Thursday, 28 Mar 2024

Opinion | Southern Baptists Face Their #MeToo Moment

NASHVILLE — Growing up in a Southern Baptist church, I heard much about “the age of accountability.” Our tradition baptizes only those who confess their own faith in Christ, and the phrase describes the time when a person is mature enough to understand the difference between good and evil — and from that point onward could be, at the point of death, expected to stand before God in judgment, accountable for one’s own decisions, without the excuse of ignorance of what was right.

This week The Houston Chronicle ran a series of articles exposing, in painfully specific documentation, hundreds of sexual abusers who have worked within Southern Baptist churches over the last 20 years.

This series of articles demonstrates clearly that our tradition is well past its own age of accountability. The vital question is what we as a religious community, faced with these sins, do next.

Though many have cried out about the problem in church life, too often our tradition has thought this was a problem outside our walls. Some saw abuse, for example, within the Catholic church, and attributed it to a priestly celibacy or to a powerful church hierarchy different from American evangelicalism. Others saw the shocking abuse in the entertainment industry and considered it confirmation of what happens in communities with a lack of religiosity.

We see the same impulse at work throughout American culture when it comes to sexual abuse and assault allegations against politicians. Often these acts are viewed through a partisan lens: either as confirmation of the end result of one’s politics, or a distraction to be waved away, depending on whether the politician was on one’s ideological “side” or not.

Either way, among some, the idea was often that while sexual abuse is awful, it happens everywhere, no more, and probably less, in the church than anywhere else. That mentality was always vicious and deceptive, but faced with the Chronicle’s accounting, it is utterly impossible to maintain.

When churches do cover up abuse, they often justify it by acting as if they are preventing the world from seeing “scandal.” If the public saw such a dark reality, they say, they might not want to hear the gospel, the reasoning goes.

Nonsense. Jesus does not need the church to protect his reputation. And Jesus was, and is, enraged by those who would seek to blame him for empowering atrocities. Those who would use religion to prey on those looking to hear a word from Jesus are more than just criminals who use their cunning to traumatize people, as if that weren’t awful enough. They commit spiritual rape of the most incestuous and violent kind.

The stakes for the church are high, and they are about far more than organizational survival. The church is to be the place that previews for the world a picture of what the kingdom of God is like — a place where sinners are reconciled to God and to one another, where the weakest among us are loved and respected. Jesus announced a reign in which children and the vulnerable are not just cared for but are the “first” in the kingdom of God. Predators are awful and should be held accountable wherever they are found. But nothing is worse than those who would abuse the vulnerable under the name of Jesus Christ.

Almost every church has a picture somewhere, often in a stained-glass window, of Jesus with rod and staff, surrounded by sheep, as the Good Shepherd. This imagery from the Bible, though, is not of some Romantic pastoral idyll. Jesus spoke of himself as a shepherd in his determination not only to feed and lead his flock, but to fight off the wolves and robbers who keep climbing into the sheep pen.

He warned repeatedly that people would use religion, including his own name, to prey upon the weak and the vulnerable. When confronted with those who would use the name of God to exclude the marginal and the vulnerable, Jesus overturned tables and drove such from the temple of God.

Simply stated, much can and must be done. The fact that our churches are autonomous is no excuse. We do not allow churches with heretical doctrine to cooperate with larger denominational structures. In that same way, we should insist that any church in fellowship with others agree to widespread prevention training and systems, and they should commit to immediately reporting abuse allegations to civil authorities. Any church shown to be covering up for abuse, or that refuses to compassionately care for those who have survived such trauma, should be withdrawn from the fellowship of its denomination.

But even with all the needed reforms in place, the church should be worried most about Jesus himself, who will ensure the holiness of his church, even if it means evacuating his temple with a whip of cords. What’s at stake is more important than institutions and ideologies. The lives of vulnerable children, and adults, are, as we learned to sing in Sunday school, “precious in his sight.” The church faces not just a crisis of credibility, but also an age of accountability.

A world in need of good news is watching to see just how born again we are.

Russell Moore is president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. He is the author of “The Storm-Tossed Family: How the Cross Reshapes the Home.”

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