern Baptists have, especially in the deep South where we already see greater and greater restrictions on sexual and reproductive freedoms. That should scare the bejeezus out of us all.