Megan Basham critiques the Guidepost Report's findings on Southern Baptist Convention abuse, arguing it relies on uncorroborated testimony from Jennifer Lyle regarding David Sills while ignoring police records and Sills' denial. She contends the Executive Committee's shift from "morally inappropriate" to "abuse" was a legal tactic exploited by Rachel Denhollander for a defamation payout, violating Deuteronomy 22's witness requirements. Pastor Joel Webben supports this skepticism, suggesting the narrative serves a political agenda to dismantle complementarianism rather than reflect institutional corruption, ultimately emphasizing due process over an identity of victimhood. [Automatically generated summary]
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Baptist Press Story Diverges00:15:02
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Hi, welcome to Theology Applied.
I am your host, Pastor Joel Webben, and today I am very, very privileged to have Megan Basham from the Daily Wire as my special guest, and we are discussing her recent bombshell article.
Where she discusses the guidepost findings, their research and data about the SBC, Southern Baptist Convention, and all of the alleged abuse, sexual abuse that's taken place there, and all the ways that those in positions of power, institutional power within the Southern Baptist Convention, try to cover it up.
Megan Basham does a wonderful job exposing a lot of those things that have been hyperbole, exaggerated, and some of them just downright false.
And so we discuss the all things SBC.
Why the SBC is so intent, or at least some leaders in the SBC are so intent in saying that the SBC is corrupt and therefore needs to believe all women and that it's sexually abusive and trying to cover up scandals.
What are the facts?
What do we know with certainty?
And then towards the end of the episode, Megan and I speculate a little bit about what do we think are the motives?
Why are there people trying to paint the SBC in this light?
What's the end goal?
This is a fantastic episode, and I think we are the first to have Megan Basham address her article in detail and provide even some more behind the scenes information.
You're in for a real treat.
Buckle up.
Here we go.
Applying God's Word to every aspect of life.
This is Theology Applied.
Welcome to another episode of Theology Applied.
I am your host, Pastor Joel Webbin with Right Response Ministries, and today in our episode, I'm very pleased.
Privileged to have as a special guest Megan Basham from the Daily Wire.
Megan, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me.
It's great to be here.
Great.
All right, go ahead and introduce yourself for some of our listeners who may not be familiar with you and what you do.
So I'm Megan Basham.
I am a reporter with the Daily Wire.
I actually started out as a culture reporter, but when I moved over there, I kind of let them know look, I have a very special interest in evangelical coverage and evangelical issues.
And I made a deal.
I'm like, you know, I definitely want to cover entertainment, but If you will allow me to cover this area that I have such a strong interest in, I'm your girl.
And so we kind of made that deal.
And before Daily Wire, I was with World Magazine, which, if you're not familiar with it, is a Christian news organization that, you know, it's evangelical, but, you know, a lot of Presby's over there, Baptist, non denominational, some Anglican.
So it's kind of a grab bag.
And I spent a lot of years there covering culture.
I worked on their podcast as well.
They have actually have a great daily news podcast.
If you haven't heard it, the world and everything in it.
And so those are kind of the two places that I am most known for working in news.
Great.
Well, we're glad to have you.
And really, what we want to talk about in this episode is one of your most recent articles dealing with the SBC, the Southern Baptist Convention, also known as the hashtag MeTooMovementGoesEvangelical.
So, what are some of your thoughts on this?
You just wrote this article.
You did, I think, a wonderful job in just explaining some of the things that are concerning.
What is your sense, right?
We just had the convention.
Tom Askell was my pick.
I think he was your pick as well for SBC president.
And he lost by a lot.
It wasn't really even close.
What are some of your thoughts on the SBC right now?
Well, you know what I can tell you with this article that I wrote is it was really long.
It was like 3,500 words.
And I didn't even really feel like in that movement because it's complicated.
You know, you go, there were real stories of abuse, but majority of what is covered in this report that the task force put in motion was already known.
A lot of it had been dealt with.
With already, even people had been ousted.
So there were things in it that I really wish I could cover.
And if I get a chance, I'd love to do a part two about how the task force came about.
