Rockin' Roberts, Katie and Cody Moonman Johnson expose the Southern Baptist Convention's systemic cover-up of child abuse, revealing how D. August Bodo used "church autonomy" to hide a secret file of 700+ cases while reinstating predators like Timothy Redden. Despite internal scandals involving Frank Page and Mark Ederholt, leadership prioritized protecting missionary funding over victims, resisting reforms until the 2019 Houston Chronicle exposé. While the denomination shifted rightward under Paul Pressler and Paige Patterson, recent elections of J.D. Greer and Barber signal a potential decline in extreme culture war alignment as membership plummets. Ultimately, this narrative illustrates how institutional self-preservation enabled decades of sexual violence before public pressure forced reluctant accountability. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trust Your Girlfriends00:04:45
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that: trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Mode.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Goespiece and Michael Mancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots five, City Hall building.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that, Jeffrey Woods.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
They screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery that may or may not have been political, that may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Oh, yeah.
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards.
I'm just letting you know I would have quit so long ago.
So fucking long ago.
What?
If this was your real, if this was real.
Well, behind the bastards.
It's Rockin' Roberts with Ku Katie and Cody Moonman Johnson here in the morning with you to help you drive time go by like the moon light.
Yeah, baby.
Look in.
Now we're going to do a new thing where we're going to prank call.
We're going to prank call people whose children are in the NICU and make them think their kids are dead.
Let's go to Cisco.
How all comedy works in 2003.
I yeah, and the girl just has some sort of like laugh.
Yes, it nailed it.
Nailed it.
We're back.
Support our misogyny by laughing at our jokes.
Oh, Cody.
Thanks, Moonman.
Oh, Christ.
How's it going?
How's it going?
Well, guys.
What's up with you?
I'm good.
I'm wishing I'd made my real calling as a drivetime radio DJ.
That's who I learned about 9-11 from.
Really?
You really?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Wait, learned about 9-11 or like learned that 9-11 happened from.
Learned that it happened.
Yeah.
It was the Jeff and Anna morning show.
I was driving to fucking, I mean, I wasn't driving because I was a child, but my mom was driving us to school.
And like, they started riffing about how a plane, and I think they thought, like, because I remember thinking at first that it had been like some prop plane or some shit that some idiot had acts.
And so like, they were just like joking about how bad you, like, probably making jokes about people with bad eyesight or something.
And then when I walked into my first period class, which was health, I walked in in time to watch the second plane hit.
And it was just like, wow.
That might not been, that might not have been just a kooky mixup.
SBC Abuse Scandal00:15:47
Maybe not a.
Oh my God.
Morning drive tongue kid.
I wanted to be a radio show host when I was in the middle.
I was like, that seems perfect.
I wanted to be like an oldies radio station.
You don't got to do shit.
And look where I am now, baby.
Playing the oldies.
Hanging out with Moonman.
Classics and the hits.
Oh, Jesus.
So, yeah.
Speaking of Jesus.
Christ?
Well, yeah, yeah.
That's one of the Jesuses.
I mean, there's a couple of them.
Jesi.
Common one.
Yeah.
Jisui, us.
One of the famous GZI.
Yeah, one of the famous.
Anyway, whatever.
We're talking about the Southern Baptist Convention.
Anyway, so in 2004, D. August Bodo, often known as Auggie, a terrible nickname, became the executive committee general counsel to the Southern Baptist Convention, right?
And obviously, so the SBC, which is the centralized governing body of the Southern Baptist Church, which does not have a centralized governing body, of course, they have an executive committee, which are, you know, because they don't have popes and bishops, not like being popes and bishops, but effectively, kind of like being popes and bishops.
And August Bodo was like their lawyer, right?
And as that guy, it's Auggie's job to guide them in their responses to allegations of sexual assault, which just become more and more common in the years leading up to 2008 when that group of survivors comes to beg for them to do something more than the nothing that they were doing.
There you go.
Really?
Yeah.
In 2006, members of the Survivors Network of those abused by priests held a rally outside of the executive committee's office in Nashville, Tennessee.
Augie accused the abuse victims of coming at the committee with a quote adversarial posture, which he used to justify his opposition to their requests for reform.
He was presented with a list of possible procedures to address sexual assault by the committee, but he ignored them.
In 2008, after Debbie Vasquez and other abuse victims begged the SBC to set up some sort of internal list to track abuse within the faith, right?
So that's one of the things Debbie and these other victims ask is like, hey, could you guys keep like a list of the pastors who rape people so that like if they try to get a job at a Southern Baptist affiliated church, it'll go like, no, that guy molested a bunch of people.
Like a database of some kind.
Yeah.
Like a registered, like a registry, like to sort of like literally the bare minimum.
Yeah.
It's see, it's again, like the least you can do is be like, we should probably know if somebody molests kids, tries to get another job where they can molest kids, right?
Like that's again, this should not be like a political issue in any way.
Yeah, should not be considered radical.
But they don't, this does not pass muster with the Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee.
And Bodo drafts the rejection letter that they send to Debbie Vasquez when they ask for reform.
And His justification for doing nothing was the cherished Southern Baptist tradition of church autonomy, right?
The executive committee, there's no central power in the Southern Baptist faith, right?
We can't tell churches what to do, so we don't have the authority to force them to report sex abuse to a central registry, right?
That's just not what we are.
Now, obviously, we do things like demand that they oppose abortion and that they say that women should be submissive to men.
Right, it works one way, but not the other.
But not that, but we couldn't make them keep a list of all the people who rape kids.
That's not cool.
So that's neat.
It's neat that that's the justification.
As a result, Augie later said the committee, quote, realized that lifting up a model that could be enforced was an exercise in futility.
And so instead, they drafted a report that, quote, accepted the existence of the problem rather than attempting to define its magnitude.
Again, this is now an ancient Baptist tradition, right?
Bad things happen.
We acknowledge that.
There's nothing we can or will do about them, but they happen.
We can save their souls preaching.
Well, their souls are probably already saved.
Before the pastor molested them, he surely baptized them.
So really, it's other people we need to worry about.
They're taken care of.
They're good to go.
To heaven.
Good to go to heaven.
Even judged by the standards of his faith, Bodho's justifications are fucking nonsense.
SBC churches work together to share teaching materials.
They have curriculum that is in common across thousands of churches and schools.
They share resources to help expand and maintain the infrastructure of their faith.
And they pool together money to fund missionary trips and seminaries.
There is ample precedent for at least a voluntary database tracking sex abuse convictions and allegations among pastors, right?
It is a thing that would not be out of step with other shit they have done.
To their credit, the Baptist General Convention of Texas did publish a list of sex offenders who had served in Texas Southern Baptist churches.
