Last time we met up, I showed you an interview Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) leader Philip Robertson did with some evangelical dude on YouTube. Last year, Robertson became the Chairman of the SBC’s top-ranked Executive Committee (EC). Alas for him, he came to this position at a really bad time for his denomination and his hardliner faction. In their own different ways, both are struggling hard to deal with the SBC’s systemic sex abuse crisis.
Of course, I have long known that Robertson’s faction constantly seeks to downplay or ignore that megascandal. But I sure wasn’t quite expecting him to simply declare by fiat that megascandal neither systemic nor a crisis!
Even so, Philip Robertson’s boneheaded comment is the very worst thing he could have said to help his faction out. He might think that fancy phrases like systemic abuse are just things that his tribalistic faction’s enemies throw at hardliners like him to score Jesus points. Unlike his faction’s very—oh, dare I say? Yes! Yes, I do!—surprisingly-postmodernist view of how language works, many words have specific meanings. Indeed, systemic is about as P-or-not-P as it gets. As for “crisis,” we’ll see exactly why our guest star refuses to apply that word at all to what we keep unearthing about the SBC’s utterly broken system.
(Hat tip to Christa Robertson, who wrote about this story on Baptist News Global. Also, this post went live on Patreon on 8/16/2024. Its audio cast lives there too!)
Vocabulary related to this story:
SBC: Southern Baptist Convention
EC: The SBC’s Executive Committee, which handles day-to-day administration and decision-making as well as setting annual budgets for denominational projects like seminaries and evangelism
The mother ship: My name for the SBC’s leaders as a whole; if you think of it like the one from the 1996 movie Independence Day, you’re on the right track
Old Guard: My name for the SBC’s ultraconservative hardliner faction; their members want to ignore the sex abuse crisis and focus solely on stuff like evangelism (however, they suck at it)
Pretend Progressives: My name for the SBC’s ultraconservative but slightly less hardliner faction; their members make mouth-noises about the sex abuse crisis as well as the SBC’s endemic racism problem
Conservative Resurgence: The Old Guard’s name for the schism that took place in the SBC around the 1980s-1990s; its participants dragged the denomination hard rightward politically and chased away anyone who wasn’t a conservative culture warrior
The general evangelical tendency to misuse particular big words
Evangelicals in general have a cargo-cult mentality regarding the meanings of words that might say unpalatable things about their religion, behavior, and culture. In other words, they use words they see others using, but without having the faintest idea why they’re doing it. They think if they imitate what they see others doing, they’ll get those same results.
So they don’t care about figuring out what liberalism is, or leftism, or Communism, or socialism. Similarly, the meanings of words like feminism and atheism escape them utterly. Nor do they understand the meaning of big words like evidence, love, proof, reality, and truth. Along with words like traditional and biblical, they’ve redefined all of them in supremely self-serving ways.
(This topic reminds me of an apologist years ago who hilariously decided that her Argument from Miracles/Appeal to Miracles still counted as PROOF YES PROOF that her god was real. She’s the one who gave us our team nickname: The Fightin’ Hornets!)
The further into the hardline end of evangelicalism someone roams, the more divorced from meaning these dangerous words get. Eventually, these words just become incoherent sounds: Enraged snarls to fling at their enemies.
Evangelicals vaguely understand that their enemies hurl these words at them and seem to score wins. So if they fling those words, then they, too, will score wins.
This bizarre mindset results in some of the daffiest exchanges you will ever witness in evangelicalism. One example: Years ago, I saw one of those angry Millennial Calvinist Old Guard guys on YouTube accuse Russell Moore of being a “Democrat.” This occurred around the time of the letters he leaked about the Old Guard. In response, I commented that Moore is definitely not a Democrat. Alas, the YouTuber just drilled down harder on his false accusation. (Hey, it’s not like Yahweh is real anyway! Why even pretend to follow his rules?)
And now, let us address the meanings of crisis and systemic—just to help Philip Robertson, since he clearly doesn’t know what those words really mean.
Yes, the SBC’s sex abuse problem is a crisis—at least to good, moral people
Out here in Reality-Land, when we use the word crisis, we indicate a situation that has hit the very peak of danger and/or instability. A crisis situation is wreaking havoc and causing great amounts of damage. Once the dust has settled, some big and major change is going to come out of that situation. It might be a step up from whatever the status quo was before it happened. Or it might be considerably worse.
Either way, life won’t be the same. There’s no going back to how things were before.
Perhaps that is exactly why Philip Robertson keeps insisting that the SBC’s sex abuse crisis isn’t a crisis at all. Here’s what he said in that YouTube interview around 31 minutes in:
Essentially, this article claimed that there was a systemic sex abuse taking place within the Southern Baptist convention that was elevated to a crisis. Now, there’s a lot of problems with that article.