Because my perception after talking to a lot of people was that while I believe that abuse is a real issue and a real issue that needs to be dealt with, I also don't believe it was probably the main motivating factor for some of the people who put the wheels in motion there.
It felt like you had people looking to sort of settle some scores and using it as a way to rest some political control of the denomination and introduce some other reforms that they wanted regarding complementarianism, women's roles, and even just we want to be seen differently by the world.
So, to get down kind of into the granular of what I did end up that didn't end up on the cutting room floor was so, if you're not familiar, There were some leaked letters in 2021 from Russell Moore, and those letters brought up the fact that he felt that the executive committee did not do enough to address abuse allegations.
And based on those leaked letters, and this is all very political, these are political maneuvers, those leaked letters were used as impetus to say, let's launch this investigation into the executive committee.
Of course, it was convenient that those also happened to be Russell Moore's sort of enemies, you might say, opponents, let's say, opponents within the church.
So at that point, Someone I would say who was very closely aligned with Russell Moore, Rachel Denhollander.
They're very well known for doing some conference stuff together, for doing podcasts together.
She was appointed as the person who would be advising this task force on who they would hire and how it would go about its business of investigating the executive committee.
So they hired a firm called Guidepost, and Guidepost started investigating.
And Guidepost is distinctly Christian, right?
I'm not at all.
No, Guide Post is not at all Christian.
In fact, as everyone knows, a lot of people probably know by now, they put out a post that was, you know, pride waving the rainbow flag for pride and their allies and affirming.
So, just to confirm, Guide Post doesn't know what a woman is and they also don't know what a baby is.
But they know that they know what sexual abuse is according to God's standards.
And the SBC is going to go to them.
Okay.
Continue.
Yeah.
And I think, and part of what I get into, and the reason I'm sort of laying all the groundwork here, One, because it is complex how it came about, but also because Rachel Denhollander played a really significant role in how all of this unfolded.
So I think that her relationship with Russell Moore is fairly important, and her relationship with some of the other major players who were driving this investigation is also very important.
So Guidepost spends about eight months doing an investigation, and then they put out their report.
Some of the things in that report, Well, really, most of the things in that report were already known.
Other things were very questionable.
And I kind of tried to drill down, okay, what is the main case that they're putting forward to say that there was just egregious, rampant dismissal of abuse victims?
And the number one story they had, there were other stories in it, but the key one was a woman named Jennifer Lyell and David Sills.
Well, when I started looking into that case in particular, which guidepost directly says this is a case of a sexual abuser and a victim, there were a lot of problems with it.
Just the bare outlines of it, you're talking about a 26 year old woman who was a Master of Divinity student on the campus of Southern Seminary.
She said she began some sort of interaction, let's put it that way, with a professor who was about 23 years older than her.
And that he was married, he had a family.
She became very close with the family as well.
Whatever relationship she had with him and with the family continued for.
Another 12 years.
She was only on the campus at Southern Seminary for two of those years.
So, from 26 to Moody Publishers in Chicago, she works for Lifeway in Nashville and she's contracting with books with him.
So, she's asking him, You come work with me.
I'm going to publish your books.
Things that you might say even put her in power over him in some ways.
So, this goes on for 12 years.
There is a break.
This is where the stories diverge.
She says, She was abused and got away from that.
He, I'll say, I talked to a lot of people and he relayed a lot to me through third parties.
My sense is that David Sills is extremely leery of talking to anyone in the media and he hasn't really told his side of it.
He kind of, what his friends have informed me is that he is afraid of one, making the situation worse, bringing more attention on himself.
I think that's kind of unmerited just because there's already so much attention there.
Right, right.
But so, along with that, he also indicated that he feels like a lot of this negative press, a lot of this labeling of him as an abuser, is part of the consequences for what he did, part of the consequences for having a relationship, he would say, an inappropriate relationship with Jennifer Sills, I'm excuse me, with Jennifer Lyle.
So, he has never, though, confessed to abuse.
And really, what you do have is a very classic.