You want to guess how many names it contained?
No.
Eight.
Ah, that's way too much.
That feels like it's everybody.
Yes.
That feels like it's everybody.
I was searching for, I was thinking 20 came to mind, and I was like, oh, oh, I have no idea.
But eight.
Katie, you have to remember Texas is the smallest state in the union.
It has the least people, right?
So there's just not a lot of folks there, of course.
Eight.
So few.
Yeah.
Eight seems comprehensive.
You know, it seems like they got them all.
One for every corner plus.
Yeah.
One for every town in Texas.
I remember growing up.
That's why it's eight flags over Texas.
A flag for each other.
Everybody knows everybody in Texas.
So that's right.
It's like Iceland like that.
Me and my good friend Matthew McConaughey talking about True Detective, where I mostly just say Reggie Ledoux until he hangs up the phone because he is tired of it.
He's got stuff to do, isn't he?
He's got stuff to do.
Reggie Ledoux.
That's not because he reggie.
It's not because he regret doesn't like you.
That didn't work.
Oh, no, no, that was perfect.
That was perfect.
I might have gone with Reggie LaDident, but it's all good.
Oh, that's what I meant to do.
It's all a banger.
This is a fun joke for the three of us.
That's who's here.
And that just happens to remember True Detective.
And mainly the way that one thing specifically.
You guys should really check out True Detective.
One, one.
This little sleeper show that nobody.
Two words from one line of one season of a show from like six years ago.
It's not two lines.
That's a name that gets said a bunch.
He doesn't say that.
Sure.
And to be clear, he never says it like a verb or whatever.
It's just a person's name.
Nearly all of this is just us because it's funny.
Why would Russ Cole start doing a bit in the middle of a hardboy detective series?
I don't know.
So Bodo comes to these sex abuse of Iris and is like, look, there's just nothing we can do because of the nature of how the convention is structured.
We can't make people keep a central database.
It's just not possible.
It would be outside of the traditions of our faith.
You want to know something fun?
Yeah.
Maybe.
It turns out that for years and probably decades, the executive committee leaders kept a database of sex offenders who'd worked for the Southern Baptist Convention.
Fucking knew it.
That was my guess.
Did they show anyone this list?
Of course not.
Right?
To say specifically that it's like against our faith or whatever the justification is saying.
Don't do it too hard against our faith.
Not what we do.
But we do it.
Of course we do it.
Obviously, come on.
And I'm going to quote now from an interview with Russell Moore.
He's a former spokesman for the denomination.
He was now a critic of the SBC.
And this is him commenting on the Houston Chronicle expose.
Quote, allegations of sexual violence and assault were placed, the report concludes, in a secret file in the SBC Nashville headquarters.
It held over 700 cases.
Not only was nothing done to stop these predators from continuing their hellish crimes, staff members were reportedly not told to even engage those asking about how to stop their child from being sexually violated by a minister.
Rather than a database to protect sexual abuse victims, the report reveals that these leaders had a database to protect themselves.
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
That's always the way.
I'm not an expert on morality, but I think it might be arguable that if a bunch of people who were molested, many of whom were molested as children, come to you and say, please, for the love of God, do something to protect us and other children who are at threat and other people who are at risk, and you instead ignore them to protect yourself.
Sure, okay, okay.
That might be the kind of thing that were I God, I would shoot you with lightning bolts for.
Whoa, hey, you can't just put actions into God's mouth and fingers.
Come on.
You don't know.
I may be in school with it.
It's been a while since I was in Sunday school, but that does strike me as a sin.
I think that might be a sin.
It seems like a sin.
It's a sinful.
In this scenario, you laid out the person said, for the love of God.
And in that scenario, they would be taking the Lord's name in vain.
And I don't know.
Maybe it's true.
That's true.
I don't know.
I don't know.
We have to remember Mark 16, 24, in which Jesus Christ said, and I quote, fuck them kids.
Yeah.
Famous Jesus says one of the only sayings that really sticks.
That's like, because it's also because it's all.
I have it tattooed across my back.
Yeah.
Fuck them kids.
Most courthouses have it.
Yeah.
It's honestly like a little overcommercialized, don't you think?
I do, I do.
It's printed so much.
I don't know.
It's like, yeah, it kind of loses a little.
It loses its power a little bit.
You're right.
We're doing lots of fun bits that distract this topic.
So they'd made this database, which they claim they couldn't do, just to protect themselves.
And here's the thing.
They weren't even very good at protecting themselves or the Southern Baptist Convention because the same pedophiles and molesters kept getting hired again and again as this devastating segment from the Chronicle investigation makes clear.
Quote, Doug Myers was suspected of praying on children at a church in Alabama, but he went on to work at Southern Baptist churches in Florida before police arrested him.
Timothy Redden was convicted of possessing child pornography, yet he was still able to serve as pastor of a Baptist church in Arkansas.
Charles Adcock faced 29 counts of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl in Alabama.
Then he volunteered as a worship pastor at a Baptist church in Texas.
You know what's a really good way to protect yourselves against this would be to fire those people.
You might say, yeah.
That would be the best way to protect yourself against allegations of sexual abuse would be to fire those people and to make clear in no uncertain terms that there is no room for predators in your faith.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I'm not a PR person, but.
It's one of those things.
Nobody could.
There would be no realistic reason, even given all like the right-wing shit, there'd be no realistic reason to be angry if a church, if a denomination with 47,000 churches on a semi-regular basis found that people who were volunteering or working were child molesters and fired them, right?
There's 14 million people.
You know, you can't avoid that to some extent, you know?
If they were firing them and taking it seriously, it would just be like, yeah, man, there's 14 million people in the faith.
Sometimes predators are going to try to get in there.
And all you can do is try to build resiliency around that and make sure those people are removed when they pop up and constantly be sort of evaluating how you can make people safer from that.
Instead, the SBC does nothing.
Well, they don't do nothing.
They enable these folks a lot of the time.
That's cool.
Okay.
Yeah, yeah.
The other thing, the opposite of the thing.
The opposite.
Yeah, I'm going to continue that quote from the investigation.
Quote, in Georgia, the pastor of the SBC-affiliated Eastside Baptist Church near Atlanta announced it was re-examining its hiring practices after Alexander Edwards, a volunteer youth pastor, was arrested in 2016 on charges of sexual battery involving an 11-year-old boy he had met at the church.
It wasn't Edwards' first criminal charge.
While serving as a youth pastor at another Baptist church 160 miles away in Lee County, south of Atlanta, Edwards was arrested in August 2013 and charged with using the internet to find a child for a sex act.
That case was still pending when Edwards began volunteering at Eastside.
