Part One: How The Southern Baptist Convention Was Taken Over By Republicans and Child Molesters
00:00Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations.In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests.It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse.And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns.But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them?He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen.Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?
01:21And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price?Two death sentences in a life without parole.My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.Dr. Peterson, why is it you think all of these left-wing radicals seem to fundamentally hate the ideas that built the United States?Well, you know, I mean, it's the story of Cain, right? You have this jealousy, this deeply ingrained jealousy in their DNA, and as they say in the film Tombstone, you're angry at God for being.And I think we all feel that, but this is just the lashing out of children who have not been properly developed in our society.Impressive.
02:26Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Peterson.Oh, no, he's crying.He's crying.He's crying.He's crying.Oh, God.It's okay.It's okay.
02:37Jordan Balthazar Peterson.Oh, no, I'm sorry.To be clear, that was I was coming from a photograph from a source illustrated.Oh, that's good.A woman I find beautiful.One from the 1970s when things were still ordered properly.Yes.So I've been looking at my copy of Maps of Meaning, and yeah.
02:56Terrible book.I apologize for writing it.Well, that's all the time Dr. Peterson has for us today.I'm Robert Evans.Let's go to the second portion of Behind the Bastards where I introduce my co-hosts, Katie Stoll, Cody Johnston.Hello.Hello.How you guys doing?
03:15How you guys doing?Fucking great.Got pumped and guessed to co-host.Look, you'll always be my co-host.Even though our other show is paused while we wait for the litigation to finish.Oh, God, yeah.No.Any day now.
03:29Any day now.Any day now.I mean, they deposed us all this week.We're looking fine.Yeah, it's looking good.I love you guys.It's good to have you back on, good to be doing this again, and I thought I'm going to havesome of my best friends.
03:44We're all going to sit down and talk.What better thing to chat about than a massive decades-long sexual abuse scandal with anAmerica's largest Protestant denomination?Fuck you, man.Goddamn, you know us so well.Like, yeah, I'd love to hop on.Can I rope into this bullshit?That good stuff.
04:07Yeah.So today, our bastard is the Southern Baptist Convention.What do you guys know about the SBC?Is that phrase true?All cops are Baptists?Yes, that is.I mean, actually, broadly speaking, yes.Some of them are Pentecostals, and those are the real scary ones.
04:31I don't know much.I don't know much.I am the perfect canvas for this story.I wish all cops were Anabaptists because the Anabaptists were actually pretty dope, butthat's a story for another day.That's a different story.Also got massacred in a castle, but anyway.But anyway.
04:52But anyway.I digress.Yeah, the Southern Baptist Convention, we'll talk about what that means, but the SouthernBaptist Convention is the thing that organizes the Southern Baptist denomination, essentially.Southern Baptists are the largest Protestant denomination in the United States.Today, there's around 14 million of them, and there's like 46 or 47,000 SBC affiliatedchurches in the United States.So real big and very conservative.
05:21A lot of people will argue that the Southern Baptists are kind of the heart of the conservativemovement in the United States in a lot of ways.And at the moment, as we speak, like literally the week that we're recording this, a bunchof fucked, well, okay, the literal week that we're recording this, they had their annualSouthern Baptist Convention where they vote on a bunch of stuff, including like the dudewho's going to be, we'll call him the president of the Southern Baptists.And they vote on like resolutions and stuff.We'll talk about that at the end in part two a little bit more, how that went.
05:52But yeah, the thing that was kind of one of the top stories about the Southern Baptistsis both this kind of war between, it's really not between left and right.It's between like normal conservatives and absolute fascist maniacs, right?Oh yeah, that classic tale.Yeah, that classic tale of like people who don't like taxes and people who want to doa genocide.Yes.So that clash has been, and this has been actually going on for years, but the thing
06:19that has kind of sent a curve ball in it is starting like a year or so ago, two yearsago, something like that.A series of articles started being published by the Houston Chronicle about a massivesexual abuse scandal within the SBC.So we're going to talk about that a lot.That's what we're all going to be going into today.But before we get into that, we need to do some history, right?Because while over the course of my lifetime and y'all's lifetimes, the Southern Baptists
06:49have been a huge force for rigid, regressive, often vicious conservatism.They didn't start that way.The very first Baptist.Again, the tale is all this time.The tale is all this time, right?Yeah.It is kind of weird how different this actually gets kicked off though is from where theyare now.
07:06So the very first Baptist church was founded in 1609 in Amsterdam by an English dissenternamed John Smythe.Now, John and his fellows, again, what a dissenter is.These are folks like, you know, you got that Church of England thing, right?Because you get that king and there's like, he wants, you know, wants to fuck.There's other stuff than the fucking.He wanted to fuck.He wanted to fuck.
07:29Like he wanted to, well, he wanted marriages, whatever.He wanted to do shit you couldn't do as a Catholic.There's other stuff going.People always get angry.It wasn't just about that.This was going on too.And this was going on too.And fuck you in your English history.
07:39I don't care.Anyway, you have these, you have this Church of England get established, breaks away,Catholic, Catholicism is illegal, all that good stuff.And then you have these like dissenters who are not Catholic, but also are not, don'twant to, don't like the idea of the Church of England.And John Smythe, particularly in his followers in Amsterdam, the thing they don't like isthe idea of the religion being affiliated with the state government.They don't want a state religion.
08:02They think there should be separation between church and state, right?We'll see about that.Yeah, theirs is less about like, yes.And again, this is not because of like, this is less about personal liberty, I think intheir hearts, than it is about like the state will fundamentally corrupt the faith.Yeah, which it's, it sure does seem to.Might have been right on the money there, John.Now there's some other stuff going on here, including the fact that John and his fellow
08:31early Baptists rejected the baptism of infants.Like the Anabaptists, I think you might be able to tell where the name Baptist comes fromby the fact that earlier in history, there was a group called the Anabaptists.They don't believe a baby should be baptized.Only adults can be baptized because like a baby can't choose to be Christian.Like an infant cannot accept Jesus Christ because it's a baby.Yeah, that tracks, that tracks to me.Now, an awful lot of people get murdered over this.
09:02Like it is astounding how many human beings are killed because some folks are like,what if only adults who could consent got baptized?That is a big, big thing.So let's fucking kill each other.I love how the, so much death comes from the holiness of God and how we should devote to him.This is just like, and this is again, so you see fundamentally the one of the big splitsbetween other Protestant denominations and the Baptists is the Baptists are really focusedon personal liberty and autonomy, right?
09:35The idea that you can't get baptized until you can fully choose,can make an informed choice as to whether or not to be a Christian,which I think is broadly speaking better than dunking babies in the water.But I also don't think baptism babies has any particular effect on them because they're babies.They don't remember shit.You can do whatever, like draw on it.You already give baths to babies.If they die without being baptized, they go to hell.
10:02I'm actually not a Christian, but I do believe that.That's the one that broke through.The babies are fundamentally evil.Hell is just for babies.Yeah, especially for babies.Baby hell where it's like, you have to, I don't know, what would baby hell be?I guess like, I mean, just be a pile of like just a room full of babies with no adults.Right?
10:27Yeah.Honestly, I have to say that I think being a baby probably is hell.You're just shitting yourself and you can't you don't ever know what's happening.Yeah.But then you get the things that you need and comfort from all you got to do.But I don't know who these giant people coming at me really close with their giant faces.I think being a baby is probably an incredibly traumatic experience.It does seem difficult having having known a couple of babies.
10:53It seems way harder than what I do.I do not envy you, man.And then at one, it starts being good because you can talk.Yeah.Then you can start to fuck around with people, you know.Yeah, yeah.We all have that power.So in the decades that follow John Smythe and the establishment of his church,
11:11the Baptist faith grows and it actually has a split very early on between a chunk of Baptistsand people like...It's like murder of crows, chunk of Baptists.Yeah, chunk of Baptists, yeah.So half of them are like, I don't know if it's exactly half,but a big chunk are like anyone can be saved.Jesus Christ died for everybody, right?All you have to do, you have to accept Christ as your Lord and Savior and you're saved.
