The photo was taken from our train at the El Paso station. Sharon and I took Amtrak to Los Angeles and then down to Anaheim, and, along the way, we and a few hundred other passengers arrived in LA quite late because of an incident in west Texas. The lady you (barely) see talking to two city cops was the reason for our long delay. Somewhere east of El Paso, she tripped an emergency alarm that made sure we’d be confined to the train for the better part of an hour once we made the station; all doors were locked, and without an explanation. After a long haul through night and day on the Texas Eagle—from San Antonio past Del Rio and Alpine—we’d been looking forward to our walkaround on the platform (especially the smokers). But, without explanation, we were quarantined till something was sorted out. We didn’t know whether the problem was mechanical or terroristical or what, and when they finally released us to stretch our legs, it took us another hour or so to get as clear as we could on the holdup before moving on.

Once on the ground, as we made our way up the siding to the locomotive on our first recreational lap, we came across a woman leaning out of a window, her voice and hands trembling. She told us that she’d been sexually assaulted and she was waiting for the authorities to arrive to give her aid and justice. She was on the spot since it’s a federal offense to pull the emergency cord (or flip the emergency switch) on Amtrak without dire cause, and we were in the lurch since the train couldn’t proceed until the matter was resolved. We figured that somebody had groped her in passing between cars, but we weren’t in a position to judge, so we turned back to our walking route. I told her I was “as dumb as a sack of hammers” and so unable to answer her questions about juridical jurisdictions, the progress of the police investigation, and such. But she said she knew I wasn’t so dumb because she’d overheard me talking to a Finnish tourist in the San Antonio station while they were adding cars around midnight. As the Finn and I were swapping life stories, I mentioned that I’d been a prof, and she’d filed that away. So I turned and heard a bit more. Since we were both interested in higher education, I asked about her schooling, and she said she’d done some work in counseling at (now defunct) Argosy University.  I offered a short prayer for her, and when I opened my eyes, she said what she really needed was protection from a former husband who was stalking her.

As the delay dragged on, word filtered down that she was now claiming rape, and it struck us that this would have been quite a feat given the crowding and constant movement from car to car along the way. How in the world would this have missed detection? But the police did their due diligence, homing in on some folks she’d pointed out in the observation car. So we sat as the police stood in the aisle to question suspects and two other cops pressed her for details beside a fence outside the train. After nearly three hours had passed, they took her away and everybody but her stayed on the train and continued west (except, of course, those whose destination had been El Paso). The upshot of conversation on board, involving both crew and passengers, was that she “had issues,” that her story was a stretch, and that it was weird of her to try to stop the train instead of just calling for aid and reporting the incident to a conductor.

I couldn’t help thinking of what was facing us in Anaheim as the Convention took up the question of what we should do over reports of sexual abuse and cover-up in our churches and agencies. It was clear that many of these reports were true, but others were not so obviously impressive. Sometimes a “survivor”—an appellation the Guidepost Report attached to each complainer—is less a victim than supposed. Perhaps it’s quite rare, but it happens. 

When discussion of the Sex-Abuse Task Force (SATF) was winding down on Tuesday afternoon of the Convention, I walked to the mic and objected to the conceit that was driving the effort to make the SBC an overseer of churches regarding this murky matter. (I’d written on this issue the week before, here and here). In the course of my allotted three minutes, I brought up a new analogy, likening the Guidepost document to the 1619 Project, introduced by the New York Times and pressed upon us (with much eager acceptance in many school districts). We have Nikole Hannah-Jones to thank for that, what with her thesis that the real beginning of America came when a slave ship landed in Virginia a year before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock and over a century before the Declaration of Independence. By her lights, the story of America is the story of slavery, as it’s worked itself out in a range of color-coded injustices and indignities. Of course, a lot of sorry stuff has occurred in that connection, but responsible historians have debunked her tendentious metanarrative. Likewise, I found the Guidepost work implausible and contemptible.

Looking back, another analogy comes to mind, that of the Congressional Select Committee on January 6. The composition of that “investigative” body was carefully engineered by Nancy Pelosi, with the exclusion of dissident Republican voices, and she’s getting exactly what she wanted—ammunition for knocking Donald Trump out of the running in 2024. Similarly, SBC president Ed Litton got his tailor-made committee, along with special advisors, including the relentless Rachel Denhollander, who helped link them up with Guidepost, whose report they received with gratitude and praise. And the Executive Committee was pleased to pick up on the SATF’s work to craft their recommendations. Hysteria in, hysteria out.

I’m not saying that committee appointments require a free-for-all, with little or no idea of where things will land. Sometimes conflict is needful (as with the Warren Commission on JFK’s assassination); often it’s not, since the group is formed to do the spadework on a project whose blueprint is already on the table. That’s the case for the January 6 committee as well as for the SATF. 

I’ve been on one of those weighted groups. When Ed Young was SBC president in the mid-1990s, he appointed a Presidential Study Committee to revisit the Baptist Faith & Message 1963 to see if recent developments on the theological scene warranted an update to meet fresh challenges to orthodoxy. While he did include former SBTS president Roy Honeycutt (himself the object of criticism for his opposition to the Conservative Resurgence), the committee was heavy with vocal biblical inerrantists such as Timothy George, William Bell, Carl F. H. Henry, Richard Land, Albert Mohler, William Tolar, Walter Carpenter, Stephen Corts, and myself, as well as the chairman of the 1963 committee, Herschel Hobbs. Sure enough, we found fresh, ascendant heterodoxy in the land, including the use of female pronouns for God and eschatological annihilationism. 

So the question is whether “rigged” committees are responsibly ordered for thoughtful ends or not. I submit that the SATF fell short of this ideal. We were not well served on a matter of great moment. 

1619 meets Jan6. What could go wrong? 

Oh, one more thing. Back to El Paso. What’s with the impulse to shut down the whole train to address your grievance in the most sweeping possible fashion, and with utter disregard for the other passengers and their connections? At least Amtrak officials didn’t go from car to car pressing us to pitch in some cash to give this woman in light of our collective guilt for her distress.