He was convicted of the 2016 charges, and the charge in Lee County was dismissed.
So that's all good.
Seems fine.
Oh, it seems bad, Robert.
It really seems bad.
It is bad, Katie.
But what's interesting about it here to me, on kind of an intellectual level, is that obviously this is all like Catholic church shit, right?
Like you can find, switch the names up, and these are all stories that you can find within, you know, abuse by Catholic priests.
But on paper, at least, the Southern Baptist Convention basically has the opposite structure of the Catholic Church, right?
It's supposed to, at least.
Catholic Church, it doesn't get much more centralized, right?
You have a hyper-centralized religious bureaucracy that vets and teaches every single priest and also acts to shuffle them around and hide what they're doing to protect church assets and resources.
Among Southern Baptists, pastoral assignment is, in one expert's words, kind of the Wild West.
There's no regulation.
There's no central authority.
Churches make their own policies for deciding who can be a pastor there.
In many smaller congregations, all it takes is being a good speaker and getting enough congregants to say, yeah, this guy.
The SBC's response to allegations has likewise been decentralized, with some leaders, like Paige Patterson, taking action to help abusers, but with most abusers seeming to slip through the cracks because there's nothing but cracks.
Yeah, yeah.
Now, one thing I find fascinating here is that as different as the SBC system is, at least on paper, from Catholicism, the guy who was probably the leading expert on why the Catholic Church is a fucked up den of molestation immediately realized the SBC had the same problems.
Have you guys heard of the Reverend Thomas Doyle?
Fucking cool dude.
He is a priest and a former lawyer for the Catholic Church.
In the 1980s, he was the first major insider to blow the whistle on child sex abuse by priests.
And so he gets my coveted Good Catholic Priest Award, which I have only given out to him and the guys from the beginning of Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter, which is a pretty good thing.
It's good thing you had so few printed.
Yeah, I did.
Well, I mean, I'm going to be honest, Katie.
I got a couple of storage facilities full of awards here.
I'm taking a bath on this one.
I'm looking.
I keep trying to give him out, but I'm underwater here.
I can't get my head above it.
Life is long.
Maybe you'll be surprised.
Yeah.
Ultimately, got to do something.
The good reverend became an activist after leaving the church, and he wound up working with a number of victims of Southern Baptist pastors.
The stories they told him and the actions taken by the SBC to keep things quiet sounded familiar.
In 2007, he wrote letters, including one to SBC president Frank Page, warning him, hey, hey, I think you guys are doing a Catholic church, right?
Timothy Redden's Warning00:03:31
So Page responded that they were, quote, taking the issue seriously, but that there were serious limitations to what they could do because, of course, we don't have any power over the churches that are, you know, obviously, right?
Obviously.
Yeah, there's nothing to be done.
How are we even?
Yeah.
In March of 2019, Page resigned as president and CEO of the SBC Executive Committee for what we currently know only as, quote, a morally inappropriate relationship in the recent past.
Oh, what?
Part of the relationship.
Yeah, baby.
Surprising.
So this guy who fucking, this, this good, this Catholic Church whistleblower reaches out to Frank Page, who's the head of the SBC, right?
He's their president, which is like an elected kind of position, reaches out to him in 2007 and says, hey, there is a sex abuse problem.
It is systemic.
You guys need to deal with it.
Page is like, we're taking it seriously.
This is a challenge.
There's a lot of limitations on what we can do, but trust me, I take this seriously.
12 years later, he has to resign from the SBC Executive Committee because he has a morally inappropriate relationship.
We don't know anything else.
We don't know the age of that person.
We don't know the degree to which consent was or was not involved.
We don't know what exactly happened, right?
That could mean, because again, of how these kind of people define sex, a morally inappropriate relationship could be he had a perfectly consensual relationship with an adult that was outside of the bounds of marriage, or it could be that he was diddling like a nine-year-old, right?
Like all of that stuff.
It's a wide spectrum.
Yeah.
No idea what he did.
One of the most important things for Southern Baptists is what's called the Great Commission.
Now, as, and in fact, a lot of them call themselves Great Commission Southern or Great Commission Baptists now instead of Southern Baptists.
And this belief, the Great Commission is like the super special mission that God left for them to do to like recruit all the people that you can.
And obviously, evangelicals believe the most important thing you can do with the gospel is to win souls for Christ, right?
Like nothing else matters more than that.
This is why groups like the Joshua Project keep a database of uncontacted peoples so they can convince dumb young missionaries to go and get killed or spread disease trying to share Jesus stuff with people who are perfectly happy living wherever the fuck they already are.
Now, the legitimate belief is that people, their legitimate belief, the legitimate belief here that kind of drives this, is that people cannot be saved without choice and they can't choose to accept God without knowing about him.
So the logic goes, since the afterlife is eternal and this life is not, no amount of suffering in this world is worth more than preventing damnation in the life after this.
On a small scale, this does lead some individual missionaries to take on terrible risks and live in privation to share their faith.
On a big scale, it means that true believers in this might do anything to avoid fucking up, say, the money that funds missionary activities.
And this brings us to the story of Timothy Redden, the director of missions for the Central Baptist Association.
Now, this is.
I think it's time for an ad break.
Maybe it brings you to an ad break.
Maybe.
Speaking of evangelism, you know what I'm a missionary for, Katie, Cody.
Products and services that support this podcast.
Products and services.
You're spreading real good news.
Let me quote from Isaiah 26, 13.
Jesus Christ cannot save your soul, but the incredible products offered by Blue Apron and Shopify can.
Amen.
Amen.
Praise him.
Him being Blue Apron.
I need 30 inches.
Missionary Secrets Exposed00:03:50
Sure.
That's okay.
Yes.
Before we come back.
Sorry, sorry, sorry.
Sorry.
Yeah.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, Open AI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
Sam Altman Interview00:14:55
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
We're back.
Cody was just regaling us with the story of the years he spent as a rodeo clown in Arizona.
Not a joke.
Look it up.
You can find the videos online.
They are out there.
Let's get back to the story.
All right, I guess.
I've got more, so I got more to say about it, but I'm not sure.
There's another piece.
People can listen to the Some More News episode.
Yeah, we got a whole bunch of people.
If they can find it, it's easy.
Just google.
We've talked about this.
We have all talked about it.
Of course we have constantly.
Now, so we were talking about how, obviously, if nothing matters more than winning souls for Christ, then nothing that the Southern Baptist Convention does matters more than funding missionaries, right?
And so anything is justified if it stops fucking up the money that allows you to send missionaries places.
And this brings us to the story of Timothy Redden, the director of missions for the Central Baptist Association.
This is a very prestigious position coordinating the activity of missionaries for 22 pretty prominent churches.