11:37Ba-da-bing, ba-da-boom.And then there's a chunk that are like, no,God picked a small number of people all throughout history.There's 60,000 to be elected to go to heaven and everyone else goes to hell.Oh, shit.Which is a thing that only lunatics believe, but it's very popular in this period.So as a general rule, Baptists were the anti-authoritarian strain of Christianity in this period.Nice.
11:59They believed in separation of church and state, they believed in freedom of conscience,and they believed in the value of individual life experience in preaching.And this is a big, this starts like, because the Catholic church in this period,you know, insert your opinions into talking about the Bible.You read the Bible, right?And you do the liturgy and you have this like creed that you read,and it has all been laid down and other people, like,your job is to go read the same thing every Catholic hears, right?
12:26Your job is not to extemporanealize from the fucking pulpit, you know?And now you've got these Protestant denominations and they have some different,there's Protestants who are like, no, because the Bible is inerrant,you preach just the Bible.Baptists are like, well, no, your God made you as a unique personand your experiences and beliefs about faith are a part of like what God has given you.So you should share your personal experience with faith with other people, right?This scares the shit out of Anglican and Calvinist leaders.
12:55They do not like this.And the main reason why is that the Baptists really extend this attitude that like,well, God made us all the way we are with the capacity to make choices and experience thingsand he wants us to share that with each other.So clearly women should be allowed to speak in church.This is a big problem for people.So you've got, you've got, I don't know if they're quite past, yeah.They're not quite pastors, I don't think,
13:22but you have women preaching the word of God in Baptist churchesand that is a real, like, folks get very honry about that.And spoilers, they still are today.So through the 1700s, Baptists were attacked out of the fearthat their beliefs would overthrow male leadership,not just in the church, but in government, right?And they believe that, like, men had been put above women.This is part of God's design.
13:46There will be chaos and violence and horror if women, you serve this.Yeah, cause chaos in our lives and in the system.Oh, yeah.God, I'm sorry.He just pops up without time.Yeah, Jordan B. Peterson would absolutely have been, like,if he's in the 1700s, he's never not talking about Baptists.Like, that's every hour of his life.
14:09And still claiming that patriarchy doesn't existand has never existed and it's made up by activists.But also some hierarchies are ingrained within the human souland older than trees.Older than trees.That quote.Jordan Peterson.Yeah.
14:30So I want to quote right now from a very enlightening write-upin Religion Dispatches by Diana Bass.Quote,The Baptist's commitment to liberty also shaped a revolutionamong Christian women, empowering them to exercise their spiritual giftsand take up leadership in the emerging religious movement.Indeed, one of the first attacks leveled at Baptists in Englandwas that they scandalously allowed for she-preachers,
14:50including one, this is it.That's called she-chers, right?That's right.Including one, Mrs. Attaway.It's right there, guys.It's waiting for you.Get together.Mm-hmm.
15:00Including one, Mrs. Attaway,whose Tuesday afternoon Bible lectures in 1645attracted as many as a thousand eager listeners.Baptist women were among the greatest radicalsof a revolutionary century,and they preached a gospel of visionary egalitarianismbased in biblical injections like,your daughters will prophecy
15:17and there is no longer male and female in Christ Jesus.So, there's some radical shit going on.Radical shit going on in the Baptists.Love this shit.That's pretty cool.Radicalism way back when, I mean, that does it for me.So, OG Baptists.I guess I would have been a Baptist.
15:37Yeah, OG Baptists are fucking revolutionariesin a lot of ways in this period.You open the door for women and look what they do for you.Yeah, we are abolishing gender.16th or 17th century Baptists.Yeah.Now they're abolishing it under Christ, whatever, specifically.Yeah, it's whatever.
15:57So, conservatives at the time struck back against progress,as is why they exist,and they accused Baptists of fomenting revolution and chaos.One pamphlet from the mid-1600s warned that female Baptists,quote, oh, you're gonna like this, Katie,female Baptists have, quote,lately advanced themselves with vain glorious arroganceto preach in mixed congregations of men and women
16:21in an insolent way, so usurping authority over menand assuming a calling unwarranted by the word of Godfor women to use, yet all under the colorthat they all as the spirit moves them,wherein they highly wrong and abuse the motionsof the blessed spirit to make him to be the authorof such, of so much schism, disorder and confusion,they being rather led by the strong delusions
16:43of the Prince of Darkness to countenance their ignorance,pride and vain glory.Baby, that's what we call word salad.Yeah.You piss, because she's better at it than you.Better at preaching than you, Jordan Peterson.Yeah, women, um...What did I do?
17:04Bring him to this.So, Baptist radicals were met with weaponized Bible quotesabout how women need to, you know,stay quiet and submit to their husbandsand all that good stuff.In England, a whole lot of Baptists get jailedfor doing Baptist stuff.And when they refuse to stop anyway,
17:21you know, things get...This is part of why a lot of Baptists wind upin North America, right?There are crackdowns across Europeof Baptist communities and they're like,well, let's go colonize a place.Now, this is where things start to go wrong,because number one, they're now becoming kind of implicit
17:38in the genocides or the series of genocidesthat are about to follow.But also, because it's North America in the 1600s,they're gonna start to become complicit in slavery.This is where things go awry.Pretty good for a while, though.For a while.For a while?
17:59We can't just end the episode where we were.No, he asked for the Baptist.They had a good 30 years.So, that's like...30 years.Not even someone's lifetime.They have a generation?Yeah, that's not bad.
18:19Good for the time.It's longer than we have left in the United States.I mean, it's disappointing.Yeah, it is disappointing.This is a story that's gonna end on a kind of hopeful note.So, that's good.This won't be as sad as a lot of things end,although, boy, howdy, it's gonna be a rough road to get there.
18:40So, in the old country, right,Baptists had lived in a slave state as well,the British Empire, most of the countries in Europe.Slavery is, if it's not within the country itself,the country's economy is heavily reliant upon slaveryin colonies and stuff, right?So, obviously, Baptists, but personal ownership of slaveswas not really much of a thing,
19:02nearly to the extent that it became in the US South.And Baptists were radicals.They did not tend to have a lot of money.So, you didn't have, before they kind of came to the US,I don't think they were really Baptist slave owners.Certainly not as any kind of organized group, right?Maybe there were some individuals who did.But in the United States, Baptists,
19:20because so many of them come over in very short order,they are the largest Protestant sect in the new,you know, first in the coloniesand then eventually in the new United States.And because there's a lot of them,and because, you know, when you travel to a countrythat's in the state of being bornand that is appropriating and stealing a great deal of land,
19:40a lot of them wind up being rich and they get wealthand they get power and they get slaves.And they stop being quite so cool and radical.So, the first Baptists had been big.One of the foundational things about being a Baptistis that they are a non-hierarchical religion,which means that they abided by no state interferencein their worship, unlike the Anglican church,
20:00and they also have no bishops or popes.Their radicalism actually extended beyond that.Baptists had no unified creed,so like the Nicene creed or whatever like that.They don't have anything like that. There's no liturgy.There's nothing that if you are a Baptist,every Baptist like reads this thing,and like every Baptist goes straight, other than like the Bible,
20:17but again, there's a lot of freedomand like how it's preached and like what not.So, the Baptists in the United Statesvery quickly start to split alongkind of the same lines as the rest of the new country splits.Northern Baptists continue to hew to this anti-hierarchyintellectual tradition, and a lot of them do become abolitionists.A lot of northern Baptists are part of the abolition movement.
20:42But in the South, Baptists who had accumulatedwealth and power and slaves start to see things very differently.Now, they still reject choice hierarchy,and they claim to not have a creed,but a growing number of them start to arguethat slavery is not just acceptable,but is divinely inspired.The actual will of God.
21:01Dr. Richard Furman, who is an early Southern Baptist leader,wrote in a letter to the governor of South Carolina,quote, the right of holding slaves is clearly establishedin the Holy Scriptures, both by precept and example.Now, this causes a rift because by the 1800s,the mid-1800s, the 1840s, slavery,I don't know if you guys know this,kind of a contentious issue in the United States.
21:24Yeah, a lot of people disagree.I have heard that.Did they smooth it out?Yes, they smooth it out during...Was there some sort of fight?People call it the big disagreementthat everything was fine after.That everything was fine after.
