The vulnerable are not protected

After I sent my column to the editor last week, I sent her a sentence to add at the very end. The last paragraph was about how we imagine—or in the case of the Little Rock Immanuel Baptist pastor, we may even say—the devil is attacking us from the outside.

But the most dangerous demons I have ever faced were the ones on the inside, whether it be in my closest relationships, my state government, my community, my church, my country, or my own heart. I am convinced those are the ones we should be more concerned about than outside forces.

I know outside problems exist. I believe Jesus was onto something when he said in Matthew 7:5, “You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.”

I find that I have enough junk clouding my vision—so does everyone else I know, as well as every organization I have ever been a part of—that if I work my whole life on removing those logs I probably won’t get around to the speck in my brother’s.

I suspect Jesus knew that as well. Maybe it was his point.

At any rate, the added sentence was this: “And as with every wound, healing can’t happen till we get the poison out.” It heals me when I write about what hurts. In the case of how the Immanuel Baptist story intersects with my journey as a Southern Baptist, the more I plumb it, to my sadness and horror, the deeper the poison seems to go.

I see this story through both a macro and microscope. Maybe a small country lane in tandem with a superhighway is a better metaphor. What happened is I lived my life up to a point that for the most part I could be a Southern Baptist, embrace my role as a woman in that context, minimally participate in politics by voting and trusting leaders to do their jobs while I did mine, and feel I was living an authentic life.

A life of integrity, meaning my values and the inner workings of my heart and mind were integrated with what I did in my daily life, my outward practice, my actions.

There were times those things were tested. Times I definitely made mistakes. But in the main when my church’s official stance on something clashed with my convictions, I felt free to follow my interpretation of scripture, my experience of Jesus, my conscience. I think I felt that because I believed the highest form of the Southern Baptist doctrine was an emphasis on the individual’s relationship with Jesus.

Born of the Protestant Reformation and passed down to me by my family of Bible-believing Baptists was this inherent principle that church leadership won’t always get it right, but Jesus does—and that there is a distinction between the two.

We have individual agency as we follow Christ, regardless of what any leader or doctrine says. That was at least part of what it meant to me to be Southern Baptist all those years that I was one. It is still something fundamental to my identity as a Christian.

If my life was a country lane and the big picture of what was happening in U.S. politics a superhighway, the two paths crossed in 2016. It feels like I was standing at that intersection and got hit by a bus barreling down the superhighway. The bus was on its way to film an episode of “Access Hollywood.”

And with my children, then ages 16, 14, 9, and 4, all around me, we heard Donald Trump, candidate for president of the United States of America—which we know has faults but still believe to be the greatest country in the world, the noblest, freest, most honorable and aspirational idea that has ever existed as a nation—brag about trying to seduce a married woman and suggest he might start kissing a woman he was headed to meet.

Then he added, “I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. … Grab ’em by the [genitals]. You can do anything.”

We cannot even print the word he said in this paper because of editorial standards. But our beloved country elected him as its supreme leader. The one our kids look up to. The one the entire world sees as our example. The one we trust with the very lives of our men and women in the military.

This man became our 45th president. And his greatest supporters were—and still are—evangelical Christians, of which the largest denomination is Southern Baptist.

I recently watched the Super Bowl along with the rest of the country and winced every time I saw one of those—I guess they are called— commercials about Jesus. “He gets us,” they declared, for presumably $7 million a pop.

I want to say to whoever produced them, and to the evangelical world at large: We know. We know Jesus gets us. No one questions the character of Jesus. That has never been the problem.

The problem is that too many churches and the “Christians” in them don’t get Jesus. That is why people are leaving. That is why I cannot imagine I will ever again go looking for Jesus through Southern Baptist doors.

It breaks my heart to say this. But as I watch the mass exodus from Immanuel Baptist Church, I don’t see the devil attacking from the outside. It is not the press who reported the story, or the victims coming forward, or the woman who quit her position because she dissented, or the deacons who won’t declare absolute fealty to the pastor. These are not the demons Immanuel needs to reckon with. The devil is in the cover-up.

And here is the kicker. It doesn’t really matter if the intentions were good or evil. I imagine if they were laid on a spectrum, we’d find the intentions of individuals involved in this saga to be from good to evil. We can do a lot of mental and spiritual gymnastics when we are invested in a church, in certain people. I know from experience.

But here’s the truth: Abuse happened. And regardless of anyone’s intentions, what happened next is abusers were protected instead of victims. And instead of more potential victims.

This is the micro-view of one church. The macro is that this is the culture of the Southern Baptist Convention, and I believe evangelical culture everywhere, but especially in the South. It is a messed-up culture in many ways, but for the purpose of this column my focus is on the fact that it does not make as its priority the protection of the vulnerable.

When our spiritual training happens in a culture that protects an abuser instead of the abused, it not only affects those directly involved. It affects every single person in every single pew, from the highest in authority to the least of these.

And the message it sends, in 1,000 different ways, is that someone can abuse their power and get away with it. In God’s house. Among God’s people. We make this choice, and we justify it in the name of Jesus.

I originally found it so ironic that the same people who excoriated Bill Clinton abandoned those standards to throw their support behind Trump. But now I wonder what really happened there. After all, Clinton was a lifetime Southern Baptist and member of Immanuel Baptist Church. Maybe it wasn’t his flagrant infidelity and treatment of women that bothered evangelicals.

Maybe it was something else. Because the same culture that built and then bashed Bill Clinton is the one in which Trump could rise to power. It is the culture that defends and enables him still.