Now, in 1998, while he was doing that job, he was caught with child pornography and sent to prison for more than two years.
Now, I might say that one thing that being caught with child pornography means is that you should not be the head of sending people to missions or maybe ever close to children.
So, he did say he did promise, if this makes you feel better, during his sentencing, he told a federal judge that he would never molest a child.
Didn't make me feel better.
Doesn't make you feel better, huh?
I tried.
I was prepared for it.
He serves his term.
He leaves prison and he gets a job as a pastor for one of the churches he had previously been a mission coordinator for.
So you would assume they might have fucking known about the child porn arrest.
Shouldn't ex-convicts have a chance to do some things, yes.
Perhaps not teach children if the arrest is for child pornography.
Perhaps not go back to look.
If he wanted to be, I don't know, putting in drywall or something, right?
And again, that's nothing against putting in drywall, but you don't tend to spend a lot of time teaching children as a contractor.
You know, whatever job he has after getting out of prison, it probably shouldn't involve little kids.
Yeah, installing like that at locations that are a certain distance from schools.
From schools, sure.
Yes.
A number of things he could do that don't put him near children.
Instead, he becomes a pastor.
So, yeah, he becomes a pastor at one of these churches he had worked for before.
And in July of 2018, he was arrested for attempting to solicit a 14-year-old for sex in an online chat.
Thankfully, that 14-year-old was actually a Homeland Security agent, but who knows what he actually got up to, even if it was just being creepy outside of that.
Fingers crossed, he didn't actually get to molest anybody.
But, you know, we'll never know.
Coordinating missionary work de facto puts you in contact with lots and lots of young people, right?
That's kind of who does mission work mostly.
Most missionaries are young adults.
There's a lot of teenagers and young children who go on mission trips, sometimes because their parents are missionaries, right?
And they all live in whatever foreign country they're doing a mission in.
Obviously, by the way, there's a huge ethical question about colonialism and mission work and all.
We're not really going to get into that today because that's much too big of a subject for right now.
But we will be talking about because of what mission work is, there's a lot of little kids around if you're going to be working in that kind of environment.
And this brings us to our next story.
And I'm going to quote again from the Houston Chronicle.
George Thomas Wade Jr. had been spreading the gospel as a missionary on African training farms and in bush villages for six years when his Southern Baptist supervisors learned a horrifying secret.
The supposedly devout man of God was molesting his own daughter.
Supervisors met once privately with the girl who was attending boarding school in Johannesburg and later consulted leaders based 50 leaders based 50 or 7,500 miles away at the Richmond, Virginia headquarters of what's now called the International Mission Board.
Wade promised to stop, the supervisor said.
His daughter said she was told to forgive Wade and was sworn to secrecy.
Here's the fucking kicker.
Are you guys ready for this shit?
There's a kicker.
No one told Wade's wife, also a missionary, what he had done.
What?
Wow.
He molests their daughter.
Everyone at the church knows, and they don't tell his fucking wife.
That's horrifying.
That's a fucking nightmare.
It's not our business to tell her.
That is a fucking nightmare.
Yeah, it's outrageous.
When you do learn and to know that everybody, everybody.
Oh, God.
Oh, God.
And you've like, this is, again, as problematic as mission work is, this is, you've dedicated your whole life to mission work.
And like this, like, my God, what a fucking, yeah, that's a betrayal right there.
That's like right up, high, high-level betrayal.
That gets, you know, one of the things I am running out of is my awards for greatest betrayal, which I get.
Oh, okay.
So yeah, that warehouse is a lot of fun.
Definitely that one.
Very empty.
Yeah, yeah.
I may move some of the best priest awards over there just to split it out.
So it seems like you're doing it.
Maximize your space, you know?
Yeah, exactly.
That seems smart.
So his daughter was never again asked about the abuse, which, by the way, continued.
He keeps molesting his daughter.
She attempts to kill herself when she is 15.
She is still alive.
This is, oh boy.
I think this is the early 2000s.
Okay, I'd just like to know when we are in time.
So his daughter, you know, keeps being molested by him.
She attempts suicide.
She does live.
And she later testifies, quote, I felt stupid for having told anything to anybody.
The concern was for my father.
It didn't matter what happened to me.
And again, her soul's saved, right?
She's been baptized.
Her dad is winning souls.
So whatever he does, whatever he does, it's kind of worth it.
Yeah.
That's how the math works.
Just so baked in, this misogyny, this idea that the man, the ruler, is the ruler of the household, and he specifically is the ruler of this congregation.
And look, I'm not a believer in the divinity of Jesus Christ, but there's a historical case.
There was certainly a guy and individuals that some of those stories were written about.
And I have to think that any one of those people who was like the actual historical individuals, rebels in a lot of ways, who we get our stories about Jesus from, if explained this, if you could go back in time and explain this story to them, would like get a stick and start swinging.
This is like fuck, right?
Like this is fuck them up behavior, you know?
Yeah.
Like by anyone, right?
Any moderately, again, that's the thing.
You talk about like, like, I don't know a goddamn fucking atheist or degenerate weirdo hippie in the world who wouldn't like fucking burn down a building if this was done like to their family, you know?
But these people, these men of God, love this shit.
They're totally down.
So the Southern Baptist Mission Board is the world's largest sponsor of Protestant missionaries.
And their official policy, as revealed in 2019, was to keep misconduct reports, allegations of rape and child molestation, inside the church hierarchy, rather than involving law enforcement or often even telling both parents.
The focus was on protecting the Great Commission, not the victims.
In Wade's case, he was sent back home quietly.
His wife did not find out for three years until, oh, sorry, here's the date, Katie.
In June of 1985, she learned her husband had abused three additional girls, as well as her eldest daughter.
So she finds out not only that her husband's molested their girl, but now three other girls have been molested while she's been married to this guy.
And no one had told her.
Just that nobody.
This all comes out because her daughter gets pregnant at age 17, not with the dads.
Anyway, but she's preparing to get married to like the father of the baby.
And dad decides he's going to officiate the wedding.
And for whatever reason, this is like kind of the straw that breaks her back.
And she suddenly blurts out to her mom that like, I can't, I cannot let my dad perform the wedding ceremony, like, because he's been fucking molesting me for years.
And that's when Diana Wade finds out what fucking happened.
Wow.
So again, she calls the cops right away.
Her husband is arrested.
He is charged and convicted on five counts of felony, sex abuse, and he goes to fucking prison.
Next, Diana does the natural thing and files for divorce, right?
Pretty clear.
Like, I don't think that needs explaining to reasonable people.
One of the first steps.
Yeah.
Right.
Pretty reasonable reaction.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Not according to the church.
