Back in the fall, a pastor friend asked me if I’d seen our SBC president Bart Barber on 60 Minutes being interviewed by Anderson Cooper. He thought the segment went well, and I gave it a look. Sure enough, Barber stood by the Convention’s repeatedly-expressed declarations on abortion and homosexuality, and with convictional detail. Good for him. Of course, since the onset of the conservative resurgence, we’ve passed over a score of resolutions against each of these practices, and to have spoken otherwise would have been tantamount to endorsing gambling, another practice we’ve repeatedly condemned. Still, I’m glad Bart kept the faith, and with thoughtful rationales. But, the balance of the interview was less impressive.

I bring this up now in late winter since Barber has, in connection with a recent Executive Committee meeting, doubled down in his defense of the Guidepost boondoggle, one to which he’s tied his standing in the Convention. As he said on CBS, our (mis)handling of the sex-abuse scandal was “the reason [he’s] the president of the Southern Baptist Convention.” (I beg to differ on that’s being the reason he ran and was elected, but more on that a bit later.) 

In several pieces (with links below), I’ve explained why I use the word ‘boondoggle’ to describe the hair-on-fire response to a Houston Chronicle report on sex abuse in the SBC. By my lights, it would be bad enough for us to shriek and tremble at the statistical mouse the paper released to scurry across the floor and then let hysterics undermine our polity, pilfer mission funds, and purchase, at the cost of millions, the tendentious, sloppy services of a company keen on the gay/trans agenda. What’s worse is that some have weaponized this folly to gain and maintain power—not letting a “crisis” go to waste as they advance the fortunes of their “Hope and Change” party. 

As for the SBC’s contracting with gay/trans boosters, I heard one defender say it was no big deal since we all do that sort of thing all the time (e.g., by patronizing Walmart, Levi Strauss, Verizon, Amazon, American Airlines, and Starbuck’s), and, besides, you go for the best (e.g., in your choice of surgeons, mechanics, or attorneys). But there are at least two big problems with that line of argument: With Guidepost, we’re contracting for the deliverance and enforcement of moral and jurisprudential judgments, not just the price of jeans, shopping convenience, seating comfort, or arabica beans. Furthermore, woe is us if Guidepost is the best there is out there; their report was quite expensive, derivative, tendentious, and often specious (Jennifer Lyell, a victim/survivor warranting dozens of pages? Really?) 

A quick review: The Houston Chronicle presumed to identify 220 Southern Baptists (not just ministers but laity included) who had been convicted of sexual abuse over a 20-year span. During that same period, 28,000,000 people were, at one time or another, members (as baptized believers) of an SBC church.  So, only .00007 % of our people were declared guilty of this crime. Never mind that: As the head of the committee assigned to investigate the problem told us from the platform of our annual meeting in Anaheim, 2022, this was “just the tip of the iceberg.” But I thought the tip-to-bulk ratio for icebergs was 1:9. Was he saying he had good reason to believe that, in addition to the 220 who were convicted over a 20-year stretch, another 1,980 of us should be in jail for sex abuse? How about some names? Maybe it was true, but, unless he was sitting on a trove of reliable evidence to support that figure, it was irresponsible of him to throw it out there to bat away a critic’s concerns. (And, colloquially, “tip of the iceberg” talk conjures up more than a 1:9 ratio.)  Unfortunately, denominational spokesmen, both hired hands and volunteers, are enabling the flawed and damaging narrative instead of fighting back against the delicious slander, which is savored by both the press and those who are eager to self-identify as the new curators of denominational respectability. 

Of course, these numbers are subject to all sorts of qualification. Do we deduct juvenile offenders, who are not subject to prosecution? Do we count men only, since they’re the ones most likely to act feloniously in this connection. Whittle away. Say it’s twelve million rather than twenty-eight million. You still have a small fraction of a percentage. 

Yes, of course, every true instance is abominable. Yes, of course, we all want sexual abuse to go away. Yes, of course, church leaders handling these matters can blow it. But how truly dire is the denomination’s problem, and what new things, if any, we should do about the problem, such as it is. Whatever our response, we mustn’t fall into the trap of equating an individual’s act of sexual abuse (or smoothing over sexual abuse) with a church’s affirming it. The latter prompted the 1990s bylaw change to expel two North Carolina churches, one for licensing a homosexual to preach, the other for performing a gay marriage. 

Tom Ascol, Barber’s main rival for the presidency in Anaheim, has argued that, yes, a new thing is called for, but not the one Barber and his cohorts champion; rather, local churches need to recover a fear of God entailing comprehensive submission to the leading of his Word, including insistence on a regenerate membership, a willingness to exercise discipline, and deference to secular authorities in addressing crimes.