She has a story of he was violent and threatening and coercive with me for these 12 years.
He has a story that is no, this was consensual and sinful, but consensual.
Right.
So, this is the main case that Guidepost put forward.
That's the main one in their report?
Yes, it is the most prominent.
So, there's the most mentions of Jennifer Lyle.
She takes up the most pages, about 35 pages.
Okay.
So, that was really why I focused on that particular case.
And there were some other issues with some other.
You know, incidents that they brought up, but that was the key one.
Well, that's important to mention.
So, you highlighted that case in your article not because you thought this is the weakest case and I can poke it apart and make guideposts look like a sham, but no, this is the one that guideposts themselves chose to highlight.
This was the tip of the spear for them.
So, I'm dealing with what they're presenting as their strongest proof of the SBC being this dungeon of sexual abuse, you know, whatever.
And it's flimsy.
It could be true, but it's flimsy.
Right.
And I was very careful in my reporting to go, I don't know.
But here's what I know for sure Guidepost doesn't know either.
I know for sure that Lyle's attorney, Rachel Denhollander, doesn't know either.
So, what happened at that point is that Jennifer Lyle told her story to her boss at Lifeway, who called up Dr. Albert Moeller, president of Southern Seminary, and they had a meeting.
She relayed that this was abuse.
And this was two years after contact had ended.
So, this is in 2018.
They stopped talking in 2016.
And Moeller fired David Sills.
Said, I believe her that this was abuse.
She told me this was abuse.
This was a case of abuse.
So at that point, Baptist Press was going to run some sort of story.
And it sounds like Eric Geiger, her boss at Lifeway, suggested you should do a story with Baptist Press.
And so there was sort of a first person thing in play, and they didn't end up doing that.
And they were going to do a report.
And the original draft of that story characterized it as abuse.
Then the executive committee, which is over the Baptist press, got a look at it and said, We're uncomfortable saying that this is a very clear cut case of abuse.
We're uncomfortable using that language.
And it actually makes a lot of sense to me because they could have handled it better and communicating with her, I think.
But the decision not, and if it were me, I just wouldn't have run the story.
I don't think they should have run the story.
But what they did was change the description within the story, not her quotes, but the description within the story of what that relationship was.
They called it a morally inappropriate relationship.
So that was the key sticking point that everyone said.
This was how the executive committee was cruel and callous and dismissive to survivors.
So Rachel Denhollander then at a conference mentions this story that the infamous 2019 Caring Well conference with Russell Moore.
She mentions this story that brings a lot of negative press to the executive committee.
At that point, she represents Jennifer Lyle in.
A threat.
They never did actually file a suit, but in a threat of a defamation suit against the executive committee, that threat is successful.
The insurance company agrees to pay Jennifer Lyle, I'm hearing about a million dollars, and they think that will be the end of it.
And then this story comes up, and I look into it, and Guidepost represents it as abuse and callous disregard of survivors.
And then you start to look into the story, and you go, as I said, so much of this doesn't really make sense.
And then I looked at the fact that Jennifer Lyle said that she filed a police report with the Louisville PD in 2018 when it happened.
So I called the Louisville PD.
They have no record of her.
I then obtained another interview that she gave where she said not only that she called the police, but that Al Moeller called the police.
They have no record of any of that either.
Then I spoke with her and she said, no, no, no, I made a mistake.
It was this other police department, it was Jefferson Town.
I called Jefferson Town.
Jefferson Town had no record of this.
Corroborated Claims vs Police Records00:02:14
So, what you have really is something that illustrates the entire problem with what Guidepost did and what the recommendations are.
And that is not just Guidepost, but Rachel Denhollander, lots of people on social media, the Religion News Service, numerous other reports in Washington Post.
I don't want to name the others because I'm not positive, but there was a lot of reporting labeling this guy an abuser.
Someone who's violent, someone who really hurt this woman.
And I think you can always say that when there's sin involved, you're hurting people, you're hurting each other.
But this was different.
They were saying he was a violent sexual abuser.
Those were Rachel Denhollander's words.
These were the words that were in that guidepost report.