Almost all of his disavowal of the scandal involves denials of its systemic nature. He doesn’t even address why he doesn’t believe his denomination faces a crisis. That said, I bet Catholic leaders wish they’d figured out his trick before journalists exposed their systemic sex abuse crisis! Gosh, who knew it was this easy to dismiss worldwide sex abuse committed by the handpicked representatives of a living god? Just deny it’s any kind of big problem!
Reading between the lines, though, we can perhaps understand why Philip Robertson insists that the SBC is not facing a crisis at all:
Crises are the heralds of big changes, but he and his faction don’t want to endure any changes at all. They vastly prefer the SBC as it was.
A crisis is something someone must deal with, too. Nobody can ignore a crisis. Even denying it is doing something—it’s a response, albeit a shoddy one. But addressing this particular crisis in any meaningful way inevitably means forcing accountability down the throats of these dysfunctional authoritarians—and even more inevitably, forcing them to deal with serious checks and balances on their power. To Old Guard hardliners, no fate could possibly be worse.
So like all of the Old Guard, Philip Robertson just wants this entire scandal to go away.
Specifically, he wants everything to go back to how it was before February 2019. That’s when journalists broke the entire story of the scandal, which they dubbed “Abuse of Faith.”
Philip Robertson and his faction aren’t the only ones who want to turn back time and deny reality
The Pretend Progressives want the same thing. They’re just not quite as obvious about it.
After all, J.D. Greear, the SBC President and Pretend Progressive faction leader reigning when “Abuse of Faith” dropped, knew the series was coming at least a month ahead of time. But as I showed, he avoided the entire topic ahead of the drop. That entire month, he said nothing about sex abuse anywhere I could find. Only once “Abuse of Faith” dropped did he put on his blubbering sadface mask and start pretending to care enormously about sex abuse victims—while, of course, shielding an abuse-shielder he’d hired for his very own megachurch.
The leaders in both factions want this sex abuse thing to end. They want to go back to beating themselves with money and enjoying levels of personal power that you and I cannot even imagine.
To anyone with morality and and even one iota of lovingkindness in their hearts, though, what’s going on with sex abuse in the SBC is definitely an actual crisis. The sex abuse genie can’t be put back into the bottle. Even suggesting it could is a slap to the faces of the many hundreds (and perhaps many thousands) of sex abuse victims that SBC ministers, employees, and leaders have hurt over the decades.
Something’s got to give here
For years, the SBC has dangled above a crevasse.
Something has got to give. Something’s got to change: All those sickening secrets, cover-ups, backroom deals, attacks on children, rapes, and endless abuser-shielding by an entrenched evangelical crony network. That network’s members have grown increasingly frantic to retain their power and privilege. As a result, the more abuse gets discovered, the more authoritarian SBC leaders—particularly Old Guard leaders—have become in turn. For about a year or so now, I’ve sensed their impatience for this whole thing to be done with.
Alas for them, their attempt to keep the scandal under wraps has now exploded well out of their control.
Nobody good could ever think the pre-February-2019 situation was tolerable. But nobody good really knew the extent of the situation. Church and denominational leaders maintained a wall of silence that kept each cell of information separate from the rest. Nobody outside the crony network had a bird’s-eye view of the entire landscape—until February 2019. That’s when abuse victims began to network, connect, and start comparing notes.
Know this: To the SBC’s ministers and masters, by and large, The Big Problem Here isn’t sex abuse. It’s outsiders exposing that sex abuse without their permission and direction. They’re furious that outside forces compel them to reckon with this scandal without a single tear shed for their own lost comfort and privilege.
OH, won’t someone think of the poor, misbegotten, mediocre white hardliners here?
Yes, the SBC’s sex abuse crisis is systemic
Systemic is definitely one of those words that implies denominational culpability for the sex abuse crisis. Thus, I can easily understand why Philip Robertson and his Old Guard cronies desperately want to stop SBC-lings from associating it with that crisis. Their “paycheck,” so to speak, depends on deliberately employing antiprocess from understanding what it even means.
So let us rip away the veil shielding their eyes. Here are the markers of systemic sex abuse, inspired in part from this Oxford University Press article:
- How common incidents are. In the SBC’s case, sex abuse turns out to be shockingly common. Every large church seems to face sex abuse complaints eventually these days. Similarly, every big-name SBC leader and megachurch pastor eventually seems to face either abuse complaints themselves—or accusations of shielding other abusers or silencing abuse victims.
- How tolerant the organization’s culture is of sex abuse and abusers. This one doesn’t just mean how lax the SBC is toward sex abusers and abuse shielders—though yes, its leaders and pastors are often incredibly lax toward them. This marker also indicates the SBC’s lack of enforced policies against sex abuse and its still-poor and spotty training about abuse and abusers.