The church, who is her employer, warns her that her divorcing her husband is, quote, an unpardonable sin.
This is really upsetting.
Not that I don't know that this shit happens or happened.
It's fucking outrageous.
Yeah.
So it is.
Diana had, by her own admission, never wanted to be anything but a missionary, but she was traumatized, as was her daughter.
And so she asks the church that she'd given so much of her life to if they could compensate her for the counseling and medical bills that she and her kid are going to have to go through, right?
Reasonable, bare minimum.
Bare fucking minimum.
The SBC says no, and they force her to resign alongside her imprisoned husband.
In a letter she sent to her employer, Diana wrote, quote, I am deeply hurt.
I find it difficult to accept that because of what Tom alone did, my calling and commitment in ministry are of no account and are to be thrown away along with his.
She's still saving souls.
She's still good for your fucking math.
I mean, this all sounds very illegal.
It does sound illegal, Katie.
Yeah.
It does sound like concealing a serial child molester might have...
There might be some things that you could get in trouble for if you do that.
Firing someone for wanting to divorce their husband.
Well, actually, I think that probably is because it's a church.
They may be on safe ground there.
I don't know.
Again, not a lawyer, but I am going to quote next from the Chronicle's reporting.
Diana Wade filed a lawsuit alleging that the mission board had broken contractual promises to protect her family and increased harm to her children by concealing her husband's criminal behavior.
A jury decision favored the family, but the Wades lost in 1991 after the board appealed with the Virginia Supreme Court.
Mission board leaders were forced to address the allegations publicly only because of the lawsuit.
Board officials never said whether they had later investigated if other children were abused by Wade.
In all five cases, the crime, or sorry, missionary board officials Had been abused by Wade while he was a missionary in Kenya and Botswana from 1976 to 1984, right?
They never investigated, did he like molest any local kids?
This like guy with power and effectively a lot of legal immunity, being a white missionary in Kenya and Botswana.
Did anyone like look into whether or not he did anything there?
You got to think where this started.
Shot in the dark that they didn't, and he did.
Yeah.
And in fact, the Chronicle looked into five cases of missionaries who were definitely abusing kids.
And yeah, at no point, in none of these cases was there evidence that they had been investigated to see if they abused local children, right?
So in five cases of people who abused missionary kids, there were no investigations to see like, they do anything else.
Well, yeah, what else?
Who else?
Yeah, nothing else looks.
Nobody look into that.
They're not.
The only reason they look into this is because they get caught.
They're not opening any lids.
And they certainly don't care.
It's pretty vile.
Non-white kids.
Absolutely not.
They care about them not going to hell, but you can get molested and go to heaven.
They don't actually care about that, do they?
Yeah, I mean, they say they do.
I mean, but don't they make it's about money and power?
Yeah.
Like, if you're willing to fuck a kid, you're actually not concerned whether you might make that case, right?
That's a strong argument, Katie.
Thank you.
Now, in 2018, the board sent more than 3,600 missionaries overseas and managed a budget of $158 million, which was provided by tithes from church members.
That is a big bag to protect, right?
And over the years, the Chronicle's investigation shows at least five salaried employees of the mission board were accused of or convicted of abusing two dozen victims, most of whom were children.
The problem was bad enough that in 2004, the IMB established an abuse hotline.
The inciting incident for putting this together was a scandal over a missionary named William McElrath, one of the mission board's most dedicated evangelists.
He had been stationed in Indonesia for decades, where, as it turns out, he repeatedly molested his colleagues' children.
Letters the man sent to his own co-workers show that he privately admitted to abusing colleagues' children 30 years before the story became public.
He's like writing his fellow missionaries like, molested some kids the other day.
I feel a little bad about it.
Wait, yeah, like, like, this is like a casual correspondence.
It's like, I did this and I feel bad, or I did this and like, everything's cool.
Yeah, I think it's, I think it's, I did this and like, I'm feeling kind of, kind of funky about it.
Maybe it's bad to molest children.
Look, Cody, nobody's perfect.
Or as I say, I was going to splay blat.
One of his victims was Linda DeVarthe.
She had moved to Indonesia at age eight with her brother and missionary parents.
McElrath was the elder missionary there.
And at first, she thought he was an admirable figure.
He was a good writer.
He played the banjo.
He was a very friendly, charismatic guy, right?
He's kind of like the head missionary, more or less, because he's been there for forever, and he's just this very charismatic person.
One of the things she recalls about him is that he always had a kid on his lap.
In 1972, when she was nine, DeVrath became that kid, and McElrath fondled her.
She said nothing for five years, but when she did tell her parents, her father, to his credit, reported McElrath to mission board officials in Indonesia.
Silent Child Victims00:08:38
No action was taken.
The Chronicle continues.
By the time Devarth reported McElrath in 1977, mission board leaders had already heard similar accusations.
Letters and other records show.
In 1973, he confessed to molesting another child and a note was placed in his file.
But mission leaders let him continue to serve.
In 1978, another incident caused the organization to restrict McElrath's interactions with children.
Still, he remained in the field.
Board records and correspondence provided by victims shows.
Finally, in 1995, DeVarth and several others wrote Jerry Rankin, mission board president from June 1993 to July 2010, complaining about McElrath.
That same year, the board fired McElrath for an immoral lifestyle unbecoming to a missionary.
He immediately set to work playing control.
Yeah, so that's good, right?
Yeah.
This is fun.
Just like the phrasing for all this stuff is like so watered down.
It's ultimate weasel word shit.
Again, for these people who are all like fire and brimstone and the inerrant word of God, there's a lot of like, a mistake was made and people were impacted.
Again, it's like the best way to protect, the best way to respond would be to loudly and boldly say there is no place for this in our community.
In fact, it's the only way to respond.
If you're not responding, if you're not saying that, then you're allowing it to happen because people were like...
aggressive response.
Yeah like, I would like to hear at least once that like, oh hey, it came out that this, this missionary or this pastor had been molesting kids and one of his co-workers hit him in the fucking face repeatedly.
Yeah like, some some examples like people are like outraged about this thing like oh, what do we do?
Yeah like yeah, what do you do?
Yeah you, I mean obviously, that doesn't isn't the the only solution that you should do, but it would be nice to know that, like some of these people cared that much.
Um, he immediately set to work Mclrath playing contrite because again, he knew that doing so was going to let him get another position with the church and then he could molest more kids.
The way he does this is by sending letters to six families he described as having been impacted by his actions.
One of these kids was Linda Devarth.
He wrote, please forgive me for having touched you too intimately when you were a child many years ago.
I regret having abused a family-like situation.
What kind of got an issue with that?
You don't think that's good?
No, it's not good.
He could maybe second draft.