So, and nobody really looked into it.
So, really, all of these people were operating on the fact that we just believe her.
And based on that, also, the guidepost report said her story was corroborated.
Well, when I looked into what they meant by her story was corroborated, that was what they meant, just that these people believed her.
Well, that's not due process.
And based on all of that, you would have to go, so affirm like guidepost.
Who is putting itself forward to create this public database of abusers for the SBC?
Rachel Denhollander, who is demanding this public database, both of them clearly would be very comfortable adding David Sill's name to that list, even though we have no concrete evidence that he is an abuser.
He's never admitted to being an abuser, and there are no public records that document the fact that he's an abuser.
There's no witnesses that say he's an abuser.
All we have is Jennifer Lyle's word and her claims that are somewhat undercut by the public record.
So there you go.
There's a long spiel on what the story was about.
No, that's really helpful.
Thank you for just taking the time and doing so much work to investigate all that and to follow through.
That's what we need.
We need accountability for the alleged accountability.
We need someone to be able to address these things, not to say that there's nothing true, but to investigate and see is this actually true and is it true according to God's standards?
Cry for Help in Open Fields00:06:02
So, real quick, I want to take what you said that was so helpful and just kind of maybe.
Just investigated in light of some scripture.
So, one, and I know that you're aware of this, even in our case law system that we have in the United States of America, that was built off of a lot of biblical principles, the Bible is very clear that we need to have two or three independent lines of testimony.
And so, a lot of times people will say, Well, as a pastor, I get this.
Well, by God's grace, I haven't in a while, but I used to get this a lot.
Somebody would come with a concern, and concern is a euphemism for criticism, and they would voice their criticism, and they would always preface it by saying, A lot of People are saying, right?
A lot of people, right?
Because you want to give weight to your opinion.
You want to give weight to your perspective.
And so a lot of people are saying, and then you would have to kind of press on that and say, well, okay, so what is a lot of people and who are these people and could they come to me also and let's meet with them?
And a lot of times what you discover when somebody has some kind of discrepancy, some kind of frustration, is that the lot of people usually aren't quite as many as you thought.
And even if it is, let's say it's 10 people, 20 people, 200 people, the question is, are these 200 people?
Independent lines of witness, 200 people that saw the same event?
Or is there only one actual eyewitness and then 199 other people that that eyewitness told and then they told?
There's a difference between eyewitnesses that the Bible says and our laws based on versus hearsay.
And a lot of Christians, they need to be refreshed on this and understand the distinction between hearsay and an actual witnessable testimony.
And so in this case, you only have one witness and well, actually, you have two witnesses.
The man and the woman, and their testimony is contradictory.
And so you're at a standstill unless somebody else witnessed it.
And one of the verses that comes to mind, there's a lot that we could talk about, but one just briefly, this is Deuteronomy chapter 22, starting in verse 23.
It says, If there is a betrothed virgin and a man meets her in the city and lies with her, then you shall bring them both out to the gate of the city and you shall stone them to death with stones, the young woman, because she did not cry for help.
Though she was in the city.
The implication being because of the context, the place where this occurred, what's being implied is God's word is saying if she was actually a victim, somebody would have heard her.
She was in a public setting in a city.
And so if she had yelled for help, somebody would have heard her.
And so because no one heard her, the text is assuming she did not cry for help, which means that it was consensual.
So she was engaged in this.
Infidelity.
And so you shall stone both of them with stones.
The young woman, because she was complicit.
She was a part of this.
She did not cry for help, though she was in the city, a context publicly where she would have been heard.
And the man, because he violated his neighbor's wife.
This is a woman who is betrothed.
So you shall purge the evil from your midst.
Then verse 25 says, But if in the open country, right, where there's not a bunch of people around, it's not a public setting, if in an open field or open country a man meets a young woman who is betrothed and the man seizes her and lies with her, then only the man, Who lay with her shall die.
He shall be put to death.
But you shall do nothing to the young woman.
She has committed no offense punishable by death.
For this case is like that of a man attacking and murdering his neighbor.
