Behind the Bastards - Part One: How The Southern Baptist Convention Was Taken Over By Republicans and Child Molesters

Episode Date: June 28, 2022

Robert is joined by Katy Stoll and Cody Johnston to discuss The Southern Baptist Convention. FOOTNOTES: https://religiondispatches.org/the-sbc-sexual-abuse-scandal-is-a-success-story-of-the-theological-vision-and-social-structure-implemented-by-the-conservative-resurgence/?fbclid=IwAR0iDdS0N-6WnKnIBpJbq78hx2kFWRDqdqVa2BfTFu2l5ST60CH8-fnI1bg https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/06/southern-baptists-call-off-the-culture-war/563000/ https://eji.org/news/southern-baptist-seminary-documents-history-of-racial-injustice/ https://sbts-wordpress-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/sbts/uploads/2018/12/Racism-and-the-Legacy-of-Slavery-Report-v3.pdf https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/22028383-guidepost-investigation-of-the-southern-baptist-convention https://religionnews.com/2022/05/23/a-timeline-of-the-southern-baptist-conventions-sexual-abuse-crisis/ https://archive.ph/Wdf1U https://archive.ph/KTRei https://churchleaders.com/news/426195-sbc-reckoning-sexualabuse-reforms-missions-budget.html  https://churchleaders.com/news/382384-jesus-white-southerner-great-commission-baptists.html https://churchleaders.com/news/377251-greear-doesnt-want-to-use-a-slaveholders-gavel-anymore.html https://churchleaders.com/news/339544-339544-sbcs-flagship-seminary-releases-report-detailingracist-past.html/2 https://www.baptiststandard.com/news/baptists/southern-baptists-resolve-to-love-the-transgendersinner/ https://www.thedailybeast.com/southern-baptist-convention-trans-people-dont-exist https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/southern-baptist-convention-2021-offers-trump-critical-race-theorylitmus-n1270825 https://www.newsweek.com/southern-baptist-convention-dodges-critical-race-theory-fight-electsmoderate-ed-litton-1601064 https://www.baptistpress.com/resource-library/news/how-southern-baptists-became-pro-life/ https://www.patheos.com/blogs/daylightatheism/2017/06/pro-slavery-history-southern-baptists/ https://www.edweek.org/education/southern-baptists-exhort-parents-to-monitor-teaching-onhomosexuality/2005/07 https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/05/southern-baptists-hit-bybombshell-report-on-sexual-abuse.html See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet 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?

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. 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.

Thank 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.

Jordan 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.

Terrible 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?

How 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.

Any 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 have some of my best friends.

We're all going to sit down and talk. What better thing to chat about than a massive decades-long sexual abuse scandal with an America'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.

Yeah. 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.

I 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, but that's a story for another day. That's a different story. Also got massacred in a castle, but anyway. But anyway.

But anyway. I digress. Yeah, the Southern Baptist Convention, we'll talk about what that means, but the Southern Baptist 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 affiliated churches in the United States. So real big and very conservative.

A lot of people will argue that the Southern Baptists are kind of the heart of the conservative movement 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 bunch of fucked, well, okay, the literal week that we're recording this, they had their annual Southern Baptist Convention where they vote on a bunch of stuff, including like the dude who'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.

But yeah, the thing that was kind of one of the top stories about the Southern Baptists is 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 do a genocide. Yes. So that clash has been, and this has been actually going on for years, but the thing

that has kind of sent a curve ball in it is starting like a year or so ago, two years ago, something like that. A series of articles started being published by the Houston Chronicle about a massive sexual 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

have 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 they are now.

So the very first Baptist church was founded in 1609 in Amsterdam by an English dissenter named 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.

Like 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.

I 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't want 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 is the idea of the religion being affiliated with the state government. They don't want a state religion.

They 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 in their 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

early Baptists rejected the baptism of infants. Like the Anabaptists, I think you might be able to tell where the name Baptist comes from by 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.

Like 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 splits between other Protestant denominations and the Baptists is the Baptists are really focused on personal liberty and autonomy, right?

The 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.

I'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?

Yeah. 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.

It 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,

the Baptist faith grows and it actually has a split very early on between a chunk of Baptists and 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.

Ba-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.

They 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?

Your 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 person and 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.

They 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 things and 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,

but you have women preaching the word of God in Baptist churches and 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 fear that 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.