21:40The civil debate.The civil debate, and then everything was good.That's what we had.So, it happens, obviously,the Civil War starts in 1860 in the United States.It happens a bit earlier for the Baptist.In 1845, there is a fundamental riftof the Baptist faith over the question
21:58of whether or not slaveholders can be missionaries.That's what kind of...Again, there have been a bunch of arguments and debates,but fundamentally, this issue is kind of like,winds up being the thing that sets the kettle of boiling.Can slaveholders go out and preach the gospel?Can you go out and win souls for Christwhile owning human beings?
22:17That's a good question.That is a good question.Easy question, but also a good one.Yeah, easy question.The Northern Baptist would say very easy question,but the Southern Baptists say yes,and the Baptist faith splits,and the very first Southern Baptist convention
22:32takes place in Augusta, Georgia in May of 1845.And I'm going to quote from a write-upin Pathios' Daylight Atheism blog.Largely comprised of slaveholders,the gathering endorsed the peculiar institution.Slavery was biblical, abolition sinful.Baptists of the North were wrong to oppose slavery.Abolitionists bore responsibility for the Baptist division.
22:52Baptists of the South have been patient with the agitators,but enough was enough, right?It's just, again, tales all this time.We've been very patient.We've been very civil with us needing the slaves,but you people need to calm down.That's such a...It's amazing how the same thing happens forever in a loop.
23:15Over and over and over.All the time.Time might be some sort of flat circle.I've heard that.I've heard that.Reggie Liddo.Reggie Liddo.I did have, I did an event in Austin recently,
23:29and I had a lunch in a couple of Lone Stars there,and I considered, I should have done it.I regret not doing it.I should have bought a six-pack of Lone Starto walk into my book signing,just like pounded six Lone Starswhile like ranting about nihilism to the audience.I'm going to take out your knife
23:45and start carving the empties.Yeah, Robert, I see that in your future.I really want that for you.Next time.I mean, what man doesn't want to grow up to be Rust Cole?Like, honestly.A beautiful man.Fucking Harrison's character's name.
24:03Goddamn it.You're right.You're Woody Harrelson's character.Woody Harrelson's character.Nobody.Yeah.Anyway, whatever.Great season of television.
24:11Never watched the show again after that.Sorry for saying Harrison.Had any good ones.Oh yeah, not worth after that.Do we need an ad break?It's not.Yeah.We regila do.
24:19We regila do.Yeah, Cody, you fucking regila did it.You regila did it.So go watch the first season of True Detective againand also listen to these ads.They're the same length.During the summer of 2020,some Americans suspected that the FBI
24:43had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations.And you know what?They were right.I'm Trevor Aronson,and I'm hosting a new podcast series,Alphabet Boys.As the FBI sometimes,you gotta grab the little guy
25:00to go after the big guy.Each season will take you insidean undercover investigation.In the first season of Alphabet Boys,we're revealing how the FBIspied on protesters in Denver.At the center of this story is a raspy-voicedcigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse.
25:20And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns.He's a shark, and not in the good badass way.He's a nasty shark.He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time,and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen.Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app,Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.What if I told you that much of the forensic science
25:42you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?The problem with forensic sciencein the criminal legal system todayis that it's an awful lot of forensicand not an awful lot of science.And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price.Two death sentences in a life without parole.My youngest, I was incarcerated two days
26:05after her first birthday.I'm Molly Herman.Join me as we put forensic scienceon trial to discover what happenswhen a match isn't a matchand when there's no science in CSI.How many people have to be wrongly convictedbefore they realize that this stuff's all bogus?
26:27It's all made up.Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app,Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.I'm Lance Bass, and you may know mefrom a little band called NSYNC.What you may not know is that when I was 23,I traveled to Moscow to train to becomethe youngest person to go to space.
26:50And when I was there, as you can imagine,I heard some pretty wild stories.But there was this one that really stuck with me.About a Soviet astronaut who found himselfstuck in space with no country to bring him down.It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev,is floating in orbit when he gets a messagethat down on Earth, his beloved country,
27:15the Soviet Union, is falling apart.And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost.This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space.313 days that changed the world.Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app,Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.Oh, we're back.Boy, that was a pretty good show.
27:49True detective.It was.Loved it.Loved that show.Enjoy it.Yeah.So the Southern Baptist faith grows rapidly after 1845.And it's got, there's a lot of slave money behind it,
28:03which allows them to do things like set up a shitload of schoolsand build a really, really powerful publishing armto start pushing out newspapers and magazinesall over primarily the South.Now, the faith is decentralized on paper.Again, there's no central church.There's no pope.But you start to have these very wealthy institutions
28:21arrive that are putting out content for schools,that are putting out like stuff, you know,training pastors and whatnot.And as a result, things, even though the Baptists,Southern Baptists say that it's decentralized,things get very fucking centralized, right?You start to congregate a lot of power in these institutionsthat are influential for the Southern Baptists.
28:43And of course, because the men who are funding themand running them are slave holders,supporting slavery becomes a religious creedfor the Southern Baptists.In 1850, one Baptist news editor wrote, quote,quote, as a question of morals, it is between us and God,as a question of political economy.It is with us alone, as free and independent states.
29:04Right?Interesting word choice.What's that word?What's that first word you said?In what?States?Oh, my God.Under the wall.
29:13It's cool.So in 1856, a prominent Alabama Baptist leaderlabeled slavery, quote, as much an institution of heavenas marriage, basically saying, of course,there will be slaves in heaven.It wouldn't be heaven if I didn't own people.How could I be happy without my property?Yeah.
29:29It's amazing tying slavery to marriage.Yeah.It is.It is interesting.Interesting.Make my stomach churn every time I think about how recentall this shit is.It's not all that far ago, actually.
29:411850, mother fucking God.Yeah.This is like 100 years before Martin Luther Kingis marching around.It's not that distant from us.Parents' lifetime.Like, I mean, not 18 very, but like.Are grandparents new people who'd been alive in this period?
30:00Absolutely.Absolutely.Or at least could have.So the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary is founded in 1859in Louisville, Kentucky, and it provides the Southern Baptistwith a place to train their clergy.Again, part of the thing with Baptist is that there'ssupposed to be no centralized control over clergy.
30:16People are not like, it's not like, you know,if you, like being a Catholic priest,it's like a whole fucking deal, right?They're like, it's like becoming a mechanic or something.You can just get declared a, like if your congregation says,hey, we like this guy, he's the pastor,you're the fucking pastor, right?But now they also have a seminary that is training people
30:35to be pastors, which is very centralized.Oh, and by the way, the four guys who own the seminaryown 50 slaves in between them.So when Abraham Lincoln was elected.No.Yeah, that's fine.It's good times.It's good times.
30:50Lincoln gets elected and the very normal dudesat the Southern Baptist Theological Seminaryreacted as you had expectby immediately arguing for secession.Now some Baptist leaders had been arguing for secessionin the early 1850s, and the Southern Baptist faithoverwhelmingly supported the Confederacyin the Civil War that followed, which should not be a surprise.
31:11In an 1863 meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention,SBTS founder John Broadus, seen by some as almostthe founding father of like the Southern Baptist Convention,wrote and submitted resolutions pledging Southern Baptistsupport for the Confederacy.Now, Cody, I know you're just like on page 105of your US history textbook from middle school,but I'm going to spoil something for you.
31:35Civil War doesn't go great for the Confederacy.What?Yeah, I know.And I'm sorry, I know you were just getting there, right?But the flags are still around.It seems like it was successful.I see why that's confusing, Cody.But no, it does not work out.
31:54Celebrating victory, right?They're celebrating a victory.We're actually kind of getting to some of that.Oh, good.Yeah, so the South loses the war,and kind of as a result of the South losing the warand a number of things that happened with it,there are rather fewer living Southern Baptist men in 1865
32:14than there had been in 1860.Now, emancipation and the end of the warleads eventually to something that kind of startsto approach equal rights for black people, right?And obviously, this is not an even, you know,you've got your reconstruction periodwhere things are looking good,you've got this horrible crackdown,
32:32you've got the establishment of Jim Crow laws,and the SBTS, the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary,and thus the leadership of the faithare hugely in favor of Jim Crow.And then finding ways to reduce and eliminateany kind of legal equality that black people might have.The people who are kind of runningthe Southern Baptist Convention oppose equality
32:55and support the separation of white and black people.Professor William Wilson assured his students,whites will rule in the South still.Now, some Southern Baptist leaders like Broadusdid evolve their views as time went on.Broadus eventually came around as believing slavery was wrongin 1882.I don't give them a lot of points for that.