Now, real quick, the last thing I'll say on that is just in the private context of the open country or field where there was no witnesses around, if a woman, right, they're found afterwards and there is witnessable proof that infidelity happened and assumed in this is one of those.
Proofs would be her testimony, then the man shall be put to death.
Now, that testimony has to be collaborated, it has to be proven, evidenced.
But once proven, then the man would be put to death and she would go free because there was no one around.
So it's giving the benefit of the doubt that she actually did cry for help.
But even in that case scenario, it's not that this man is put to death on her singular testimony alone.
The reason why the man is put to death is because even if it was consensual, The infidelity in this biblical context, according to God's law, the infidelity was sufficient.
Meaning that the man doesn't have to be, it doesn't have to be a violent sexual abuse case.
Just the sexual immorality itself with a betrothed woman, another man coming, that would be enough to put him to death.
So her independent testimony of saying, I yelled for help, but nobody was around because I was in an open country, an open field, that's enough not to incriminate.
Her alleged perpetrator, but it is enough to save her life.
So it's not enough to end his life, but to save her life.
His life is ended because even if she's lying, even if she's lying, his infidelity, whether it was forced or not, regardless of whether it was consensual, is enough to be incriminating for him, according to biblical law, with Israel to be put to death.
And so my point is this is, you know, obviously, there's a lot of this that is unique to Israel.
But there is the general equity, which is the Westminster Confession and the 16.
There is the general equity, the heart of this law, the spirit of the law that I believe is applicable and relevant for all people in all places and all times.
And the heart of this is if a woman is in a public setting where she can cry for help, but no one hears her cry, that's fishy.
So if you're talking about a grown woman, something starts when she's 26 years old, a 12 year long Escapade, and you bring technology and cell phones.
Contradictory Testimonies and Numbers00:04:43
You know, at any point, she could have given a call, sent an email, said this, said that.
And when that's in the scenario, and you might say, Well, she did say it.
Okay, but how many, how long did it take her to say something?
How many years did it take her to say something?
Russell Fuller, you know, who was a professor, has seen the two of them smiling at the lunch table in the cafeteria at a seminary and laughing and these kinds of things, according to your reporting, your article.
And so it's just like, yeah, that doesn't look like a victim.
So, like you said so well, according to biblical standards, there's still sin and sin is a big deal, but there's a difference between sins and crimes.
And so we have to understand that.
And so, yeah, this is a problem.
And if that's the leading proof in this guidepost report, then.
What are we talking about?
And you go on in your article.
So I want to ask you this.
You go on in your article and you said, I think it's only 400 something cases and only two of them were current.
Can you explain how many cases and show us some of our listeners?
They don't know how big the SBC is.
Can you talk about that?
Yeah.
So I kind of opened with that because, you know, you always sort of have to do the listen, abuse is serious.
I'm very much against abuse because the initial, immediate pushback you get is, oh, you're trying to minimize abuse.
Well, no, I'm not.
But I am trying to be very specific because.
There was a torrent of media coverage calling this bombshell, explosive, makes the SBC a diseased orchard.
That was David French or an apocalypse from Russell Moore.
So you want to drill down and go, okay, let's look at what we're talking about.
So, what we were talking about, this is what Guidepost found 409 cases over the course of 21 years in 47,000 churches.
Now, I spoke to a demographer, somebody who was an expert in these kinds of just looking at statistics and what we might infer from them.
And he tells me, okay, looking at that, I might roughly estimate about 100 to 150,000 workers in SBC churches.
And this guy was not SBC, by the way.
So he's just kind of looking at it from his professional opinion, not from having any vested interest in protecting the SBC.
And he said, okay, if you're looking at 100 to 150,000 over that period of time, this is actually really remarkably low, particularly as you're only talking about two current.
Connected to the SBC workers.
It wasn't clear if they were staffers, if they were pastors, or if they were volunteers.
It wasn't clear what they were.
But two people still connected to the SBC church who are right now accused.
Yeah.
And so the pushback from that was well, Guidepost was only looking at the investigative committee, and they got those numbers from this list of published reports of accused or convicted abusers or sex offenders that they had sort of assembled this list.