This side of heaven, there will be trouble wherever people associate. For a variety of reasons, there are many “tares among the wheat” in our congregations, unregenerate people who make it onto our rolls. Some do terrible things, but, for all the horror of particular cases, we need to be very careful about declaring a crisis. Both veteran abortion-provider George Tiller and “BTK Killer,” Dennis Rader, were active in their Lutheran congregations, but we wouldn’t say American Lutherans (much smaller in number than the SBC) have a serial-murderer crisis. We need to keep things in perspective. 

Again, an analogy: When it comes to crime, there’s a big difference between Chicago (one of the most dangerous cities in America) and Naperville, thirty miles west of the city (one of the safest towns in America). Both suffer violent crimes: Naperville sees 91 per year—a rate of .61 per thousand citizens. But Chicago has a 3.95-per-thousand-citizens rate. So, the question is whether the SBC is more like Chicago or Naperville. 

And yet another analogy: Let’s compare the SBC “Sex-Abuse Crisis” to the “Anthropogenic-Global-Warming Crisis,” with the Al Gores of the Greear-Litton-Barber-Inconvenient Truth party calling the shots. You’ve probably seen an image of a single polar bear floating out to sea on a block of ice, proof that the ice shelf is melting precipitously, threatening the survival of one of God’s dazzling species—and it’s our fault. Whew! Reason enough to cripple the fossil-fuel industry and to bully other corporations through ESG protocols into abandoning their fiduciary responsibility toward investors in order to show themselves “kosher.” 

As for the polar bears, expansive estimates put their worldwide population at around 30,000. Given life spans and birth rates, let’s imagine there could be as many as 100,000 different polar bears on earth over a 20-year period. So, using the 220:28,000,000 ratio (or swap the 220 for 700, the Chronicle’s victim estimate), and you still have only a handful bears (less than a percentage point), hardly enough to launch the Paris Accords and ratify the Green New Deal. (And no, gentle reader, I’m not equating humans with bears; it’s an analogy.) 

If, as Barber claims to Cooper, our collective malfeasance in dealing with the sex-abuse issue was the reason he was elected, it’s not surprising that he’s digging in to defend our determination to pour even more millions into Guidepost’s coffers and to continue driving Executive Committee expenditures to “unsustainable” levels. 

Incidentally, his tweets on this issue have a curious cast to them. In one, he adopts a Sermon-on-the-Mount format in his rebuttal: “You have heard it said” and continues with “But I tell you.” What’s next, “Verily, verily”? And he’s no stranger to patronizing snideness in citing the Bible dubiously. For instance, when he honored ERLC protocols in counting all abortion recipients as “victims,” he dissed those not on board with him with, “Is 2 Corinthians 4:4 in your Bible, too, or just mine?” (The verse about “the god of this world [who has] blinded the minds of unbelievers”). He could have, instead, said something like “I think 2 Corinthians 4:4 speaks to this.” But I guess that’s how you speak when you’re dealing with exegetical slackers who might object that his application of this verse could be used to give victim status to every sort of lawbreaker.

You’ll probably think me churlish to continue with a broader take on the 60 Minutes interview. It’s reflexive, since I spent five years dealing with the media for the SBC and the Army—as VP for Public Relations for the Executive Committee and as a two-weeks-a-year Reserve staffer in the Pentagon’s Office of the Chief of Public Affairs. No, I didn’t hit the big time like Bart on CBS, but I did supply a host of statements to a range of outlets, whether quoted in print (e.g., USA Today; Washington Post; Anniston Star) or appearing live (e.g., Chicago Public Television; WSB talk radio, Atlanta). At the Pentagon, our commanding general would occasionally assemble a “murder board” to abuse him before he submitted to a media interview. All of us were below him in rank but were encouraged to pepper him with prickly, tricky, insulting, and trap-laying questions and comments, thereby prepping him for what he might well face from the press. Bart could have used one of these sessions, but what’s done is done. So, I offer a few postmortem words—not to be petty, but to sound the alarm over the sort of damage we can do when we’re manipulated by those who wish us harm. Of course, clever editing can twist words and take things out of context, and that could have happened to Bart. If it did, let him say so.