33:15You'll see defenders of Southern Baptist leaders being like,well, look, no, Broadus realized that it was wrong.He's like, yeah, in the 1880s.Look, man, if you're raised in the slaveholding southand in 1850, you're like, you know what,this is wrong, fuck it, I'm an abolitionist now.You get a lot of points.It's hard to evolve beyond the things
33:33that your culture considers fine when they're immoral.That takes courage.In 1882, I don't really care that you came around, man.Is it radical anymore?Yeah, like get a golf club.Yeah, that's not really like good, I guess, but okay.But he also argues against those in the faith.What he does do is he argues against Southern Baptist
33:56once the war is over and they've lost.He does argue against people within his religionwho think that black worship is less acceptable to Godthan white worship.And as a result, there start to bea few black Southern Baptist churches.Now, this is a more significant chunk of the faith now.It's still not most.
34:14I think it's like 7% of SBC churches are majority black.But black Southern Baptists do grow to bea more significant chunk of the faiththroughout the early 1940s.And particularly in the modern period,an actually kind of disproportionate chunk of pastors are black.But yeah, the Southern Baptists,black Southern Baptists do become more of a factor in the faith.
34:38Even as kind of leaders of the Southern Baptist conventiontake advantage of this racist systemthat they've built in the post-war South.And for more information on that,I want to quote from an investigation published bythe Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.Yeah, that's actually kind of a spoilerfor where some of this ends.
34:56But this is the same institutionthat we were just reading a bunch of argumentsfor why God loves slavery.Let's quote.Okay.Yep.Pretty bad.That guy.
36:00Pretty bad stuff.So as you might guess, though,the SBTS recently has done some broadly admirable thingsin terms of grappling with its legacy.But of course, even in these, again,broadly admirable, because there's some really good workthey've done on kind of the fucked up parts of their history,they also still toss some bullshit up in there.
36:20For example, again, most of these Southern Baptist sourcesyou'll find grappling with their legacywill note that guys like Broadus came aroundand that other theological leaders, specifically William J. McLaughlin,loudly repudiated the children of Ham stuff,which is, do you guys know anything about that?No.There's also a thing in the Mormon church.
36:38There's this idea that...Children of Ham?Yeah, there's like some shit in the Bibleabout these like children, these city,you know how there's all these cities God gets mad atin the Old Testament for like stuff?Okay, so Ham's a city.Yeah, yeah.
36:51The Mormon church will be preaching that kind of shitup until like when we were little kids.You know?So, but some guys in this period and this kind of like lateend of the 1800s, very early 1900s,there are some Southern Baptist leaderswho are like repudiating that.But, and this is good.
37:10It's important in your analyses of racismto mention stuff like that.But then after doing some really good research,you get lines like this, quote,several faculty and trustees lamented the prevalenceof lynching in the South, which is like,why would you even include?Like the fact that someone are like,
37:27yeah, lynching seems fucked up.That's not a point in anybody's corner, right?Bringing down our property values.Oh, what a bummer.Lament is like such a weird word for that.It's weird.Like maybe just don't even include that, right?If somebody did something to try to stop lynching,
37:44sure, of course, that's a part of your history too.They felt anxiety about it.But also this is going to be a pattern.This exact kind of thing where you're like,well, we're not going to do anythingand we're not going to take any actionto try to make this less common, but we'll say it's bad, right?That is a real strong through line
38:04in the Southern Baptist Convention and the Seminary,all that good stuff.So while they lamented lynching,the SBTS approved of the Lost Cause mythology,which spread in Southern Baptist schools and churches.And that, Cody, is a big part of why you seeso many Confederate flag stickers on cars.This a historic take,
38:24we'll do a whole thing on the Lost Cause at some point,but basically it describes the Civil War as a conflictcaused by not the South's desire to maintaina nightmare system of human bondage.But because of the South's need to uphold their honorand states' rights and all this,there's this noble culture that sometimesthe people who are smarter about it will be like,
38:46well, slavery was bad,but it wasn't any worse in the Southand it wasn't all these other placesand there was all these good thingsand it wasn't just about,obviously it was about slavery,the Confederates at the timewere like, yeah, it's about fucking slaves.
38:56Literally.Yeah, they weren't coy about it.It's all there.Archibald T. Robertson,a prominent professor at the SBTS in the early 1900s,supported and taught the books of Thomas Dixonas major Southern Baptist texts in their schools.Do you know who Thomas Dixon was?
39:15He wrote The Clansmen,which was adapted in 1915to the film The Birth of a Nation.So this guy's books are all over Southern Baptist schoolsin the early 1900s.That's good.Yeah.It's good to be educated.
39:29Yeah.Now the SBTS...Reading is good.Yeah, reading is important.It's great to learn because knowledge is white power.Knowledge is white power.Yeah, there you go.Knowledge is white power.
39:41Christ.So SBTS faculty supported segregationuntil 1940, which, if we're going to be totally fair,means they were ahead of a lot of the United States.Yeah, they beat some folks.They were not the last, you know?That's 1940s when the SBTS admits its first black students.Again, and this is the school that can like train people
40:00to become pastors.The process of giving up segregation was unevenbecause there's a bunch of Southern Baptist schoolsand stuff, but the SBTS integrates...Like, as a general rule,they integrate their classrooms in 1951under the advice of Southern Baptist Convention president,Ellis Fuller.
40:17This puts them like three years ahead of the federal mandate.In general, SBTS faculty and much of the Southern Baptist leadershipsupported the civil rights movement with hesitation,but apparently with some honesty.And in 1961, they invite Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to speak,which isn't nothing.So they do like, while there is this strong conservative chunk,they are able to like...
40:40They're not on the side that's, you know, anti-Martin Luther King.Yeah, they're not like fighting tooth and nail again.Right, right, right.It's just kind of more like, well, I guess we're getting draggedinto the present, but maybe that's not bad,which is not the worst that anyone in America handles things.It's not the best.I don't give them a lot of credit.
41:01Yeah, but not the worst.Yeah, let's give them a C, give them a C.Seem nice.Yeah.By the early 19...Do you say B-minus?No, I said C-minus.Sorry, sorry.
41:13Yeah, that's fair.By the early 1960s, a huge chunk of the faithhad become quite liberal in their doctrineand progressive on a whole host of social and political issues.A lot of this has to do with the growth of black churches,black Southern Baptist churches.And yeah, only about 6% of Southern Baptists are black,but something like one-fifth of their churches are headed by black pastors.
41:34And in this period, a lot of those folks are kind of more liberal.A lot of... They're not the only ones.This is the 60s, right?There's this kind of progressive wave that's sweeping over a lot of the country.Now, as I've noted a few times, there is no creed for Southern Baptists,but they do have what they call an outline of faith,which is basically a creed.It's called the Baptist faith and message.
41:57One thing that does legitimately separate the SBC for other faithsis that the faith and message is edited and revised over timeand reflective to democratic or at least kind of quasi-democratic pressure.Some segment of people within kind of the faith every yearkind of like vote on things that will be ways in which this will be like addedand like different motions and stuff.So it is much more... Southern Baptist Convention is much more able to kind ofmove with the times than a lot of denominations
42:27that are so, you know, for as large and as centralized as it becomes.It is kind of more reflective, able to be more reflective of the times.And I'm going to quote from a write-up by Religion Dispatches here.The first version was issued in 1925 during the heyday of the fundamentalist modernist crisis.A 1963 revision toned down the fundamentalism of the older statement,articulating more strongly Baptist latitude and doctrinethat favored the liberty of conscience.So you see, you've got this throughout the early part of the country,
42:54while there's also, you know, the things going on in the countryabout like the civil rights movement and all this other stuff,within the Baptist faith there's this debate over fundamentalism.Is the Bible perfectly inerrant and unquestionableand something to be taken totally, literally,or can we be like not lunatics about how we read the Bible, right?And in kind of this period for the middle of the century,the people who are like, yeah, let's adapt our faith to the modern era
43:21and like be different than people were in the 1920sor in the 1860s or whatever.Those folks are winning.Like they're winning for a while.Now this opened things up for Baptist churchesthat might in the future come to embrace and support even more radical ideas.Women's rights, gay rights, all that good stuff.So, and indeed, Baptist for a time were some of the most liberal denominations.