From already published reports in the public domain.
And that is true.
But you have to look at the Houston Chronicle, also spent a year investigating as well, and their numbers were very similar.
So when you look at that, you go, maybe, maybe there is more abuse that if somebody were investigating all of the SBC, they would find.
But we have to deal with the numbers that we have.
I'm not going to make a hypothetical assumption that there is some apocalypse that we just don't know about.
Let's deal with the numbers that we have.
And those were the numbers that we had.
409, 21 years, 47,000 churches, 100 to 150,000 staffers.
And only two current individuals.
Current, that is correct.
So the demographer said, looking at this, I am astonished that they found so little.
So I think that's an important key to look at.
And then you look at, okay, so then why?
Why is the media treating it like it's something so significant when, I mean, the numbers in Say the public school system are so much.
I was going to say, I wish that same standard would be applied to public schools.
You know, like the reform that I keep, you know, praying for and working towards with public schools is the reform of shutting all of them down.
You know, that's if those standards were, it's just, it's such a double standard.
It's frustrating.
Go ahead.
Sorry.
And the point is, you go, look, we don't want abuse anywhere.
You know, it's funny because people go, oh, you're just dismissing abuse.
I'm not.
I don't want abuse anywhere.
But I also recognize this that we live in a fallen world.
We live in just a sin cursed world.
And there is no organization that is going to be able to perfectly keep every predator out.
Biblical Standards on False Witness00:02:03
Who will try to come in to get at victims?
So, you try to act as quickly as possible.
You put up as many guardrails as you can that are reasonable.
But you also recognize that these things, they are going to happen and we have to deal with them clear eyed.
And you have to, amen.
And you have to also present them truthfully because there are different forms of abuse.
Sexual abuse is abuse.
Bearing false witness against someone is also abuse.
And we live in a A current Me Too culture where the first person who runs into the room is established as the victim, and immediately it's believed their testimony without having necessarily two or three independent lines of witness.
And the person that they're talking about is the perpetrator without any shadow of it.
But biblically speaking, the standard is that if you bear false witness about someone else and it's proven.
That your testimony was false, whatever the penalty would have been, had your testimony been true for them, that penalty now comes on your head.
So if you were accusing them of something that is punishable by death, then you would be put to death.
Bearing false witness, the Bible says that that's one of the things that the Lord hates, that He detests a false witness, one who spews out lies.
And so the point is that number one, we have to be truthful.
We can't just say this happened without a shadow of a doubt.
According to biblical standards, Their leading case with this individual, this man, their leading case cannot be proven, or at least has not yet been proven, by biblical standards.
And yet, a denomination, the SBC, that claims to say that the Bible is the final arbiter for the final standard for what we abide by is not abiding by that standard.
So we want to be truthful.
Media Portrayal of the SBC00:06:56
And so, yes, there have been cases of abuse and these kinds of things, but the way it's being presented is though, like, the SBC is just the most corrupt.
Sexually abusive denomination of all time.
And that's just not true.
So, the last thing that I want to ask you is you've done great reporting, but I'd love to hear some of your speculating if you're willing to do so.
Why are there, you mentioned there are some people in the SBC, right, that really wanted this story to get out and they want to portray the SBC as being the harborers of sexual perpetrators?
Why?
Why are there people in the SBC that want this report?
Report to be true that want to make this big push of the SBC's corruption with covering up sexual abuse scandals.
Who are some of those people, the ones that you could name that has been proven?
But what, if you could speculate for a moment, what do you think is their motive?
What are they after?
Well, you know, obviously I can look at Russell Moore for sure because just factually, what we know is that Russell Moore had this sort of notorious apocalypse essay out within 30 minutes of the Guidepost's report.
Hitting the web.
So you go, he could not have read 288 pages.
He writes in this essay, I was even more, and I'm paraphrasing, so this is not a verbatim quote, but something in the effect of, I was even more shocked by what was in this report.
And I'm like, you read 288 pages and 30 minutes to be shocked by what was in that report.