Maybe second draft, maybe a second draft where I say I am walking into the sea because the weight of my sins uh is, has has so shamed me.
I don't know, maybe that'd be better, at least better.
So Devarth's brother sent a letter to the president of the Missionary Board, a former missionary named Rankin who had worked in Indonesia with Mclrath.
He admitted he'd heard quote ugly rumors about the man but did not support making a big deal about what had happened.
Quote, I say no constructive purpose by making a general accounting of this matter to all our missionaries and to southern baptists in general.
Again, if you let people know they might like protect themselves better again, then you don't care.
You don't actually.
Well, why would you?
That's not your job.
Yeah, your job is to gotta get that your flock.
You gotta get more.
Gotta get that flock, flock out with your cock out anyway.
Um, they say after they left probably.
Well, I mean, they do that.
Um, so after they left Indonesia, Mclrath and his wife moved to North Carolina where he joined a southern Baptist church and started teaching piano lessons to children.
Um, that's probably fine.
You know no, kids never sit in your lap when you're playing piano.
That's not a thing that can clearly happen.
That's also Also, very clearly his fucking MO.
In 2002, a group of survivors learned that Mikkel Rath was still volunteering with the church, and they caused an uproar, demanding changes to the policy that included.
Sorry, even that caused the uproar.
Like, no, His actions caused the uproar.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right.
Well, sorry, that's, that's my bad phrasing.
Okay, I apologize.
You're right.
Yes.
The fact that, like, well, his actions and also the fact that the church was allowing him to still volunteer, right?
Yeah, that is definitely cause for uproar.
Yes, yes.
And these survivors are like, you need to like appoint an independent advisory committee and commit to monitor perpetrators after they're caught so that they don't keep getting positions in different Southern Baptist churches.
The board says no to all of this, but they do set up a hotline.
They set up a hotline for mission abuse, you know?
They have a hotline, Katie.
What more are they supposed to do?
Somebody answering the hotline.
Yeah.
Maybe.
Yeah, what's the idea with that hotline?
I listened to this American Life recently where they put up a tattle phone in a kid's kindergarten classroom just to record what the kids say, and it just goes to nowhere.
It's just laughed at.
Oh, that's cool.
I mean, that's pretty cute, but I'm just saying, yeah, a hotline.
What the hell?
Yeah.
So the board sets up this hotline and their attorney sends an email to Mike Elrath's victims.
We want to affirm our commitment to promptly and completely investigate any new charges of sexual abuse made against missionaries and to terminate and publicly expose any missionary found guilty of such abuse.
Okay.
Which, if you'd done that, that might have been good.
Yeah, that's.
Five years after they make this statement, so five years later, in Fort Worth, Texas, Anne Miller reports a missionary named Mark Ederholt to the IMB.
She said that he had sexually assaulted, she said that he had sexually assaulted her when she was a teenage girl.
The IMB investigates her complaint, found it, substantiates it, right?
They investigate and they're like, yeah, this definitely happened.
And then they say nothing and do not contact the police.
Well, you got to know the guy did it, but then there's nothing else to do, you know?
In their investigation, the Chronicle found a litany of victims, like former missionary D. Ann Miller, who had tried to report abuse and run into a stone wall of silence meant to protect the Great Commission.
Quote, Miller, now 72, was born into the Southern Baptist world.
Her father and grandfather were both pastors.
By age 10, she knew she wanted to be a missionary, one of the few leadership opportunities open to women.
She and her husband, Ron, were thrilled to be appointed to Malawi in 1978.
There, she met Gene Kingsley, a missionary since 1960.
She visited his house in May 1984 and he hugged her, as usual.
Then Kingsley, quote, assaulted me quickly and skillfully, pulling me a foot off the floor, continuing to tighten his arms as I struggled, and he groped me until I yelled, commanding him to put me down, Miller said in an email to the Chronicle.
Miller, who had worked with sexual predators as a nurse, reported him to other mission personnel.
Nothing happened.
Two years later, she decided to make a written complaint after learning that others in her mission family also had reported being inappropriately touched or worse.
Her complaint went up the chain of command to leaders in Richmond.
Kingsley was permitted to resign rather than be terminated.
Miller described in interviews and in her book how two other women, as well as a teenaged girl, also complained, but said those reports were initially ignored and inadequately investigated.
Kingsley died in Texas in 2016.
It's pure illness.
And when you read all these allegations, it's purely inspiring.
It's not going to terminate and expose these people.
Yeah.
But yeah.
The thought of somebody that profits makes their career off of being a certain person and positioning themselves within the community in such a way to just be so violent.
Because it is violent.
Like it's.
Yeah.
Anyway, it's ghastly.
And then everybody that allows for it, but just the act of the ugh.
Yeah, I know.
It's like you run out of things to say that are new to react to all these horrifying stories.
It's ungood, I would say.
Ungood, yeah.
For sure.
Ungood.
Ungood.
Very ungood, man.
When you read all these allegations in tandem, it's very clear what's going on here.
Predators have recognized for close to half a century that missions provide them with a steady carousel of people who are isolated from their families and support networks, and that the structure of the mission board means that allegations will be hushed up to avoid fucking with the money or the sacred calling.
So obviously, it's a great place to be a predator.
And you will also note that these perpetrators tend to be decades-long veteran missionaries.
Miller describes Kingsley as well-practiced, like the way that he abuses her.
She says, like, he knew what he was fucking doing, right?
This wasn't like a crime of passion.
This was a guy who had perfected a method, you know?
Anyway, you know who else has perfected their methods?
Perfected Methods of Abuse00:04:21
To find folks at a company?
Sears Robot, that's right.
That's why Sears is still the most relevant name in department stores.
That's where you go.
Buy a Sears now.
Yes, by Sears.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Moda.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired.
City hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios.
This is Rorschach.
Murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Hood did.
I love you.
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
They said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
Conservative Faction Drift00:15:30
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Ah, we're back.
So, in 2019, as I've noted a couple of times, the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express News published a massive expose of sexual abuse within the Southern Baptist Convention.
One of their articles, and this stuff's still coming out, dealt entirely with sex abuse cover-ups within the mission board.
In response to this, a series of new proposals were put forward to finally do what survivors had been urging them to do for 20 fucking years.
The president of the IMB responded by warning that these proposals would cut $4.5 million out of their budget for the next 15 months.
This, Baptist News reported, you remember the Baptist News, meant that 75 fewer missionaries were going to get sent into the field.
Paul Chitwood, the president of the mission board, after the last guy had to resign for sexual misconduct, told the faithful, We are praying that through the growing generosity of Southern Baptists giving through the lotty offering, 100% of which goes to fund our missionaries and their work overseas, we can continue to fund not only our existing missionary work, but the goal of growing that force by 500 new missionaries.