43:44From 1965 to 1968, when abortion was kind of startingto become a hotbed issue in the United States,Baptist publications did not mention abortion.Like there's no evidence of it being an issue at all.Nor did any Baptist body take action on it one way or the other.In 1970, a poll by the Baptist Sunday School Boardfound that 70% of pastors supported abortion to protect the motherand 71% in the case of rape.
44:10In 1973, a poll by the Baptist Standard News Journalfound that 90% of Texas Baptistsbelieved the state's abortion laws were too restrictive.Cannot emphasize how different things were back then.That's wild.Yeah.And again, we talk about this in our episodeson the religious right and the moral majority.
44:28This is, it's not that big.It is starting to become politicized.And obviously Catholics have always been against it, right?But fucking Protestants don't have a long historyin the United States of giving a shit about abortion.Now, 1973 is the year Roe v. Wade, you know, happens.And the Southern Baptist Convention endorses the right to choosein their big Vodum magic that year.
44:52Now, this makes some people happy,but it makes a lot of people angry.And it particularly infuriates a shithead named Larry Lewis.Larry is a St. Louis pastor who went on to runthe North American Mission Board.This is like the board that's,we will be talking about them a lot later.They're like the folks running the SBCs like mission,
45:11because like, that's the whole big deal for themgoing out and preaching to people.So in 1979, Larry Lewis picks up a newspaperthat listed the Southern Baptist Conventionalongside the Unitarian Church as supportive of abortion.As he later recalled, quote, that bothered me a lot.So now I'm going to quote from a write-up by the Baptist presswho suck and should gargle glass, quote.
45:31So Lewis did something about it, proposing in 1980the first of more than 20 pro-life resolutionsadopted by the SBC over the next few decades.When Lewis became HMB Home Mission Board President in 1987,one of his first actions was to createthe Office of Abortion Alternativesto help churches establish crisis pregnancy centers.We did an episode of It Could Happen Here
45:52on Crisis Pregnancy Centers.Not great stuff.Not great.Could they not help?I am, oh no.I would say not.So, you know, this is, again,we have a couple of periods, one in the late 1600s
46:08and one now where like, things were going great for a whileand now they start to get fucked up again.So Lewis was just one of the conservative white leadersof the church who started in the 1980s flipping the fuck outabout how the evil liberals were taking overAmerica's most racist faith.Most particularly, and most significantly,some of the leaders this scared were two guys
46:30named Paige Patterson and Paul Pressler.Now these were both prominent Southern Baptists in all.Those are some names.I know, I know.A lot of alliteration here.Oh my God, you just know.Fucking Paige Patterson or Paul Pressler,both of those guys, you know, have like opinions
46:48about inner city crime that are basically,like basically a fucking neo-Nazi tract from the 1970s.Oh, sure, you get it.Yeah, absolute.Like racial profiling.Oh my God.Species of some or some shit, yeah.Like, yeah, I am a nominative determinist.
47:06For example, you hear the name Dr. Jordan B. Peterson.You know what that guy's going to be serving.He's going to have a lot of opinions about snakesand gardens.I have to interject that it is time for another ad breakunless I'm a comedian.Yes, you know who else has strong opinionsabout racial hierarchies.
47:26Oh.They don't believe there should be any hierarchy.The only hierarchy he believes in is the hierarchyof children on the private hunting preservethey keep going off of the coast of Indonesiaand the people who hunt those children, as God intended.Promo code, uh...Promo code.
47:46How do you spell that?Briskit.Yeah, however you want.It's not going to work.During the summer of 2020,some Americans suspected that the FBIhad secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations.And you know what?
48:03They were right.I'm Trevor Aronson,and I'm hosting a new podcast series,Alphabet Boys.As the FBI sometimes,you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy.Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation.In the first season of Alphabet Boys,
48:22we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver.At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced,cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse.And inside his hearse were like a lot of guns.He's a shark.And not on the gun badass way.And nasty sharks.He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time,
48:44and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen.Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App,Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.What if I told you that much of the forensic scienceyou see on shows like CSIisn't based on actual science?The problem with forensic sciencein the criminal legal system today
49:07is that it's an awful lot of forensicand not an awful lot of science.And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price.Two death sentences in a life without parole.My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.I'm Molly Herman.Join me as we put forensic science on trialto discover what happens when a match isn't a match
49:31and when there's no science in CSI.How many people have to be wrongly convictedbefore they realize that this stuff's all bogus?It's all made up.Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App,Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little bandcalled NSYNC.
49:57What you may not know is that when I was 23,I traveled to Moscow to train to becomethe youngest person to go to space.And when I was there, as you can imagine,I heard some pretty wild stories.But there was this one that really stuck with meabout a Soviet astronaut who found himselfstuck in space with no country to bring him down.
50:21It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev,is floating in orbit when he gets a messagethat down on Earth, his beloved country,the Soviet Union, is falling apart.And now he's left offending the Union's last outpost.This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space.313 days that changed the world.Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App,
50:50Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.Oh, we're back.So we're talking about Paige Patterson and Paul Pressler,who are not wild.And again, the 80s is when this all really ramps up,but the 70s, the Carter administration in particular,is when these guys all start being like,we got to take our faith back from these fucking liberals.
51:13Now, Paige had started preaching as a teenager,and he moved on to occupy several positionsrunning churches across the filthy-ass South.He became president.I always want to get some scabby teen up their tongueabout God in line.Yeah, nobody I trust more.Voice cracking all the better.
51:33It's like every time I see Mormon missionaries,and it's like, my dudes,this is your first time out of the house.What do you know about life?Why do you have to teach me?Like, come on, man.Are you offering it?Go work at a sparrow or some shit.
51:51Like, get some life experience, you know?They've been opening at Dairy Queen.Yeah, seriously, dude.Like, come on.Anyway, so yeah, Paige starts as a teenager.He becomes president of Criswell College in Dallas, Texas.There's My City of Hate in 1975.Now, Criswell is a private Baptist college.
52:12It started as a Bible Institute,and as it's president, it was Paige's jobto inculcate new generations in the doctrineof biblical inerrancy.He is one of these fundamentalists, you know?And he's not a big fan of Roe v. Wade.He does not like the idea eitherthat women can be ordained as ministers,
52:29which is starting to happen.He really doesn't like that.And again, that's very anti-Baptist originalism, right?Like, dude, you need to go back.Yeah, my dude.Be a little more conservative, maybe?Yeah.But no, he doesn't like this.
52:46And he believes the Bible included, quote,an assignment from God, in this case,that a woman not be involved in teachingor ruling capacity over men.Says who?Says you?Says him?Well, it's very revealing of his attitude, too,
53:01because if it's a normal person to be like,well, yeah, why wouldn't...I mean, if it's all that matters to preachis like your relationship with Godand God loves everybody equally,why wouldn't a woman be able to preach?Because if you are a preacher, you are ruling.And women can't rule.
53:18And it's like, yeah, man, maybe that's...Maybe you shouldn't be doing anything.Like, maybe fuck you entirely.Oh, my God.Maybe you need to sit down, yeah.Yeah, maybe you need to sit to fuck down, bro.So Paul Pressler was a judgeand an extremely rich kid
53:34whose father was a Harvard graduateand the vice president of Exxon Mobil.Good lord.Oh, yeah.Stop fucking talking.That's the good stuff.Oh, when we hear about this piece of shit.So Paul goes to Princeton and in his...
53:51I really thought you were just going to say prison.I don't normally use Wikipedia as sources,but his Wikipedia biography is clearly writtenby like somebody he paid to update his Wikipedia.Yes, please.And it includes Lyons stating that he quote,invented theological liberalism head on, having never wavered in the faith acquired in his youth.Unwavering, that's right.