There 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.

And still claiming that patriarchy doesn't exist and has never existed and it's made up by activists. But also some hierarchies are ingrained within the human soul and older than trees. Older than trees. That quote. Jordan Peterson. Yeah.

So I want to quote right now from a very enlightening write-up in Religion Dispatches by Diana Bass. Quote, The Baptist's commitment to liberty also shaped a revolution among Christian women, empowering them to exercise their spiritual gifts and take up leadership in the emerging religious movement. Indeed, one of the first attacks leveled at Baptists in England was that they scandalously allowed for she-preachers,

including 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.

Including one, Mrs. Attaway, whose Tuesday afternoon Bible lectures in 1645 attracted as many as a thousand eager listeners. Baptist women were among the greatest radicals of a revolutionary century, and they preached a gospel of visionary egalitarianism based in biblical injections like, your daughters will prophecy

and 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.

Yeah, OG Baptists are fucking revolutionaries in 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.

So, 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 arrogance to preach in mixed congregations of men and women

in an insolent way, so usurping authority over men and assuming a calling unwarranted by the word of God for women to use, yet all under the color that they all as the spirit moves them, wherein they highly wrong and abuse the motions of the blessed spirit to make him to be the author of such, of so much schism, disorder and confusion, they being rather led by the strong delusions

of 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?

Bring him to this. So, Baptist radicals were met with weaponized Bible quotes about how women need to, you know, stay quiet and submit to their husbands and all that good stuff. In England, a whole lot of Baptists get jailed for doing Baptist stuff. And when they refuse to stop anyway,

you know, things get... This is part of why a lot of Baptists wind up in North America, right? There are crackdowns across Europe of 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

in the genocides or the series of genocides that 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?

We 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.

Good 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.

So, 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 slavery in colonies and stuff, right? So, obviously, Baptists, but personal ownership of slaves was not really much of a thing,

nearly 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,

because so many of them come over in very short order, they are the largest Protestant sect in the new, you know, first in the colonies and then eventually in the new United States. And because there's a lot of them, and because, you know, when you travel to a country that's in the state of being born and that is appropriating and stealing a great deal of land,

a lot of them wind up being rich and they get wealth and 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 Baptist is that they are a non-hierarchical religion, which means that they abided by no state interference in their worship, unlike the Anglican church,

and 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,

but again, there's a lot of freedom and like how it's preached and like what not. So, the Baptists in the United States very quickly start to split along kind of the same lines as the rest of the new country splits. Northern Baptists continue to hew to this anti-hierarchy intellectual tradition, and a lot of them do become abolitionists. A lot of northern Baptists are part of the abolition movement.

But in the South, Baptists who had accumulated wealth 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 argue that slavery is not just acceptable, but is divinely inspired. The actual will of God.

Dr. 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 established in 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.

Yeah, 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 disagreement that everything was fine after. That everything was fine after.

The 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 rift of the Baptist faith over the question

of 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 Christ while owning human beings?

That'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

takes place in Augusta, Georgia in May of 1845. And I'm going to quote from a write-up in 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.

Baptists 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.

Over 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,

and 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 Star to walk into my book signing, just like pounded six Lone Stars while like ranting about nihilism to the audience. I'm going to take out your knife

and 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.

Goddamn it. You're right. You're Woody Harrelson's character. Woody Harrelson's character. Nobody. Yeah. Anyway, whatever. Great season of television.

Never 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.

We regila do. Yeah, Cody, you fucking regila did it. You regila did it. So go watch the first season of True Detective again and also listen to these ads. They're the same length. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI

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True 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,

which allows them to do things like set up a shitload of schools and build a really, really powerful publishing arm to start pushing out newspapers and magazines all 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

arrive 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 institutions that are influential for the Southern Baptists.

And of course, because the men who are funding them and running them are slave holders, supporting slavery becomes a religious creed for 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.

Right? Interesting word choice. What's that word? What's that first word you said? In what? States? Oh, my God. Under the wall.

It's cool. So in 1856, a prominent Alabama Baptist leader labeled slavery, quote, as much an institution of heaven as 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.

It's amazing tying slavery to marriage. Yeah. It is. It is interesting. Interesting. Make my stomach churn every time I think about how recent all this shit is. It's not all that far ago, actually.