That's concern one.
Not to like stop shit for a minute until we figure out why all those kids are getting molested.
It's not like, let's internet 75 less missionaries.
Shoot, how can we make up for this loss of income?
Let's expand.
Plug the followers, some of whom were molested by our missionaries.
Love it when people don't get it.
You love to see it.
Now, while all of this fuckery is going on, decades of abuses and cover-ups and repeated fails to deal with entirely foreseeable problems, the Southern Baptist Convention continued to hail the conservative resurgence that had saved them from liberalism.
The SBC leadership said it was helpless to stop sex abuse, but resolutely attacked any sign of liberalism from within the faith.
In public, they continued their long-standing tradition of claiming to want only the best for the people they condemned.
A good example of this came in 2014 when the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution on transgender people, declaring that God had created two distinct and complementary sexes and that distinctions in masculine and feminine roles as ordained by God are part of the created order and should find expression in every human heart.
And I'm going to quote from the Baptist Standard here.
For that reason, the resolution says, cultural currents, including medical treatments of gender dysphoria, attempts by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender activists to normalize the transgender experience, and public schools allowing access to restrooms and locker rooms according to children's self-perception of gender and not according to their biological sex, all run contrary to biblical teaching as summarized in the Baptist Faith and Message, the SBC's official doctrinal statement.
The SBC resolution invites all transgender persons to trust in Christ and to experience renewal in the gospel.
It affirms that we love our transgender neighbors, seek their good always, welcome them to our churches, and as they repent and believe in Christ, receive them into church membership.
We love you, repent.
However, we love our community.
The resolution does mention offhandedly that it opposes bullying trans people.
So that's good.
All the bases covered.
They did it.
Yeah, all the bases covered.
Just like they didn't like lynching.
That'll work.
That'll work.
Having that little passage of the body.
That'll do.
Nailed it.
None of the unpleasantness, thank you.
Keep your bigotry a little bit contained.
A little bit.
Let the cops do it too much.
You know, the structure of laws do it.
You know, contained enough so that we can.
Do not bring us dishonor by doing it in an uncontrolled manner.
Yeah.
So, as a rule, the Southern Baptist Convention has stood to the right of progress in every meaningful issue for the last like 40 years.
There are just enough moderates that they tend to count, or have been just enough moderates, that they tend to couch their language in such a way as to excuse the worst natural conclusions of their logic.
And, you know, it's probably not surprising to note that since 2008, the convention's membership has shifted 20 points for the Republican Party.
Like, it has gotten far right.
All of this is thanks to the architects of the conservative resurgence, Paul Pressler and Paige Patterson.
They did this to stop what they saw as the satanic immoral influence of liberalism.
And in this case, that also, that means like political, they do mean political liberalism in the way we're talking about, but they also more directly mean like liberalism and interpretation of the Bible, right?
The idea that like, yeah, anyway, both men spent decades couching what they did as the only proper actions of godly men trying to protect their flocks.
You know, we are acting morally.
That's why we're doing this.
In 2018, Paige Patterson was the former president of the Southern Baptist Convention and preparing to retire as president emeritus of the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Dallas.
A special house had been built for him on campus to live in in his retirement.
It seemed as if he was going to be one of those bastards who retires ancient, wealthy, and proud.
But then his life fell apart.
A student came forward to report her rape three times at gunpoint by a fellow student.
She went to the seminary, and Patterson wound up having a one-on-one talk about her.
He told staffers that he wanted to break her down, talked about how hot she was, and then in the victim's words, he demanded in graphic detail to hear about the rape, right?
Other employees report that he made comments about her body.
She is suing him for inflicted emotional distress and for interfering with the police investigation of her case because he also interfered with the police investigation of what was an armed rape.
This sparked a broader investigation into the man, and a shitload of stuff that was barely hidden beneath the surface came up.
And I'm going to quote from a write-up in The Advocate here.
Patterson came under fire for his years of advice to women who had been abused or raped.
He would tell the woman to pray for their abusers.
In one instance, a woman approached him with two black eyes after going back to her husband on Patterson's advice.
She asked Patterson if he was happy.
He said he told her yes.
And part of his reason was because the husband had attended church that Sunday for the first time.
I don't like that.
This is a real bummer episode, man.
The good news is, when all this comes out, he gets fired.
Yeah.
And he loses his fucking house, too.
He doesn't get to live in that house.
The seminary he gave his life to has distanced itself from him, and the lawsuit against him is ongoing.
New stories break on a weekly basis about known sex offenders that he sheltered or outright helped into the seminary.
The current president of the Southwestern Theological Seminary or whatever refers to him just as a previous administration when he regularly makes apologies about stuff that happened.
And then, of course, there's our other founder of the conservative resurgence, Judge Paul Pressler.
He is a former judge now.
He's also a former SBC vice president, and he has been accused by three members of a youth group he used to run for groping or pressuring them into sex.
Three male members of a youth group.
Yeah.
And I bet you're not.
I'm not going to say this story.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, God.
I mean, for all of these guys, right?
And it is continuing to come out, right?
Like, there's a good chance there will be a new article in the Chronicle about all this shit by the time you hear the episode.
So I'm not going to say this story has a happy ending.
As of the day this airs, more than 700 people have reported being victimized by clergy, employees, or volunteers of SBC churches.
But there is some good news at the end of all this horror and frustration.
The poison that Pressler and Patterson spilled into the SBC may in fact be waning in potency.
Now, I mentioned earlier that the denomination has shifted 20% Republican by almost the last two, over the last two decades.
That is true.
But in the same timeframe, the size of the faith has also shrunk by more than 2 million members.
And I'm going to quote from The Atlantic here.
For more than a decade, the denomination has been experiencing a precipitous decline by almost every metric.
Baptisms are at a 70-year low, and Sunday attendance is at a 20-year low.
Southern Baptist churches lost almost 80 million, or Southern Baptist churches lost almost 80,000 members from 2016 to 2017.
And they've hemorrhaged a whopping 1 million members since 2003.
For years, Southern Baptists have criticized more liberal denominations for their declines, but their own trends are now running parallel.
The next crop of leaders knows something must be done.
Yeah.
So every year, they have this convention, right?
That's why they're called the SBC.
They do a convention every year and they vote on shit, right?
And there's a conservative faction.
These are guys who today are constantly on One America News and embrace Trump.
And then there is, they're also conservatives, but the more liberal faction.
And in 2018, they defeated the conservatives in the elections that year.
And a 45-year-old pastor named J.D. Greer was elected.
He won 70% of the vote against a fundamentalist and stated that the denomination had to repent for its, quote, failure to listen to and honor women and racial minorities and to include them proportionally in leadership roles.
