Southern Baptists Are Mean (the Denomination, That Is)

I'm sorry, but it needs to be said: meanness runs deep in the Southern Baptist Convention's DNA. I have some theories about why, but that's not super-important. What I want to say is, don't be surprised when you see otherwise inexplicable meanness from the SBC.

I met Jesus in a Southern Baptist church, where I received a great deal of love. I served a Southern Baptist church part-time in college, founded the Baptist Student Union there, served as a Southern Baptist Home Missionary, and graduated from THE Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. I was even president of the Whitsitt Society for Baptist Freedom, the student resistance movement against the inevitable fundamentalist takeover. I met countless wonderful people and received an incredible amount of love. No one in the SBC ever came after me.

When my Mom was very sick and death was inevitable, the choir from her Southern Baptist church got on a bus and came to the house to sing hymns. I sobbed and sobbed. God bless them.

But the Southern Baptist Convention is mean. Always has been. Let me explain.

As everyone knows, the denomination was founded to defend the interests of slaveholders. It took a long time for other denominations that split over slavery to reconcile, however imperfectly, but Baptists never did. Founding moments tend to imprint themselves in your DNA. The only reason the SBC exists at all is hate.

C. H. Toy, lifted from Wikipedia

Southern Baptists embroiled themselves in one controversy after another. Southern Baptists almost universally embraced segregation until well into the modern Civil Rights Movement. In a college research project I learned that the denomination's national setting and its agencies began calling for civil rights long before congregations were on board. 

Southern Baptists did not escape the fundamentalist controversies. In 1879 they fired a professor for maintaining that Isaiah did not predict Jesus. Poor slob wound up taking a job at Harvard. Southern Seminary and the SBC publishing house faced dire threats in the 1960s when a professor published a study of Genesis that did not promote creationism. The professor, Ralph Elliott, was fired--and I double-dog guarantee you that the people who fired him mostly agreed with him. But it's a mean organization.

Lots of people are familiar with the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention, which started in the 1970s and became complete in the 1990s. We'll get there, but not yet. I may offend some friends in saying this, but the fundamentalists had some legitimate grievances. Lots of Baptists resented the elitism of the SBC establishment, and it was real. Many are the times I saw SBC elites mock the people whose money fed their children for being naive, ignorant, and unsophisticated. There was indeed a spirit of hiding one's superior knowledge from the masses, lest one get fired. And there was a powerful good ole boy network that got people jobs, and better jobs, and sweet opportunities. 

I know. I was in the pipeline. Not in the middle of it, but close to people who were. I was set if I wanted to go that route. Even in my 50s, and decades removed from my SBC life, I've gotten a couple of calls.

No wonder the fundamentalists were mean. For that matter, the elites were mean in part because they were constantly under threat from the fundamentalists and had experienced hurt. But there was a meanness there too, even among some of the nicest people I've ever met.

Now, don't get me wrong. The fundamentalists, generally speaking, were assholes. That's being too nice. They were sadists. I could describe the trustee who mocked a woman professor for hyphenating her name. Or the megachurch pastor and SBC president who accused a seminary professor of heresy--but privately admitted he hadn't read the book in question. Or the trustee who expressed surprise when I told him that early Baptists had female deacons, offered me his address for me to send the evidence, and (of course) never replied when I did send a package. Or the megachurch pastor who insisted that divorced men were disqualified from pastoring... until his wife filed for divorce. He's still in the same pulpit.

We all know how mean those people are now. The two most influential figures in the takeover movement now live in shame. One has a documented track record of sexually assaulting younger men, and the other has a documented track record of sweeping sexual assault allegations under the rug and minimizing them, even advising wives to endure physical abuse if it's just occasional.

But you know how mean they were? They hired one of my friends to teach at an SBC seminary, replacing people they'd run off. I was disappointed that my friend would enable what they were doing, but I think he'd really convinced himself they were hiring him in good faith. He was "conservative enough" to work there. Within a few years, they'd fired that entire new first wave of new faculty members for not being "conservative enough." Mean.

If you're following religion on social media, it's amazing how quickly the SBC trolls come out. Some of them have figured out that the bigger an asshole you are, the faster you can gather a little following and maybe make some money. Today a colleague at an evangelical college voiced his support of LGBTQ+ students, and the backlash was immediate. Even some big names.

Two issues rival LGBTQ+ persons in their capacity to stir the trolls. So much as suggest that women might have distinctive and valuable gifts that the church should celebrate--I'm not even talking about ordination!--and men will just climb all over themselves to shout that down. And race? The Southern Baptist reaction against critical race theory has driven prominent Black churches out of the denomination--and you can absolutely tell that the condemnations of critical race theory come from people who have no idea what they're talking about. But that's another conversation. The point is, they're just mean.

So when you see Beth Moore leaving the SBC, remember: she experienced a lot of the same love I did back in the day. But she's also tolerated decades of meanness, and lately it's just crossed the line, overflowed the cup, injured the camel, you name it. Because meanness is in the SBC DNA.