1850, mother fucking God. Yeah. This is like 100 years before Martin Luther King is 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?

Absolutely. Absolutely. Or at least could have. So the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary is founded in 1859 in Louisville, Kentucky, and it provides the Southern Baptist with a place to train their clergy. Again, part of the thing with Baptist is that there's supposed to be no centralized control over clergy.

People 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

to be pastors, which is very centralized. Oh, and by the way, the four guys who own the seminary own 50 slaves in between them. So when Abraham Lincoln was elected. No. Yeah, that's fine. It's good times. It's good times.

Lincoln gets elected and the very normal dudes at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary reacted as you had expect by immediately arguing for secession. Now some Baptist leaders had been arguing for secession in the early 1850s, and the Southern Baptist faith overwhelmingly supported the Confederacy in the Civil War that followed, which should not be a surprise.

In an 1863 meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention, SBTS founder John Broadus, seen by some as almost the founding father of like the Southern Baptist Convention, wrote and submitted resolutions pledging Southern Baptist support for the Confederacy. Now, Cody, I know you're just like on page 105 of your US history textbook from middle school, but I'm going to spoil something for you.

Civil 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.

Celebrating 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 war and a number of things that happened with it, there are rather fewer living Southern Baptist men in 1865

than there had been in 1860. Now, emancipation and the end of the war leads eventually to something that kind of starts to approach equal rights for black people, right? And obviously, this is not an even, you know, you've got your reconstruction period where things are looking good, you've got this horrible crackdown,

you've got the establishment of Jim Crow laws, and the SBTS, the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and thus the leadership of the faith are hugely in favor of Jim Crow. And then finding ways to reduce and eliminate any kind of legal equality that black people might have. The people who are kind of running the Southern Baptist Convention oppose equality

and 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 Broadus did evolve their views as time went on. Broadus eventually came around as believing slavery was wrong in 1882. I don't give them a lot of points for that.

You'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 south and 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

that 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

once the war is over and they've lost. He does argue against people within his religion who think that black worship is less acceptable to God than white worship. And as a result, there start to be a few black Southern Baptist churches. Now, this is a more significant chunk of the faith now. It's still not most.

I think it's like 7% of SBC churches are majority black. But black Southern Baptists do grow to be a more significant chunk of the faith throughout 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.

Even as kind of leaders of the Southern Baptist convention take advantage of this racist system that they've built in the post-war South. And for more information on that, I want to quote from an investigation published by the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Yeah, that's actually kind of a spoiler for where some of this ends.

But this is the same institution that we were just reading a bunch of arguments for why God loves slavery. Let's quote. Okay. Yep. Pretty bad. That guy.

Pretty bad stuff. So as you might guess, though, the SBTS recently has done some broadly admirable things in terms of grappling with its legacy. But of course, even in these, again, broadly admirable, because there's some really good work they've done on kind of the fucked up parts of their history, they also still toss some bullshit up in there.

For example, again, most of these Southern Baptist sources you'll find grappling with their legacy will note that guys like Broadus came around and 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.

There's this idea that... Children of Ham? Yeah, there's like some shit in the Bible about these like children, these city, you know how there's all these cities God gets mad at in the Old Testament for like stuff? Okay, so Ham's a city. Yeah, yeah.

The Mormon church will be preaching that kind of shit up until like when we were little kids. You know? So, but some guys in this period and this kind of like late end of the 1800s, very early 1900s, there are some Southern Baptist leaders who are like repudiating that. But, and this is good.

It's important in your analyses of racism to mention stuff like that. But then after doing some really good research, you get lines like this, quote, several faculty and trustees lamented the prevalence of lynching in the South, which is like, why would you even include? Like the fact that someone are like,

yeah, 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,

sure, 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 anything and we're not going to take any action to try to make this less common, but we'll say it's bad, right? That is a real strong through line

in 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 see so many Confederate flag stickers on cars. This a historic take,

we'll do a whole thing on the Lost Cause at some point, but basically it describes the Civil War as a conflict caused by not the South's desire to maintain a nightmare system of human bondage. But because of the South's need to uphold their honor and states' rights and all this, there's this noble culture that sometimes the people who are smarter about it will be like,

well, slavery was bad, but it wasn't any worse in the South and it wasn't all these other places and there was all these good things and it wasn't just about, obviously it was about slavery, the Confederates at the time were like, yeah, it's about fucking slaves.