54:14These guys both will have several positions within the SBC.Patterson's going to lead it for a while.And being guys who suck, they were both good friends.And together, the two catched a plan.This is in like the 1970s.They sit down.This is like a huge part of Southern Baptist lore today.These two fuckers sit down at the Cafe du Monde in New Orleans.
54:34And a former Southern Baptist leader who now preaches against this kind of shit,Russell Moore, describes how they quote,mapped out on a napkin how the convention could restore a commitment to the truth of the Bibleand to faithfulness of its confessional documents.Now it took these guys like a decade to organize the kind of fuckerythat it took to wrench the Southern Baptist convention to the far right.But Patterson and Pressler used their influence methodicallyto weld together Southern Baptist conservative pastors into a voting block
55:03capable of manipulating the convention's procedures in their favor.In a write-up for the Atlantic, Jonathan Merritt describes how it all came together.The two men successfully executed their strategy in the subsequent decades,a movement they labeled the conservative resurgenceand their imponents dubbed the fundamentalist takeover.Whatever one calls it, the result was a purging of moderates from among denominational ranks,the codifying of literal interpretations of the Bible,and the transformation of the Southern Baptist convention
55:29into a powerful ally of the Republican Party.Great.Good stuff, huh?We did it.We got there.Great.Good stuff.Yay.
55:39Okay, we're catching up.Yeah.So Patterson and Pressler.All making sense.And their allies.They see the 1963 revision of the faith and message,which is, again, that creed that's not a creed, as a mistake.They call it, quote, an open door to a less biblical church.
55:53When they began to take over shit in the mid-80s,and that's really when this starts to come together, it's like 84, 85,support for abortion was one of the first things to go.But as religion dispatches notes, they quickly moved beyond that, quote,among their first targets were women, the Baptist women in ministry.By 1987, approximately 500 women had been ordained by the SBC,and most especially, women in the home.Southern Baptist fundamentalists busied themselves
56:18by creating an entire movement called complementarianism,a theological doctrine of equal but separate sexesbased on the joyful submission of wivesand the restriction of female authority.In 1998, they succeeded in adding a new articleto the Baptist faith and message on the theology of the family.The wife and husband are of equal worth before God,since both are created in God's image.
56:40The marriage relationship models the way God relates to his people.A husband is to love his wife as Christ loved the church.He has the God-given responsibility to provide for, to protect,and to lead his family.A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband,even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ.Sounds...Sounds like it sucks.
57:02Sounds, I mean, sounds exactly what I expected.Yeah, it's not...It's like you're describing my actual hell.Yeah.A good buddy of mine.It's equal...Separate but equal hell.Separate, yeah, exactly.
57:17That's fine.Men are trapped in this hell of machismowhere they're forced to deny all the aspectsof their personalitiesthat aren't this kind of toxic masculinityand women are trapped in an eternal prison.It's great.It's what God wants.
57:31It's the same but different.Yeah, it's good.Actually, a buddy when I was growing upwas a lot older than me.We played D&D together and he was...I think it was his church.I'm not sure it was his church or his wife,but he gets hitched and he gets married.
57:47Wife's a lovely person.They seem to have...They're still together.They seem to have a good relationship.She's very much like that kind of moreforceful one of the two,but their wedding was in thisvery fundamentalist Southern Baptist church.
58:03I'm not sure maybe the preacher couldread the vibes of the actual relationship,but he spent 10 minutes talking about the importanceof the woman submitting to her husband.It was super awkward.There are all these glances between people of like,okay, buddy, you're really going on about this, huh?It's fun stuff.
58:25It sounds very fun.Texas small town churches, good places.So hierarchy and patriarchy were now writteninto a not a creed creed that churches had to acceptin order to consider themselves Southern Baptists.This caused yet another major schism.A lot of moderates left the conventionand started to make new denominations.
58:49And in fact, more recently, President Jimmy Carter,history's greatest monster,renounced his membership in the church.He told one interviewer,at its most repugnant, the belief that womenmust be subjugated to the wishes of men,excuses slavery, violence, forced prostitution,genital mutilation, and national laws
59:05that omit rape as a crime.But it also costs many millions of girls and womencontrol over their own bodies and livesand continues to deny them fair access to education,health, employment, and influencewithin their own communities.I mean, he's been pretty solid for a while,but also it's worth noting, again,
59:22to talk about how this changes,Carter considers himself a memberof the Southern Baptist faith for a long time.Because again, this shift is not all that old, you know?Yeah.No, yeah.I mean, you keep saying that.I mean, that's like a whiplash kind of a shift, too,
59:38to have happened.And it's happened a couple of times, right?Yeah.With the slavery and everything, too.Justin and Pressler did not give a shitabout the things that Jimmy Carter has an issue with,and they celebrated their victoryover their great enemy, women,
59:52by carrying out a mass wedding ceremonyin the year 2000.Wait.They led five...No, you're continuing.You don't have to wait.Yeah.Mm-hmm, yeah.
01:00:01It was an involuntary word that utteredthat in my mouth.Wait, hold up.No, but please don't stop.They led 550 couples to renew their wedding vows,only this time with more misogyny,as they'd added these misogynist planks to the faith.Wives reciprocated, and in one accord,
01:00:18pledging to graciously submit and honortheir husband's role as servant leaderwhile acknowledging their responsibilitiesas wife and mother as, quote,priority above all else, except God.Makes me unhappy to hear this.Except God.Yeah.
01:00:33I know this happens, I understand,but it's like...There's a lot of reasons this is funny,including the fact that all of the dudeswho are horny about this are the same kind of peoplewho will point out like,well, his law means submission.And it's like, man,
01:00:47your faiths have the same fucking problems.Chill out, dude.Many faiths.Yeah.And I do think about a lot lately.How do you not, all the time,just about the way people participatein their own oppression,
01:01:02and the stories that you're toldand growing up in communities and environmentslike this where you, you know,whatever figures that push you into thinkingthat this is who you are and what you're worthand what your role is,and you become, that starts to feel like safety.Yeah.
01:01:21Even though for a lot of these people,it was probably very dangerousto consent that your husband has controland that you relinquished that.I'm sure that they were,I'm sure that there's a lot of abuse.I know, we're getting into stuff.Oh, Katie.
01:01:39Boy is there.Yeah.So convention leadership was in lockstepbehind all of these changes.A statement signed by many prominent Southern Baptist pastorsand teachers affirmed this stating,quote, we are convinced that denial or neglectof these principles will lead to increasingly
01:01:55destructive consequences in our families,our churches, and the culture at large.Now, for most of the 21st century,the Southern Baptist Convention has been a reliable reservoirof the most regressive attitudes of our era.Gay pastors were also banned in the SBC organizing documents.Interestingly enough, here's a fun fact for you kids.You know, who's not banned for being an SBC pastor.
01:02:18Sex offenders.What the fuck?That's just fine and nanny.But Robert.But, yeah.But maybe.Okay.Katie.
01:02:32What you're failing to account for is that Paige Pattersonhas a lot of friends who are sex offenders.Oh, I'm sorry.I didn't realize that he was.Yeah.He's got a bunch of buddies who are doing sex crimes.Well, you got to protect your buddies.Yeah, you got to bring your buddies.
01:02:46Two among us, two among us Baptist hasn't.Look, like if Katie, if like you were trying to get a placeand your landlord, you know, called me as a reference,like I would say, oh yeah, Katie,she's got like a 750 credit rating or whatever.Is that good?What is good for credit?That's good, right?
01:03:02I think that is good.No, that's good.Let's say 800.I don't know.I don't know.750 is a very excuse me.Everybody listening.750 is a very good credit score.
01:03:12Don't listen.You didn't see Sophie go.Meh.But.What's important, Katie, is I will lie to your landlordabout your credit.Thank you.Thank you so much.
01:03:22And in the same way, Paige Patterson is going to make surethat his friends who were repeatedly committing sex crimescan be pastors in the Southern Baptist Convention.In the same way is the phrase that you just used.And I wonder maybe if they're not comparable situations,but we can leave it at that.We don't have to explore that.We don't have to explore that.