- Power imbalances within the organization favor those in power. Hooboy, this is a big one. The SBC’s power structure is completely oriented toward its leaders and ministers. Congregation members and women in general have no power within the SBC. Worse, nobody has any objective, enforceable checks on the power of those leaders and ministers. The foxes guard the henhouse here.
- Inadequate reporting systems for abuse. The SBC still doesn’t have an effective way to report abuse or abuse shielders. It’s got a hotline now, but its workings are completely obfuscated. I doubt that’s accidental. This hotline seems designed to hand-wave away accusations of the SBC not having a solid reporting system. Without a safe way to report abuse, though, victims rightly hesitate.
- Poor response to the reports they do get. In the wake of “Abuse of Faith,” we’ve seen endless waves of victims sharing how their church and denominational leaders silenced them and dismissed their reports. Worse, those leaders may even retaliate against accusers. In 2011, after SBC church deacon Ernest Willis raped and impregnated a 15-year-old girl in his church, the church’s then-pastor, Chuck Phelps, forced her to publicly apologize to the entire congregation for tempting Willis to sin. (And yes, it was 100% an SBC church.)
- No accountability. I have been criticizing the SBC for years over its total lack of accountability. They praise themselves to the skies for having a Jesus-flavored monopoly on accountability. But it’s obvious where they really stand on the matter. Without accountability, there’s no way for SBC-lings to get rid of abusers of any kind at any level of leadership.
- A long-standing historical pattern of all of this stuff. As the SBC’s decades-running abuse log shows, the denomination’s leaders have known for decades what darkness simmered beneath all their shiny happy Jesus smiles.
- More concern for the organization’s reputation and money-making engine than for abuse victims. In the interview we just discussed, Philip Robertson himself talked at very great length about his deep concerns for the SBC’s potential legal liabilities if transparency and reform continue to be the order of the day.
- A strange number of big-name leaders getting hit with scandals. Remember Frank Page, whose resignation prompted Philip Robertson’s initial appointment to the EC in the first place? He was an Old Guard guy: Former SBC President (2006-2008), then President of the EC (2010-2018) before Ronnie Floyd took over. Well, his resignation was over what he called a “morally inappropriate relationship.” Obviously, Page returned to SBC pastoring. Also, here’s the “Abuse of Faith” chart of some of the SBC leaders caught up in the crisis (potato-quality archive).
SUMMARY:
When we talk about abuse in the SBC being systemic, we mean that the organizational structure and culture of the SBC attracts abusers with easy prey and zero risks. It conditions vulnerable people to keep silent. Systems like the SBC offer leaders vast personal power with no oversight and no accountability—and provide them access to a crony network eager to shield abusive members from any consequences.
At the same time, SBC leaders have structured their organization to intimidate abuse victims from speaking out. That move minimizes the flocks’ knowledge of both the number and nature of abuse reports.
The SBC’s masters have left nothing whatsoever to chance here.
Overly-facile well they should all just do this suggestions keep the status quo stable for Philip Robertson
Philip Robertson doesn’t want to understand that the problem here was always that SBC leaders and churches didn’t handle sex abuse allegations by just calling the cops. That, after all, is his super-simple advice for how to handle the scandal: Just tell the men in charge to call the cops! Report these offenses! There! Problem solved! As he says himself in the interview:
Here’s what you need to do as a local congregation to properly, because what you don’t want to do is try to cover it up. The first thing that has to happen if there’s an allegation is, you have to call the police. That would be my advice to any church. If there’s an allegation of abuse, no matter who it is, especially if it’s abuse involving minors, your first call needs to be the police.
Unfortunately, for a number of systemic reasons, that has not been SBC churches’ first response. If it had been, “Abuse of Faith” would never have gotten out of the gate. The SBC’s system helps abusers and makes life hard for victims, and it always has. Not only does that system rarely penalize sex abusers, it also all too easily allows church leaders to slip away from reporting sex abuse.
As part of the perpetuation of that system, SBC leaders aren’t reliably trained in dealing with abuse. They may not even know the laws in their areas regarding reporting abuse. Even if they’ve been trained and are aware of local mandatory-reporting laws, they may still refuse to call the police. Perhaps they value their own, their church’s, and the denomination’s reputations more than the safety of their congregation. Or perhaps they consider the accused person a friend or ally, so are more inclined to protect that person instead of their accuser.
Worse still, church leaders may simply be so biased—perhaps so sexist or racist—that they blame abuse victims for causing their own abuse somehow. I have never seen any great number of SBC churches angrily speaking up for victims when that happens. They only grudgingly say anything when the public finds out about it and explodes.
Watch Philip Robertson move the goalposts on sex abuse and the EC’s responsibility for it!
