Southern Baptists: Struggling With Sexual Predators and Wife Abuse[1]
By Marie Fortune, Founder and Senior Analyst
FaithTrust Institute, Seattle, WA
The SBC and Sexual Predators
“One sexual predator in our midst is one too many,” said Morris Chapman, president of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) executive committee. “Sexual predators must be stopped. They must be on notice that Southern Baptists are not a harvest field for their devious deeds.” Good so far.
But the SBC Executive Committee has determined that the denomination will not create a database to identify sexual predators nor establish a national office to respond to complaints. Not so good.
Their reasoning: polity problems. They say local autonomy of their congregations precludes a centralized list or investigative body. The Convention does not have the authority to prohibit known perpetrators from doing ministry. The local church can hire anyone it wants as a pastor. Now I appreciate the value of a congregational polity. My denomination, the United Church of Christ, also uses this way of organizing itself.
But I also have spoken with victims and survivors of Southern Baptist pastors who are very frustrated with the unwillingness of their church to take some institutional action to stop clergy offenders. The words are important. The SBC statement is strong. Their website provides some excellent articles on the sexual abuse of children. But words are not enough.
When the study began in 2006, Oklahoma pastor Wade Burleson suggested the database to track ministers who are “credibly accused of, personally confessed to, or legally been convicted of sexual harassment or abuse.” The Executive Committee nixed that idea and now urges local churches to use the U.S. Dept. of Justice database of sexual offenders to do their background checks.
So here’s the problem: the Department of Justice database or any state police database will only include convicted sex offenders. A minister will only show up in that database if he has been reported, prosecuted and convicted of a sex offense. The database will not include ministers who offend against adults and may have been fired by their local churches. So how is another Baptist church to know that their pastoral candidate is in good standing if there is no Baptist database?
Local churches need all the help they can get to deal with a complaint about clergy misconduct, even if it is finally their decision what to do about it. The national denominational structure can and should make resources available for training, preparation of local church policies, etc. It is interesting that when the Southern Baptist Convention decides to do a mission project, it doesn’t worry about local church autonomy. It provides a mechanism for its local churches to participate in mission efforts.
Yet here when the health and wellbeing of its members is on the line, it has chosen to speak but not to act. It was fourth century Bishop John Chrysostom who said, “At all times it is works and actions that we need, not a mere show of words. It is easy for anyone to say or promise something, but it is not so easy to act out that word or promise.”
This is an issue that independent, non-denominational churches struggle with all the time. They literally have no denominational structure to turn to for support. Their independence means they are isolated and often lack policies when a complaint comes to them. Even if they want to, they often lack the capacity to act to remove an offending pastor. A lawsuit is in their future.
Victims have no other recourse. The Roman Catholic Church in the U.S. has put in place a mechanism with standards and policies to address the abuse of children by clergy. Because of its hierarchical polity, it can mandate action by the dioceses and provide resources to assist them. In responding to clergy misconduct, this is an advantage. Of course one still wonders why it has taken the Catholic Church so long to begin this process.
All of which serves to remind us that polity is not the problem. Regardless of the structure of a religious institution, it has the capacity to act to address clergy misconduct. It is a matter of using the structure and values it has to guide its action. It is a matter of the will to use every institutional resource available to try to insure that congregations will be safe places for congregants rather than looking for structural excuses why church leaders don’t have to act.
Seminary Prof and Wife Abuse
Bruce Ware, professor of Christian theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, KY, actually does know why husbands abuse their wives.
But he is confused and just doesn’t realize that he knows: “And husbands on their parts, because they’re sinners, now respond to that threat to their authority either by being abusive, which is of course one of the ways men can respond when their authority is challenged—or, more commonly, to become passive, acquiescent, and simply not asserting the leadership they ought to as men in their homes and in churches,” Ware said recently from the pulpit of Denton Bible Church in Denton, Texas.
So, according to Ware, there are two options for men in response to women who assert their rights to be free and equal partners in marriage: beat them up or become passive, i.e. a wimp. Society condones the first and abhors the second. I think this is why we have abuse in marriages, Ware concludes.
In his confusion, Dr. Ware prefaces this insight with the opinion that the problem begins with women who ‘rebel’ against their husbands who have been given authority over them by God. So once again in blaming the victim, Dr. Ware misses his own insight.
Ware’s conclusion is quite limited: “He will have to rule, and because he’s a sinner, this can happen in one of two ways. It can happen either through ruling that is abusive and oppressive—and of course we all know the horrors of that and the ugliness of that—but here’s the other way in which he can respond when his authority is threatened. He can acquiesce. He can become passive. He can give up any responsibility that he thought he had to be the leader in the relationship and just say, ‘OK dear,’ ‘Whatever you say dear,’ ‘Fine dear’ and become a passive husband, because of sin.”
Talk about dichotomous thinking. Actually, there is a third option for men and women in heterosexual marriage. What about those thousands of marriages that I know, like my parents’ for fifty years, where two adults stand side by side as equal partners, faithful to each other and their children, living out Gospel values everyday?
What we have here is a professor of theology who clearly knows nothing about wife abuse and domestic violence and someone who is willing to expend enormous energy blaming battered women and excusing batterers with a high gloss, labored theological rationalization.
The “sin” is “that he [male humans] will have to rule,” i.e. the man’s desire to rule over and dominate another human being and his willingness to use force and violence to accomplish this. (I suggest that Dr. Ware reread Genesis 1 and Galatians 3:28 and anything written by Dr. Catherine Clark Kroeger.[2]
Finally, Ware worries that the “egalitarian” view—the notion that males and females were created equal not only in essence but also in function—crops up in churches that allow women to be ordained and become pastors. Praise God! Don’t even get me started on this one.
[1] This article is a compilation of blogs from the FaithTrust Institute website: www.faithtrustinstitute.org .
[2] See for example, I Suffer Not a Woman (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1992) and PASCH, a Christian network addressing domestic abuse: www.peaceandsafety.com
