Southern Baptists jolted by #MeToo crisis before meeting

The Southern Baptists are facing their own #MeToo crisis as the biggest Protestant denomination in the U.S. heads into its annual two-day meeting this week in Dallas.

A series of sexual misconduct cases has prompted the Southern Baptist Convention’s allmale leadership to seek forgiveness for the ill treatment of women and vow to combat it.

Illustrating the SBC’s predicament, the central figure in the most prominent of the #MeToo cases, Paige Patterson, had been scheduled to deliver the featured sermon at the gathering. However, Patterson withdrew from that role Friday, heeding a request from SBC President Steve Gaines and other leaders.

Patterson was recently dismissed as president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Texas because of his response to two rape allegations made years apart by students.

In a 2015 case, according to the seminary’s board chairman, Patterson told a campus security official that he wanted to meet alone with a student who had reported being raped, to “break her down.”

SBC leaders say there are more cases — adding up to a humiliating debacle for the 15.2-million-member denomination.

The Rev. Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, acknowledged that while the crisis might raise questions about the SBC’s doctrine of “complementarianism” — which espouses male leadership in the home and in the church and says a wife “is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband” — the tenet would not be abandoned.