When Cooper and an American Baptist pastor Ryan Burge parroted the Chronicle-driven defamation of the SBC Executive Committee, Barber joined the chorus. He rehearsed his indignation and anger, and made no mention of any of the pushback against the crisis-narrative. He’d had access to plenty of extenuating and mitigating material, but he uttered not a peep acknowledging it.  For instance, he knew full well that Texas layman, Allen Jordan, had painstakingly amassed and shared material gainsaying elements of the Chronicle’s conceit, and raising important questions about the soundness of some “Me Too” testimonies. Who’s Allen Jordan? As the Wall Street Journal noted in 2002, when he was CFO of Buckner Baptist Benevolences, he was instrumental in blowing the whistle on the Arizona Baptist Foundation’s Ponzi scheme, their fraudulent contrivances which did great damage to the Arthur Andersen accounting firm and small investors. You’ve probably never heard of him since his detailed rebuttals don’t fit the narrative advanced by current SBC leadership and their communications team.

When Cooper asked Bart if he thought Biden had been fairly elected, he said that he “absolutely” believed that to be the case, despite the fact that, as Burge observed, 60% of white evangelicals [whether within or outside the SBC] disagreed. He showed not the least awareness of or sympathy for the writing, on this issue, of Mollie Hemingway (Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections) or the video production from Dinesh D’Souza (2000 Mules: They Thought We’d Never Find Out. They were Wrong). Okay. Good people disagree on this. But, as Bart says elsewhere in the interview, he has to be careful how he speaks since he represents Southern Baptists. But we never expressed an opinion on this matter. Bart was just out there opining, to the delight of Cooper and Burge. 

Speaking of COVID, I might also liken those who are still in the thrall of this “task force” agenda to the triple-vaccinated, Fauci-devotees who are still inclined to wear a mask in Walmart. Horrified and terrified, they insist on denominational contortions in the pursuit of something close to utopian “zerosim,” declaring that “if just one” victimization could be prevented, then it would be “worth it all,” whatever that “all” might be (and we’re beginning to understand its frightening scope). 

Of course, their weapons of war—charges of insensitivity or worse—are nuclear, similar to the charge of racism. In both cases, you despair of proving a negative, and you might even doubt your own probity, given their zealous onslaught. 

In the introduction to his interview, Cooper lays out his agenda—to cast Bart as a cattle-raising, “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” sort of guy called to stick it to those evil EC members who were indifferent to the extensive trauma suffered by little folks in the pews. And so, 60 Minutes explains that we “turned to a small-town, Texas pastor” for leadership. And then, in the next sentence, Cooper mentions the “midterm elections looming.” Now, if he can just enlist salt-of-the-earth Bart to help stem the looming “Red Wave,” that would be so sweet. So, Cooper’s all aglow as he leads Bart to reinforce his and Burge’s talking points—that the 2020 election was copacetic; that Trump is basically a wretched person, who was, in 2016, according to Bart, “a demonstrably evil man whose campaign platform [consisted] mainly of his evilness” (Pelosi and Schiff couldn’t have said it better); that Trump was a threat to legal immigration (Huh?); that Trump put Pence’s life in danger by arguably supporting mob violence; that the quite-vague, typically-defamatory expression “Christian nationalism” means “dominionism” (tantamount to theocracy), and that it’s a real problem for our nation. 

Voddie Baucham has asked pointedly if we’d rather have secular nationalism or Christian globalism. I have to wonder, does Bart find the notion of a “nation-state” sub-Christian? Does he count explicit respect for our Judeo-Christian heritage and values unfortunate, even toxic? We need some clarification. I’d go on to ask Bart whether or not he was opposed to a White House Christmas tree; or would he delete the part of the US Constitution (Article I, Section 7, Clause 2) that exempts Sundays (and neither Muslim Fridays nor Jewish Saturdays) from the president’s ten-day veto count; or he would gainsay Abraham’s declaration, in his first inaugural address, that “Intelligence, patriotism, Christianity, and a firm reliance on Him who has never yet forsaken this favored land are still competent to adjust in the best way all our present difficulty.”  

Bart is all aglow with the dog-and-pony show he’s performing with Cooper, since the rapport must surely show him winsome to this agnostic, gay may, who’s won awards from GLAAD (the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation). And one supposes that he thinks his own election by .00025% of Southern Baptists (supporters who made it all the way to Anaheim, many with bureaucratic expense accounts from denominational agencies), will mean that the program’s viewers will feel the glow and give the Convention some creds, despite (or because of) the fact that he manages to throw a lot of us Southern Baptists under the bus. Along with Cooper, Burge is ecstatic that Barber has dismissed complaints about the 2020 election: (Burge: “That’s a big deal . . . At least 70 million people identify as evangelical today. He [Bart] can have a huge impact when it comes to who they vote for and why they vote for the candidate.”) Pardon my skepticism.

To understand my “under the bus” comment, it helps to read an RNS piece by Riley Ferrell, based on Bart’s post-Anaheim remarks.