Literally. 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 Dixon as major Southern Baptist texts in their schools. Do you know who Thomas Dixon was?

He wrote The Clansmen, which was adapted in 1915 to the film The Birth of a Nation. So this guy's books are all over Southern Baptist schools in the early 1900s. That's good. Yeah. It's good to be educated.

Yeah. 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.

Christ. So SBTS faculty supported segregation until 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

to become pastors. The process of giving up segregation was uneven because there's a bunch of Southern Baptist schools and stuff, but the SBTS integrates... Like, as a general rule, they integrate their classrooms in 1951 under the advice of Southern Baptist Convention president, Ellis Fuller.

This puts them like three years ahead of the federal mandate. In general, SBTS faculty and much of the Southern Baptist leadership supported 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...

They'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 dragged into 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.

Yeah, 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.

Yeah, that's fair. By the early 1960s, a huge chunk of the faith had become quite liberal in their doctrine and 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.

And 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.

One thing that does legitimately separate the SBC for other faiths is that the faith and message is edited and revised over time and reflective to democratic or at least kind of quasi-democratic pressure. Some segment of people within kind of the faith every year kind of like vote on things that will be ways in which this will be like added and like different motions and stuff. So it is much more... Southern Baptist Convention is much more able to kind of move with the times than a lot of denominations

that 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 doctrine that favored the liberty of conscience. So you see, you've got this throughout the early part of the country,

while there's also, you know, the things going on in the country about 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 unquestionable and 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

and like be different than people were in the 1920s or in the 1860s or whatever. Those folks are winning. Like they're winning for a while. Now this opened things up for Baptist churches that 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.

From 1965 to 1968, when abortion was kind of starting to 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 Board found that 70% of pastors supported abortion to protect the mother and 71% in the case of rape.

In 1973, a poll by the Baptist Standard News Journal found that 90% of Texas Baptists believed 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 episodes on the religious right and the moral majority.

This 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 history in 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 choose in their big Vodum magic that year.

Now, 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 run the 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,

because like, that's the whole big deal for them going out and preaching to people. So in 1979, Larry Lewis picks up a newspaper that listed the Southern Baptist Convention alongside 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 press who suck and should gargle glass, quote.

So Lewis did something about it, proposing in 1980 the first of more than 20 pro-life resolutions adopted 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 create the Office of Abortion Alternatives to help churches establish crisis pregnancy centers. We did an episode of It Could Happen Here

on 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

and one now where like, things were going great for a while and now they start to get fucked up again. So Lewis was just one of the conservative white leaders of the church who started in the 1980s flipping the fuck out about how the evil liberals were taking over America's most racist faith. Most particularly, and most significantly, some of the leaders this scared were two guys

named 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

about 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.

For 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 snakes and gardens. I have to interject that it is time for another ad break unless I'm a comedian. Yes, you know who else has strong opinions about racial hierarchies.

Oh. They don't believe there should be any hierarchy. The only hierarchy he believes in is the hierarchy of children on the private hunting preserve they keep going off of the coast of Indonesia and the people who hunt those children, as God intended. Promo code, uh... Promo code.

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Apple 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.

Now, Paige had started preaching as a teenager, and he moved on to occupy several positions running churches across the filthy-ass South. He became president. I always want to get some scabby teen up their tongue about God in line. Yeah, nobody I trust more. Voice cracking all the better.

It'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.

Like, 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.

It started as a Bible Institute, and as it's president, it was Paige's job to inculcate new generations in the doctrine of 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 either that women can be ordained as ministers,

which 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.

And he believes the Bible included, quote, an assignment from God, in this case, that a woman not be involved in teaching or ruling capacity over men. Says who? Says you? Says him? Well, it's very revealing of his attitude, too,

because if it's a normal person to be like, well, yeah, why wouldn't... I mean, if it's all that matters to preach is like your relationship with God and 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.

And 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 judge and an extremely rich kid

whose father was a Harvard graduate and 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...

I really thought you were just going to say prison. I don't normally use Wikipedia as sources, but his Wikipedia biography is clearly written by 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.

These 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.