Good.
I mean, also, also stuff is like, yeah.
Yeah, what you're doing.
It's just like, that's good.
It's depressing that this is in reaction to their numbers dropping.
Yeah.
It is the math issue that we've been discussing this whole time.
It's like, oh, so they've noticed that like people are leaving, so they need to do something about it.
It's still good.
It is.
And that said, I'm not going to say that that's all Greer is concerned with.
He is the guy I quoted earlier from a document by the theological seminary that was like going into detail about their history with slavery and stuff.
That all happens under Greer because he's like says, look, we have to reckon with the fucking racism in our back.
And like they do certainly a much better job under him of that kind of stuff.
Oh, for sure.
And like, I'm not yet saying like that's One of the things that should be noted, the SBC is where a lot of conservative bellwether cultural issues get tested out, right?
Where they start to work on the wording.
You may note that, like, in 2014, they issue a resolution condemning the idea that trans people should be able to use bathrooms.
That's 2014, right?
That's a couple of years before it becomes the big national issue that it becomes, right?
So it happens here earlier.
In 2019, Republicans within the Southern Baptist Convention forced a vote on a resolution condemning critical race theory, right?
Again, like a year or two early, right?
A little bit.
And here's the fucking thing.
The convention refuses to condemn it.
Instead, they issue, admittedly, a somewhat compromised statement, but in which they say that the concept may be useful and valuable.
Whereas the resolution the conservatives had wanted to pass described it as neo-Marxist and post-market.
Yeah, no, it's all Jordan B. Peterson shit.
Maybe they're learning a little bit.
That seems to be what's happening.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
And also, 2019 is the year that the story drops, for the story starts dropping about all these stations.
So that's something.
After 2020, the SBC's new leadership issued a number of statements condemning past racism and the racism of the founders of the denomination.
More than that, they commissioned a large report on racism in the founding of the SBC, which I have quoted from earlier in these episodes.
There's probably nothing I can quote that will do a better job of showing the positive trend than by quoting right-wing ghoul Tom Askell writing for Founders Ministries about the 2021 convention in Nashville.
Several things happened at SBC 21, and many, if not most of them, are deeply concerning to grassroots Southern Baptists who love Christ, fear God, tremble at his word, and want to cooperate for the cause of missions and evangelism with others who are like-minded.
And obviously, he's complaining that another person who is not a fucking fascist won the election.
And the week that we are doing this reading, they have just had another election at the SBC 2022.
And the guy who, one sec.
Make sure I have this right.
Yeah.
So the guy who runs for the right-wing side is Florida pastor Tom Askell, who we just heard from, right?
And Askell ran specifically by attacking the leftward drift of the Southern Baptist Convention on issues of gender, sexuality, abortion, and critical race theory, right?
Tom Askell.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He loses to a small-town Texas preacher named Barber, who is a...
One second, I'm going to read you a quote from this because this all just came out.
I just read this today.
So Askell run, like, calling for Baptists to be culturally uncompromising.
He's in, like, he's he does interviews for One America News, Real America's Voice, and the Daily Wire.
You know, he's going hard into all of this culture war shit, right?
And this is like the guy he runs against is this guy, Barber, who's a pastor in rural Texas.
And despite what that might make you think, is like he runs on, among other things, fundamentally changing the way things are done at the SBC because of the sex abuse scandal.
He wants to expand the role of women and like stop the kind of war on women pastors and stuff.
He wants to continue the discussions they're having about race.
And he doesn't want the Southern Baptist Convention to just keep plunging into the culture wars on behalf of the Republican Party.
Sounds like a pretty good guy.
That's reasonable.
And he, within, at least within the context of the Southern Baptist Convention, a better guy for sure than Askell, who's a real asshole.
Barbara wins 61% to 39%.
That's what happened today?
Very recently, within the last day or two.
Wow.
Like this week.
That's great.
That's wonderful.
Yeah.
That's broadly speaking better than how the news could be.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Good for them.
I love this.
Sorry, just this Daily Wire headline about this earlier, which I think is very telling.
It's Southern Baptists nominate Tom Askel to leadership to combat woke drift in largest Protestant denomination.
It's very funny.
Yeah.
Well, he lost pretty badly.
Not a close election, 61 to 39 or whatever.
Yeah.
Not super close.
Not a nail biter.
Not a nail biter.
Does it sound like to combat woke drift is what it said?
No, it sounds like they want to listen.
Cody, Katie, there's like a Wokey O drift joke somewhere.
We should put a pen in that and figure that out later.
I wanted to end by quoting that Atlantic article that I quoted from earlier, cited a pastor named Adrian Rogers who said, quote, as the West goes, so goes the world.
As America goes, so goes the West.
As Christianity goes, so goes America.
As evangelicals go, so goes Christianity.
And as Southern Baptists go, so do Evangelicals.
And obviously, that's a very Western chauvinist way of looking at things.
But within the context of as Southern Baptists go, so go evangelicals and perhaps even Christianity.
As Evangelicals Go00:05:16
There's some truth in that.
And it's not a bad sign that the Southern Baptists for like four years now, as America's culture wars have gotten worse, have like pretty consistently been rejecting the idea that their faith should lean into that shit.
Yeah, like tempering that sort of impulse.
It's not a bad sign, right?
No.
There are worse things happening.
That's a really insightful and lovely way to wrap this horror, horrible story.
Pretty bad story.
Pretty bad story.
Yeah, something hopeful, a little bit.
But a little bit.
You know, something hopeful.
Yeah.
So I don't know.
You know, who knows what's going to happen in the future.
If you're a Southern Baptist who's plugging to turn your faith back to its roots as the faith where they were going to abolish gender and destroy male supremacy, good luck.
There's some power to you.
Some power to you, right?
I don't know.
You guys got any pluggables?
That's nice.
Yeah, they know.
Check out.
I love to plug this Daily Wire piece.
Yeah, the Daily Wire.
You got to check it out.
Matt Walsh's documentary, What is a Woman?
Real.
Yeah.
Gina Carano has been uncanceled.
We have a podcast called Some More News and a YouTube channel called Some More News and a Patreon and all sorts of fun stuff that goes along with it.
And Twitter tweets all kinds of stuff.
Starting in July, you can listen to our new podcast, Cancelgasm, where every week we'll talk to a new victim of cancel culture.
The unwoke rise up.
Like zombies.
Like zombies.
It's awful.
Because they're kind of all the same.
It's terrible.
Might I recommend you actually just like order After the Revolution from AK Press, Robert Emmanuel's book.
Before I get canceled for it, we're telling the truth about fiction.
All right.
Nail that.
Lovely.
Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
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