So it seemed very clear.
And it was notable that this essay that he published contained no specifics about this in particular shocked me, or when I read about this, I was really astonished.
He didn't give any specifics.
He just said it was so much worse than I thought.
And so I think if you look at someone like Russell Moore, you go, there was, A personal motivate.
He sort of had written before about how they were trying to psychologically terrorize me.
And I go, he really likes really hyperbolic language.
But so I think in that case, there were definitely some personal vendettas.
It felt like it was being used in that way.
At the same time, I go, I think there is a wing that is looking to do away with the complementarian convictions within the SBC.
Because the other thing you saw was in a lot of this reporting that immediately hit, they talked about the fact that.
This cultural atmosphere within the SBC where women are dismissed and women's voices aren't heard, and that's key women's voices aren't heard, that gave rise to this culture of abuse that allowed it to fester.
And so I think that that is a big part of what it's being used for is to say, we need to have more women in leadership in order to make sure that women aren't abused and they feel free to come forward.
I think you're absolutely right.
And I don't think it's a coincidence that with the convention that just took place, Those are the two things that you see hand in glove that are happening.
Here's all the sexual abuse cases and how we've hurt women as a denomination.
And we've uniquely hurt women, right?
Because we live in a fallen world and this happens everywhere.
But man, it really happened here.
It happened worse here.
The data just doesn't prove that.
But it really happened here.
Oh, and by the way, on an unrelated note, maybe women can be pastors.
What is a pastor, right?
We got Matt Walsh with What is a Woman?
The SBC, we're going to do a documentary.
What is a pastor?
And yeah, I don't think that's a coincidence.
I think that they're just going left.
Yeah.
And I think it was really interesting to post it, kind of fairly astonishing.
This story in Box.
If you're not familiar with Box, it's very popular among maybe younger demographics.
And they drew a hard line between abuse and complementarianism.
There were other stories that kind of couched it a little bit, sort of, well, we're just drawing.
But this was very clear.
And this was something that I did not have time for in my story.
So you're getting it exclusively, but it killed me that it ended up on the cutting room floor.
And that was the fact that if you looked at the guidepost report on Christianity today, they talked about that they didn't necessarily find a lot of abuse at Christianity today.
But what they did find was this sort of male dominated culture.
And again, I'm paraphrasing, but you can go read that report.
It's not nearly as long and find it.
And they talked about you had a culture where men would speak over women and men were not listening to women.
And these men in leadership were not promoting women to be in leadership.
And you went, so that's where guideposts, that's their worldview, where they were coming from as they put together this report.
That's right.
I thought that was really key.
That's very important.
All right.
Well, thank you so much for all your hard work on this.
And thanks for sharing with our listeners some of the behind the scenes details.
I really, really appreciate it.
Any final thoughts that you want to add?
Just this look, we have to start being unafraid to be discerning and look at the hard details.
And they're going to say, Oh, you don't care about abuse, or Oh, you don't care about victims.
And I kind of shared on social media this week.
Look, I'm a victim myself.
So I do care, but I also care about due process.
And more than that, I want this message to get out to these young women.
Don't make your identity victim.
Don't even make your identity survivor.
I'm a victor in Christ.
I don't feel like somebody who, Is just surviving life.
I feel victorious.
I feel loved.
I feel powerful in Christ.
And so I really hate this movement that is teaching young women to just live in that identity of victim.
Amen.
Well said.
And we care about truth.
And wherever truth is absent, there's another kind of victim.
So because we do want to protect victims of all kinds, women, contrary to popular opinion, do not have a monopoly on victimhood.
Minority ethnicities do not have a monopoly on victimhood.
Anyone by biblical standards can be a victim when they are physically, sexually abused, or just physically abused, or when they are lied about.
And so we care about the truth because we love all kinds of victims.
We don't want anybody to be mistreated or oppressed.
So thanks so much for coming on the show.
I really appreciate it, Megan.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks so much for listening.
But real quick, before you go, do us a small favor, take a moment, and leave us a five star review if you enjoyed the show.
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