And 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 Bible and to faithfulness of its confessional documents. Now it took these guys like a decade to organize the kind of fuckery that it took to wrench the Southern Baptist convention to the far right. But Patterson and Pressler used their influence methodically to weld together Southern Baptist conservative pastors into a voting block

capable 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 resurgence and 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

into a powerful ally of the Republican Party. Great. Good stuff, huh? We did it. We got there. Great. Good stuff. Yay.

Okay, 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.

When 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

by creating an entire movement called complementarianism, a theological doctrine of equal but separate sexes based on the joyful submission of wives and the restriction of female authority. In 1998, they succeeded in adding a new article to 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.

The 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.

Sounds, 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.

That's fine. Men are trapped in this hell of machismo where they're forced to deny all the aspects of their personalities that aren't this kind of toxic masculinity and women are trapped in an eternal prison. It's great. It's what God wants.

It's the same but different. Yeah, it's good. Actually, a buddy when I was growing up was 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.

Wife'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 more forceful one of the two, but their wedding was in this very fundamentalist Southern Baptist church.

I'm not sure maybe the preacher could read the vibes of the actual relationship, but he spent 10 minutes talking about the importance of 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.

It sounds very fun. Texas small town churches, good places. So hierarchy and patriarchy were now written into a not a creed creed that churches had to accept in order to consider themselves Southern Baptists. This caused yet another major schism. A lot of moderates left the convention and started to make new denominations.

And 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 women must be subjugated to the wishes of men, excuses slavery, violence, forced prostitution, genital mutilation, and national laws

that omit rape as a crime. But it also costs many millions of girls and women control over their own bodies and lives and continues to deny them fair access to education, health, employment, and influence within their own communities. I mean, he's been pretty solid for a while, but also it's worth noting, again,

to talk about how this changes, Carter considers himself a member of 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,

to 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 shit about the things that Jimmy Carter has an issue with, and they celebrated their victory over their great enemy, women,

by carrying out a mass wedding ceremony in the year 2000. Wait. They led five... No, you're continuing. You don't have to wait. Yeah. Mm-hmm, yeah.

It was an involuntary word that uttered that 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,

pledging to graciously submit and honor their husband's role as servant leader while acknowledging their responsibilities as wife and mother as, quote, priority above all else, except God. Makes me unhappy to hear this. Except God. Yeah.

I 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 dudes who are horny about this are the same kind of people who will point out like, well, his law means submission. And it's like, man,

your 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 participate in their own oppression,

and the stories that you're told and growing up in communities and environments like this where you, you know, whatever figures that push you into thinking that this is who you are and what you're worth and what your role is, and you become, that starts to feel like safety. Yeah.

Even though for a lot of these people, it was probably very dangerous to consent that your husband has control and 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.

Boy is there. Yeah. So convention leadership was in lockstep behind all of these changes. A statement signed by many prominent Southern Baptist pastors and teachers affirmed this stating, quote, we are convinced that denial or neglect of these principles will lead to increasingly

destructive 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 reservoir of 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.

Sex offenders. What the fuck? That's just fine and nanny. But Robert. But, yeah. But maybe. Okay. Katie.

What you're failing to account for is that Paige Patterson has 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.

Two among us, two among us Baptist hasn't. Look, like if Katie, if like you were trying to get a place and 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?

I 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.

Don't listen. You didn't see Sophie go. Meh. But. What's important, Katie, is I will lie to your landlord about your credit. Thank you. Thank you so much.

And in the same way, Paige Patterson is going to make sure that his friends who were repeatedly committing sex crimes can 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.

You 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.

Darryl 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,

who's like another prominent black, like the most kind of like celebrity SBC black preacher and 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.

He becomes prominent when he earns several appearances on Jerry Falwell's national TV show. Super charismatic. And he has this backstory. He has this like lurid story about how he's like raised as a homeless orphan, you know, in a poor place. None of it's true. It's like all lies.

He'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 positions at three Dallas area churches, Victory Baptist Church in Richardson,

Concord Missionary Baptist Church in Dallas and Shiloh Baptist Church in Garland. He was similarly hired and forced to resign at Hilltop Baptist Church in Norman, Oklahoma, at least 25 women in the Dallas church publicly accused of sexual misconduct. So that is how the Southern Baptists, when they have to admit that this is a thing that happened,

talk 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 Chronicle by Rob Downen.