As part of his denial regarding the systemic nature of sex abuse in the SBC, Robertson makes this really weird observation about the EC’s own leaders having faced accusations of sex abuse. As his Jesus Smirk tells us around 19 minutes into the interview, he clearly thinks that everyone must find the EC blameless if its members haven’t abused anyone themselves:
Nobody was against an investigation! Everybody was [saying] if there’s been any abuse that has been committed by the members of the Executive Committee, then we need to call the police!
Hooray Team Jesus!
In reality, though, he’s dumber than hammered wax. To my knowledge, nobody’s accused anyone in the EC of sex abuse. Rather, people rightly accuse the EC’s leaders of not obeying their denomination’s Annual Meeting attendees/voters.
Nor is the EC disobeying because they’re terrified of anyone discovering any sex abuse committed by them. It might happen, but so far there’s been no indication of it. Rather, I strongly suspect that they disobey because they don’t want everyone figuring out the full depth of their complicity. I think the Old Guard is absolutely filthy in its corruption and depravity. Any investigation into what they knew, when they knew it, and what they did with that knowledge is going to turn up a lot of stuff they don’t want anyone knowing.
In fact, it already has. Robertson’s ongoing fretting about transparency only tells me there’s more to find.
But Robertson needs to make sex abuse sound like very isolated pockets of behavior. To do that, he needs to keep the focus on direct incidents of abuse rather than abuse as the result of the system that the EC perpetuates and protects. The Old Guard pulls this same dishonest sleight-of-hand with racism. They want SBC-lings to see racism as an isolated problem with some misguided racists doing all the ickie stuff, rather than the utterly systemic issue it is.
Really, Philip Robertson is only trying to make his faction sound picked-on and innocent. They’re anything but.
The Old Guard has traditionally never needed to care about sex abuse—or really anything else the flocks want them to do
Almost immediately after “Abuse of Faith” dropped, it caught the SBC on fire. Its sheep immediately recognized how serious things were in their churches. The more they found out, the more angry they became—and the more determined they grew to force the denomination’s leaders to do something meaningful about it all. They’ve repeatedly voted to do exactly that. To its leaders’ obvious displeasure, the SBC’s bylaws have forced the mother ship to oblige on occasion—at least, when it can’t possibly avoid delaying any longer.
Alas, their system is so broken by now that even the SBC’s official bylaws can’t force the EC to do a damned thing.
Despite all their bleating about muh church autonomy and muh independent member churches, the EC very much considers itself above the plebian hordes skirmishing at their walls. This committee has long been the fortress of the Old Guard. For decades, Old Guard leaders like Frank Page and Ronnie Floyd ruled it like their own fiefdom. Sure, some fair few Pretend Progressives and fence-sitters have crept into its trustees’ ranks. But they’re not enough to sway the balance overmuch.
I’m sure it’s no accident, either, that Philip Robertson’s mewling concerns about muh attorney-client priv’lige and zomg legal lah-BILLities are almost word for word repeats of stuff Floyd said years ago before he quit at the threat of a full and transparent investigation of the mother ship.
The upshot here: Old Guard leaders are well-used to acting like they’re totally gonna obey their own bylaws. But then, somehow, they never do it. In the past, delay tactics worked. The sheep always got distracted and forgot all about whatever they’d demanded.
Those leaders are not used to this new normal. The sheep keep demanding their lupine shepherds do something to stop wolf incursions, and then not forgetting the demand a year later.
That’s where Philip Robertson is in this new drama.
Philip Robertson is a walking red flag of a leader if there ever was one
I get that Philip Robertson really wants to kiss the asses of his fellow Old Guard leaders. But he’s chosen the worst way possible to do it. The SBC’s sex abuse crisis is indeed a crisis. Worse, this crisis erupted precisely because of the system that SBC leaders have built and protected over decades.
It’s just such a weird, weird strategy. All I can figure is that Robertson never expected anybody unsympathetic to the Old Guard to listen to that interview. Old Guard leaders who talk like that end up destroyed in the sphere of public relations. They tend to know better. Instead, they talk up their evangelism focus and press hard on culture-war stuff.
This strategy sends a very clear message to the flocks, who largely belong to the Pretend Progressives by now. They get it. This faction’s top leaders do not care about sex abuse. If the flocks want change for realsies, then they’d better be ready for a long fight.
On a personal note, if I were Christian and heard my pastor talking like Philip Robertson in that video, I’d make tracks for the church exit as quick as I could. He sounds downright dangerous—not necessarily because he’d actually abuse anyone, but because he sounds like he can be counted upon to side with abusers over victims and to protect his church’s reputation at all costs. What he said in this interview is a series of the worst, biggest red flags ever. This whole situation stinks to high heaven.
I just hope the flocks notice it all one day.
NEXT UP: How evangelicals try—and fail—to square the Problem of Suffering with a supposedly omnimax god who loves them and doesn’t mind meddling in the laws of physics all the time on their behalf. See you soon!
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