She writes, “Identifying the polarity between what he calls the ‘knuckle-dragging fundamentalists’ and ‘woke or liberal’ groups vocal in the SBC, Barber said he does not fit into either camp — and that’s his selling point.” (I’m reminded of the way the anti-inerrantist “moderates” cast themselves as “mainstream” Baptists back during the conservative resurgence.) He goes on to explain, “I’m pulling the SBC back from the brink of the sexual abuse scandal, division, factionalism largely created by secular, political forces pushing their way in the church.” (Echoes of Obama: “This was the moment when . . . the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”) 

To achieve this, he speaks of his “army of peacemakers” who make up “the immune system of the church.” Ferrell writes, “The army of peacemakers became an unofficial campaign slogan for Barber’s run for presidency, contrasting with #ChangeTheDirection messaging peddled by those in the Conservative Baptist Network, a group of ultraconservatives that has been vocally critical of recent leadership.” The article is entitled, “Bart Barber wants the Southern Baptist Convention to regain its rural soul,” but his behavior belies that claim. He’s shown himself to be the fellow traveler with big-church wokes (e.g., his predecessors in office, J. D. Greear and Ed Litton) by acquiescing to the CRT/I push by Greear and excusing Litton’s plagiarism from Greear’s sermons, likening it to Mark’s God-guided “plagiarism” of Peter’s preaching to write his Gospel. Of course, RNS’s Ferrell makes no mention of the plagiarism scandal, noting only that Litton “declined to run for a customary second term.” 

I’m inclined to think that the last thing Greear, Litton, and Barber want at the presidential level is more rural voters, those less able to manage the expense and time-off for a trip to the annual meeting (a handicap we faced back in the days of the conservative resurgence). I think these country folks are less enthralled by claims that “the Bible only whispers about homosexuality,” that we should exercise “pronoun courtesy,” and that critical theory is a valuable “analytical tool.” 

But rural Bart was happy to take up an urban-church mantle, and do battle with the “ultraconservatives” who think things are going awry in some of the seminaries and other SBC agencies, especially the ERLC. In the Cooper interview, Barber skipped the “knuckle dragger” talk (a group to which he’d consign me, I suppose; perhaps he could name names), but he managed to insult a host of Southern Baptists, including the majority who voted for Trump in 2016. He speaks of those in the churches engaged in “blind partisanship,” those who are “not listening” and “ought to know better” as they talk “to one another about the issues that are outside the church that aren’t really theological.” And then he goes right back to speaking in a partisan manner about “non-theological matters” (whatever those are; a topic for another day) outside the church, including the soundness of the 2020 election process, the nature of the July 6 event in the Capitol, and his delight at the prospect of a Pence candidacy for president. But when asked for whom he’d vote in 2020, he demurred, explaining that “the fact that in 2016 I could say something, I was speaking only for myself, and now, you know, 50,000 churches of people I love are represented by name when I speak, and so, do I feel a sense of needing to be more wise and careful about things I say now? Absolutely I do.” But, of course, he’s done a lot of speaking on matters not addressed by the Convention, and he’s dismissive of the choices that millions of Southern Baptists have made in the public arena. (Following him in the 60 Minutes interview gives one whiplash.) 

Oh, and then when asked if evangelicals sold their souls in voting for Trump, Bart responds, “First of all, I think we had to choose from the choices that were given to us. And that’s an inescapable reality in our political system.” So, was that true in 2020 but not in 2016? Was Hillary Clinton an acceptable option in 2016? Or couldn’t he have protected his integrity with a non-Trump write-in for both elections?

Below, you’ll see that I’ve spoken to this sex-abuse boondoggle for a couple of years. Why won’t I get off this hobby horse? Because Barber and company won’t get off their hobby horse, one they mounted before I dreamed of taking a ride on mine. And because I think that very important matters are at stake, including unjust slander of the SBC; besmirchment of good people on the EC staff; captivity to a wrong-headed narrative; the squandering of millions of dollars; mayhem for our polity; surrender of our integrity and prerogatives to unfriendly secular forces, putting the denomination in untenable, unwarranted binds; tasking the Executive Committee with responsibilities beyond its mission and ken; laying ourselves open to vast and pointless financial liability; imperiling the resources of our autonomous congregations; and enabling persons and forces who either don’t understand or don’t care about the maintenance and enhancement of SBC vitality. Other than that, I don’t see much wrong with the Greear/Litton/Barber/Cooper take on the Chronicle’s campaign against our honor. 

2022

The Snidepost Report

My Two Cents Worth on the SBC Sex Abuse "Crisis"

2021

What I Would Have Said 

"I didn't come up from Texas to vote against God" 

2020

An Unwarranted Denominational Perp Walk