By Rob Downen, sorry, Rob. Yeah, about what was actually going on with Monsignor Gilbert. Two years after Gilliard's 1991 ouster, he began pastoring a non-SBC congregation a few blocks away from Vines' megachirts in Jacksonville, Florida. While there, he was convicted of sex crimes

involving two teens. He faced multiple civil suits, including one eventually settled from a grieving widow who alleged that she was raped and impregnated by him during counseling sessions. Oh, my God. Very bad dude. Now, a big part of how he's able to do this

is he is personal friends with Patterson and 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?

These 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 guilty of the allegations or morally culpable.

He said that Bailey, one of this guy's victims, must forget the past and should refrain from making public statements while Patterson works to rehabilitate the gifted young preacher from 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,

thus giving me a chance to help Daryl count 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?

He'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 bad if he's committing multiple sex crimes, as long as he's winning souls. Because they don't see the victims as mattering.

You 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,

by God, you can justify damn near anything. Anything, yeah. Which is a problem. Bigger than this, but this is one of the reasons in 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,

and Patterson would later claim that since he'd been part of the panel that had investigated allegations against Gilliard and, quote, got him to confess that guilt publicly, it was fine for him to help Gilliard get jobs to preach elsewhere. He said he was sorry. What more do you want from me,

effectively 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 remarried 150 people with his buddy, the judge, Patterson sent a letter to a pastor asking him for advice on stopping

sexual abuse in a church. This pastor writes a letter to Page Patterson, he's like, hey, I am concerned about sexual 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 guy who's running things, you want his advice.

I 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 lawsuit over sexual abuse, it will look like the church did something to do something. Yeah, you smooth it over, you have these seminars.

Exactly, exactly. Now, not long after all this, again, early 2000s, the Catholic Church's sex abuse scandal blows wide open. I don't know if you guys have heard about this, but there's been a couple of problems within the Catholic Church about sex abuse. One or two thousand a year

for centuries, you know, that big a deal, but yeah. So this is a big story and 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,

but there's also still, if a bunch of Southern Baptists have the mood take them by something that happens, they can pass resolutions that are, like, good, broadly speaking. And so that year kind of inspired by what had happened within the Catholic Church, they pass a resolution on the

importance of sexual integrity for clergy, who were to be, quote, above reproach morally. They also urge churches to, quote, discipline those guilty of any sexual abuse in obedience to Matthew 18, 6, 17. I'm not great at reading

the numbers of Bible verses, but that verse reads, quote, if your brother or sister sins, go and point out their fault just between the two of you. If they listen to you, you have won them over. But if they not listen, take one or two others along so that every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.

If you still refuse to listen, tell it to the church, and if they refuse to listen even to the church, treat them as you would a pagan or a tax collector. Now, again, there's a... I'm pagan or a tax collector. The Bible, classic libertarian rant.

Yeah, that's one of those verses that, like, if you're the kind of guy who makes your own license plates and then police during traffic stops, like, you're a big fan of that one. Yeah. But no, you can obviously, again, like everything in the Bible, there's a reasonable interpretation

of that, which is the Christian church is essentially this, like, radical social movement that doesn't want to be torn apart by, like, petty disputes. So it's saying, like, hey, if you've got, like, if someone does something kind of fucked up, first talk to them one-on-one and try to get them to see that they, like, did something that was, like, hurtful or negative.

And if that doesn't help, bring other people along and try to, you know, you gradually get to the point where intervention you don't start there. You give people the opportunity. Yeah, exactly. And if they don't listen, then you, you know, then maybe they need to be out and stuff, right? Not in an unreason- Okay, but what if that person's a rapist in this sex affair? Yes, exactly.

And 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 molesting women as part of a network of churches that include more people than-

Eventually, you treat them like a tax collector. Yeah. Well, what if... What if I want something worse for this person than how I treat a tax collector? Yeah, exactly. Now, again, there's a number of ways you can interpret this.

Southern Baptist leaders tended to take it to mean if a pastor or someone else who is affiliated with 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?

It'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 place and then people will- With more opportunities, let's just- Where it happened, they'll forget about it and you go to another place and then it happens and-

Let's just put you around people who don't know who you are. Exactly. Let's remove you from the community and remove that you're a creep and let's put you in a new place. Yeah. It's good stuff. Good stuff. Yeah.

In 2003, popular Illinois pastor Leslie Mason was caught molesting four young girls. State leaders told him he would be fired and lose severance pay if he did not resign. Interesting that they gave a shit about that. I would say fire is asked because he molested four girls. Yeah.