01:03:42You know, we can explore.Cody, Katie.There's a guy named Darryl Gilliard.Now, in the 1980s.I don't know the sound of him.Gilliard is one of these.Can you say Darryl or Garryl?Darryl.
01:03:52Darryl Gilliard.Darryl is an incredible name.Darryl Gilliard would be amazing.So he is one of the SBC's like prominent black pastors.And he specifically, there's this guy,let me pull up his name,whose name will be familiar to a lot of people who is like,one sec, there's this pastor named Vines,
01:04:13who's like another prominent black,like the most kind of like celebrity SBC black preacherand Gilliard is considered to be like, oh, this is like,he's the new version of this guy who's like huge for us,shitload of money, very popular.And he's a protege of Paige Patterson,who calls him quote,the nation's next great African-American preacher.
01:04:33He becomes prominent when he earns several appearanceson Jerry Falwell's national TV show.Super charismatic.And he has this backstory.He has this like lurid story about how he's like raisedas a homeless orphan, you know, in a poor place.None of it's true.It's like all lies.
01:04:51He's not raised as a homeless orphan.But that's a good story.And now I'm going to quote next from the problematic source,Baptist news.Beginning in 1985,Gilliard was hired and then forced out of positionsat three Dallas area churches,Victory Baptist Church in Richardson,
01:05:06Concord Missionary Baptist Church in Dallasand Shiloh Baptist Church in Garland.He was similarly hired and forced to resignat Hilltop Baptist Church in Norman, Oklahoma,at least 25 women in the Dallas churchpublicly accused of sexual misconduct.So that is how the Southern Baptists,when they have to admit that this is a thing that happened,
01:05:26talk about it, right?That's their summary of this guy's crimes.It's actually quite a lot worse than that.But that already sounded bad.But that already doesn't, yeah.Wait a second, hold up.I'm going to quote from an article in the Houston Chronicleby Rob Downen.
01:05:45By Rob Downen, sorry, Rob.Yeah, about what was actually going onwith Monsignor Gilbert.Two years after Gilliard's 1991 ouster,he began pastoring a non-SBC congregationa few blocks away from Vines' megachirtsin Jacksonville, Florida.While there, he was convicted of sex crimes
01:06:07involving two teens.He faced multiple civil suits,including one eventually settled from a grieving widowwho alleged that she was raped and impregnated by himduring counseling sessions.Oh, my God.Very bad dude.Now, a big part of how he's able to do this
01:06:22is he is personal friends with Pattersonand with Vines who are, like,fucking running the SBC in a lot of ways.And so he'll tell his victims,like, hey, you know,if you have a problem with what I'm doing,like, take it up with fucking Paige Patterson, you know?Take it up with Vines, right?
01:06:41These guys who are, like,the, and for his part, as these,he keeps getting kicked out of churches,you know, for doing sex crimes,Patterson backs him to the Hilt,to quote from the Houston Chronicle, quote,Patterson wrote that Gilliard was not guiltyof the allegations or morally culpable.
01:07:01He said that Bailey, one of this guy's victims,must forget the past and should refrainfrom making public statements while Pattersonworks to rehabilitate the gifted young preacherfrom his mistakes, sorrow, and humiliation.He is no longer a problem to you, Patterson wrote.He is worth salvage.Will you agree not to disparage him any further,
01:07:21thus giving me a chance to help Darylcount for God and for good?Fuck you.Yeah, that's cool.Can we all agree to not disparage this poor man?Don't disparage him with your talk of him raping a green man.Hold your tongues about his abuse.Can you be so cruel?
01:07:42He's in pain.He's good at talking in a pulpit, guys.Do you not understand the stakes here?But also, this is the argument they'll make,is that, well, honestly, it's not that badif he's committing multiple sex crimes,as long as he's winning souls.Because they don't see the victims as mattering.
01:08:03You suffer, well, it's also just like,if you're a victim, it's bad and everything,but you just suffer once, right?Whereas if you win a soul to Christ,that's an eternity of torment that they're saved from.And the thing is, that is the logic, yeah.And here's the, I mean, this goes so much deeper than that,but if that is what you believe,
01:08:22by God, you can justify damn near anything.Anything, yeah.Which is a problem.Bigger than this, but this is one of the reasonsin which that's a nightmare problem.So with Patterson's help, again,Gilliard repeatedly gets jobs,he went to more than 7,000 people at a church in Florida,
01:08:40and Patterson would later claimthat since he'd been part of the panelthat had investigated allegations against Gilliardand, quote, got him to confess that guilt publicly,it was fine for him to help Gilliardget jobs to preach elsewhere.He said he was sorry.What more do you want from me,
01:08:56effectively the leader of the Southern Baptist Convention?People, what else can happen?What can you do?Yes.Now, in 2000, the same year that he remarried150 people with his buddy, the judge,Patterson sent a letter to a pastorasking him for advice on stopping
01:09:12sexual abuse in a church.This pastor writes a letter to Page Patterson,he's like, hey, I am concerned aboutsexual abuse happening within my church.What is your advice for, like,protecting my, a reasonable thing to do, right?You're leading a church, this is the guywho's running things, you want his advice.
01:09:28I don't want anyone to get hurt in my congregation.Page's advice was for him to, quote,hold lunch and one-hour awareness seminars.Not because they'll stop abuse,but so that if there is ever a lawsuitover sexual abuse, it will look likethe church did something to do something.Yeah, you smooth it over, you have these seminars.
01:09:44Exactly, exactly.Now, not long after all this, again,early 2000s, the Catholic Church'ssex abuse scandal blows wide open.I don't know if you guys have heard about this,but there's been a couple of problemswithin the Catholic Church about sex abuse.One or two thousand a year
01:10:00for centuries, you know,that big a deal, but yeah.So this is a big storyand because it's a big story,it kind of,again, there's a couple of things.There's this anti-democratic, very right-wing,very centralized thing happening,
01:10:16but there's also still, if a bunchof Southern Baptists have the moodtake them by something that happens,they can pass resolutions that are, like,good, broadly speaking.And so that year kind ofinspired by what had happened within the Catholic Church,they pass a resolution on the
01:10:32importance of sexual integrity for clergy,who were to be, quote, abovereproach morally.They also urge churches to, quote,discipline those guilty of any sexualabuse in obedience to Matthew 18,6, 17.I'm not great at reading
01:10:48the numbers of Bible verses, but that versereads, quote, if your brother or sistersins, go and point out their faultjust between the two of you. If they listento you, you have won them over. But if theynot listen, take one or two others alongso that every matter may be establishedby the testimony of two or three witnesses.
01:11:04If you still refuse to listen, tell itto the church, and if they refuse to listeneven to the church, treat them as you woulda pagan or a tax collector.Now, again, there's a...I'm pagan or a tax collector.The Bible, classic libertarianrant.
01:11:20Yeah, that's one of those versesthat, like, if you're the kind of guywho makes your own license plates and thenpolice during traffic stops, like,you're a big fan of that one.Yeah.But no, you can obviously, again, likeeverything in the Bible, there's a reasonable interpretation
01:11:36of that, which is the Christian churchis essentially this, like, radical socialmovement that doesn'twant to be torn apart by, like, petty disputes.So it's saying, like, hey, if you've got, like, ifsomeone does something kind of fucked up,first talk to them one-on-one and try to get themto see that they, like, did something that was, like, hurtful or negative.
01:11:52And if that doesn't help, bring other people alongand try to, you know, you graduallyget to the point where interventionyou don't start there. You give people the opportunity.Yeah, exactly. And if they don't listen, thenyou, you know, then maybe they need to be out and stuff, right?Not in an unreason- Okay, but what if that person'sa rapist in this sex affair? Yes, exactly.
01:12:08And I, this, it's, I don't know,the Bible verse is probably talking about, like,yeah, what if a guy doesn't want to share his fish, you know?Exactly.Yeah, yeah. They weren't talking about, like,what if a guy is systematically molestingwomen as part of a network of churchesthat include more people than-
01:12:24Eventually, you treat them like a tax collector.Yeah.Well, what if...What if I want something worse for this personthan how I treat a tax collector?Yeah, exactly.Now, again,there's a number of ways you can interpret this.