He's not a Christian. Maybe fire him from a cannon. I don't know. So he gets convicted and is sentenced to seven years in prison in 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.

So he gets out after he does his time and he goes right back to preach at a new SBC church just miles away from his old one. He becomes a rising star within the church again, traveling around the state and preaching until his past charges are publicized by a writer with the local Baptist newspaper. And again, you can see this as a success

for the fact that the Southern Baptists have set up their own media arm, right? This is a member of the community who 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.

Angry readers deluge the newspaper and condemnation against the newspaper's expose pours in from the Illinois State Baptist Association. Director Glenn Aiken's complaints quote, to have singled out lez in such a sensationalistic manner ignores many others who have done the same thing.

You could have asked nearly, you could have, oh wait, you could have asked nearly any staff member and gotten the names of several prominent churches where the same sort of sexual misconduct has occurred recently in our state. That's bad too! Give me their fucking names, buddy!

Go do that! Then do that, oh my god. It's like Derek Chauvin's lawyer being like, look, he was just doing what cops are 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

and 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

when you're staring at something like, yes, that's the problem. This is the problem. You are a problem. So obviously, abuse by church officials did not start in the early 2000s, right? I'm sure that's true. No, it didn't.

But under the raid of Patterson and Pressler and their acolytes, deliberately hiding and supporting the rehabilitation of pastors who assaulted children becomes basically official policy. Debbie Vasquez was molested at age 14 by her pastor in Sanger, Texas,

back in the late 1970s. She was assaulted several times before being impregnated by a married pastor more than a dozen years older than her. For years, she kept the secret. But then in the early 2000s, while the conservatives tightened their grip on the Southern Baptist Convention,

stories like Mason's began to filter out. She decided it was time to take a tremendous risk and try to do something. Next, from an investigation published by the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express News. I think I said just the Chronicle earlier. It's a joint kind of big investigation between the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express News

that honestly deserves a fucking Pulitzer. Quote, In June 2008, she paid her way to Indianapolis where she and others asked leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention and its 47,000 churches to track sexual predators and take action against congregations that harbored or concealed abusers.

Vasquez, by then in her 40s, implored them to consider prevention policies like those adopted by faiths that include the Catholic Church. Listen to what God has to say, she said, according to audio of the meeting which she recorded, all that evil needs is for good to do nothing.

Please help me and others that will be hurt. Days later, Southern Baptist leaders rejected nearly every proposed reform. Now, in the years that followed, that's 2008. In the years that follow more than 250...

Thanks, Obama. More than 250 Southern Baptist pastors, leaders and volunteers would molest or sexually assault children and other members of their congregation. More than 700 victims have come forward to date in total. Many would do it more than once

in multiple churches and will tell that story and 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 that will be very cathartic. Others won't.

Others sure won't. You got any plugs for us at the end here? Oh boy, we sure do. You can check out our other shows. Some more news is available on YouTube

and where you get podcasts. Even more news is available where you get the podcasts. Our tweets are online. Your tweets are online. Where you go to get the tweets. Yeah, at the tweet store.

Yeah, Patreon. We should invest more time in my other social media. Some more news. Patreon. We should all get one TikTok together. That's kind of what I was getting at. I actually think maybe we should

and 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 these six years ago. I think the kids want more of us.

Paul Ryan love 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 say we should make our TikTok be Paul Ryan

themed. Just bring him back. Bring back Paul Ryan. That will hit with the teens. I think the teens are ready for a vice presidential candidate who does CrossFit. They weren't ready before.

They were too young. Now they're the perfect age to see that picture of him working out. That pose to work out. Oh, yeah. I speak for everyone when I say we've all suffered enough. It would be fun.

That picture of Paul Ryan. What we could do with it. That picture of Paul Ryan is a piece of one of my favorite kinds of content which is official Republican party communicates attempting to get people horny. It's like a

species of Republican party propaganda. It's so embarrassing every 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.

It's never not funny. This was a fun and uplifting note to end this episode on. Check out our Paul Ryan TikTok where we dab. Use one of those AI bots to make uncomfortable erotic videos

of Paul Ryan while 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.

We're done. We're done. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast

or wherever you get your podcasts. Alphabet 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 were 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.

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that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts 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?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and 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 Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.