01:12:40Southern Baptist leaders tended to take it to meanif a pastoror someone else who is affiliatedwith us molests somebody,give them another chance, move them, give them another chance.And you give them another chance.And you give them another chance.You give them another chance, you know?
01:12:56It's cop shit, right?It's cop shit and it's Catholic pre-shit, right?Yeah, exactly.Like, okay, well, we'll just move you to another placeand then people will-With more opportunities, let's just-Where it happened, they'll forget about itand you go to another place and then it happens and-
01:13:12Let's just put you around people who don't know who you are.Exactly.Let's remove you from the communityand remove that you're a creep and let's put you in a new place.Yeah.It's good stuff.Good stuff.Yeah.
01:13:28In 2003, popular Illinois pastor Leslie Masonwas caught molesting four young girls.State leaders told himhe would be fired and lose severance payif he did not resign.Interesting that they gave a shit about that.I would say fire is asked because he molested four girls.Yeah.
01:13:44He's not a Christian.Maybe fire him from a cannon.I don't know.So he gets convictedand is sentenced to seven years in prisonin a plea deal which drops all but two of his charges.He gets, I mean, probably something messed up there,but whatever, he goes to prison.
01:14:02So he gets out after he does his timeand he goes right back to preach at a new SBC churchjust miles away from his old one.He becomes a rising star within the church again,traveling around the stateand preaching until his past chargesare publicized by a writer with the local Baptist newspaper.And again, you can see this as a success
01:14:18for the fact that the Southern Baptistshave set up their own media arm, right?This is a member of the communitywho has exposed this guy, right?Which is dope, right?That's unequivocally a good thing, good journalism,good on you, buddy.But people don't react well to this.
01:14:34Angry readers deluge the newspaperand condemnation against the newspaper's exposepours in from the Illinois State Baptist Association.Director Glenn Aiken's complaintsquote,to have singled out lez in sucha sensationalistic mannerignores many others who have done the same thing.
01:14:50You could have asked nearly,you could have, oh wait,you could have asked nearly any staff memberand gotten the names of several prominent churcheswhere the same sort of sexual misconducthas occurred recently in our state.That's bad too!Give me their fucking names, buddy!
01:15:06Go do that!Then do that, oh my god.It's like Derek Chauvin's lawyerbeing like, look, he was just doing what copsare trained to do when he murdered that man.Can't you not see how that's worse?I'm watching We Own The City,this HBO show about dirty cops
01:15:22and Baltimore, and that's what it is.It's like, one after the other,well like, yeah, well that guy's doing it.This guy's doing it.Man, that's why it's bad to be you.Like, yeah, right.Do you not get it yet?And yes, it's like
01:15:38when you're staring at something like,yes, that's the problem.This is the problem.You are a problem.So obviously, abuse by church officialsdid not start in the early 2000s, right?I'm sure that's true.No, it didn't.
01:15:54But under the raid of Patterson and Presslerand their acolytes,deliberately hiding and supportingthe rehabilitation of pastors who assaulted childrenbecomes basically official policy.Debbie Vasquezwas molested at age 14by her pastor in Sanger, Texas,
01:16:10back in the late 1970s.She was assaulted several times before being impregnatedby a married pastormore than a dozen years older than her.For years, she kept the secret.But then in the early 2000s,while the conservatives tightened their gripon the Southern Baptist Convention,
01:16:26stories like Mason's began to filter out.She decided it was time to take a tremendous riskand try to do something.Next, from an investigation published by the Houston Chronicleand the San Antonio Express News.I think I said just the Chronicle earlier.It's a joint kind of big investigationbetween the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express News
01:16:42that honestly deserves a fucking Pulitzer.Quote,In June 2008, she paid her way to Indianapoliswhere she and others asked leadersof the Southern Baptist Conventionand its 47,000 churches to track sexual predatorsand take action against congregationsthat harbored or concealed abusers.
01:16:58Vasquez, by then in her 40s,implored them to consider prevention policieslike those adopted by faithsthat include the Catholic Church.Listen to what God has to say,she said, according to audio of the meetingwhich she recorded,all that evil needs is for good to do nothing.
01:17:14Please help me and others that will be hurt.Days later, Southern Baptist leadersrejected nearly every proposed reform.Now,in the years that followed,that's 2008.In the years that followmore than 250...
01:17:30Thanks, Obama.More than 250 Southern Baptist pastors,leaders and volunteerswould molest or sexually assaultchildren and other members of their congregation.More than 700 victims have come forwardto date in total.Many would do it more than once
01:17:46in multiple churches and will tell that storyand will also tell some stuff that's less depressing.In part two.Oh, I can't wait.Part of that I look forward to.Yeah, aspects of thatwill be very cathartic.Others won't.
01:18:02Others sure won't.You got any plugsfor us at the end here?Oh boy, we sure do.You can check outour other shows.Some more newsis available on YouTube
01:18:18and where you get podcasts.Even more news is availablewhere you get the podcasts.Ourtweets are online.Your tweets are online.Where you go to get the tweets.Yeah, at the tweet store.
01:18:34Yeah, Patreon.We should invest more time in my othersocial media. Some more news.Patreon.We should all get one TikTok together.That's kind of what I was getting at.I actuallythink maybe we should
01:18:50and we should talk about that.It's been real fun in that environment.We could dab.How are you guys talking about it?The kids are dabbing a lot thesesix years ago.I thinkthe kids want more of us.
01:19:06Paul Ryanlove us.The kids haven't caught on.Let's do...I'm sorry, Katie, I cut you off.No, I wasn't going anywhere good.I was just going to saywe should make our TikTok be Paul Ryan
01:19:22themed.Just bring him back.Bring back Paul Ryan.That will hit with the teens.I think the teensare ready for a vice presidentialcandidate who does CrossFit.They weren't ready before.
01:19:38They were too young.Now they're the perfect age to see thatpicture of him working out.That pose to work out.Oh, yeah.I speak for everyone when I saywe've all suffered enough.It would be fun.
01:19:54That picture of Paul Ryan.What we could do with it.That picture of Paul Ryan is a pieceof one of my favorite kinds of contentwhich is official Republicanparty communicatesattempting to get people horny.It's like a
01:20:10species of Republican party propaganda.It's so embarrassingevery time.It's like a hunting photo as part of that.Oh, for sure.They did their best.It's so embarrassing.My God, it's so funny.
01:20:26It's never not funny.This was a fun and uplifting note to endthis episode on.Check out our Paul Ryan TikTokwhere we dab.Use one of those AI botsto makeuncomfortable erotic videos
01:20:42of Paul Ryanwhile standing on top of a dodge dart.With that, oh no.Oh no song going in the background.Oh my God.Oh no.That one.I don't need to sing it, you know it.
01:20:58We're done.We're done.Behind the Bastardsis a production of Cool Zone Media.For more from Cool Zone Mediavisit our website, coolzonemedia.comor check us outon the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast
01:21:14or wherever you get your podcasts.Alphabet Boys is a new podcast seriesthat goes inside undercover investigations.In the first seasonwe're diving into an FBI investigationof the 2020 protests.It involves a cigar-smoking mystery manwho drives a silver hearse.
01:21:30And inside his hearse were like a lot of guns.But are federal agents catching bad guysor creating them?He was just waiting for me to set the date, the timeand then for sure he was trying to get it to happen.Listen to Alphabet Boyson the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcastor wherever you get your podcasts.
01:21:46Did you know Lance Bassis a Russian trained astronaut?That he went through trainingin a secret facility outside Moscowhoping to become the youngest personto go to space?Well, I ought to knowbecause I'm Lance Bass
01:22:02and I'm hosting a new podcastthat tells my crazy storyand an even crazier storywho found himself stuck in spacewith no country to bring him down.With the Soviet Union collapsing around him,he orbited the Earthfor 313 days
01:22:18that changed the world.Listen to the last Sovieton the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcastsor wherever you get your podcasts.What if I told youthat much of the forensic scienceyou see on shows like CSIisn't based on actual science?
01:22:36And the wrongly convictedpay a horrific price?Two death sentencesand a life without parole.My youngest, I was incarceratedtwo days after her first birthday.Listen to CSI on Trialon the iHeart Radio App,
01:22:52Apple Podcastsor wherever you get your podcasts.
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