38 United States The Economist May 28th 2022
SexscandalandSouthern Baptists
I
n 1985 gilbert gauthe, a cowboybootwearing showboat of a
priest in southern Louisiana, was convicted of abusing dozens
of altar boys. It was one of the first of the sexualabuse scandals
that for three decades have rippled through the Catholic church,
devastating the institution. Millions of Americans and Europeans
have left it. After a fresh round of scandals in 2018, concerning
abuse of children in Pennsylvania, 37% of the remaining Ameri
can Catholics said they were considering doing so.
America’s biggest Protestant denomination, the Southern Bap
tists, now faces the same reckoning. In 2019 the Houston Chronicle
revealed 380 allegations of sexual abuse in the denomination’s
47,000 affiliated churches. In response, its national executive
stonewalled and prevaricated, leading to demands for an indepen
dent investigation. Its findings, made public this week, are even
more shocking than expected.
Abuses within the denomination appear to have been wide
spread, often committed by church leaders and systematically co
vered up. The report includes a “credible” allegation of sexual as
sault by a former president of the national executive, Johnny
Hunt, against the wife of another pastor. It describes efforts by
Southern Baptist officials to intimidate and denigrate as “oppor
tunists” victims of assault and an overriding concern to stop them
suing for compensation. A senior Southern Baptist leader is
quoted denouncing victims’ complaints as a “satanic scheme to
completely distract us from evangelism”.
It amounts to a familiar story: of privileged men exercising
power with grubby and sometimes criminal impunity, then deny
ing having done so to protect their institution and themselves.
Secular institutions have seen plenty of that, of course. But it is
probably no coincidence that the Catholic and Southern Baptist
churches are among the most malechauvinist Christian tradi
tions. Nor is it by chance that some of their most censorious fig
ures have turned out to be among the biggest abusers.
Those named in the report include Paige Patterson and Paul
Pressler, oncerevered architects of the “conservative resurgence”
of the 1970s and 80s that propelled Southern Baptists into politics.
Mr Patterson, another former Southern Baptist president, was
sacked from a leading seminary in 2018 after it was revealed thathehadallegedly instructed one student not to report a rape and
met privately with a victim of abuse in order to “break her down”.
Mr Pressler, a former vicepresident of the denomination, is ac
cused of raping a boy.
Southern Baptists will discuss the report, which is already re
ceiving pushback from conservatives, at their annual meeting in
California next month. But even if their leadership accepts it con
tritely, the revelations seem likely to accentuate a decline in the
white evangelical tradition that is already advanced.
Since 2006, when Southern Baptist membership peaked at
16.3m, the group has lost 2.6m members, including over a million
in the past three years. Formerly seen as an American bulwark
against irreligiosity, white evangelicalism, of which Southern
Baptists are the dominant strain, now looks to have been a brief
holdout. It has been losing congregants at the same rate as the
Catholic and mainline Protestant churches. In 2006, almost a
quarter of Americans were white evangelicals; only 14% are today.
The decline has been most pronounced among those aged 18- Anecdotal evidence suggests they dislike the partisan align
ment as much as the scandals Messrs Patterson and Pressler have
wrought. Leah Boyd, a 23yearold Southern Baptist seminarian
and victim of assault within the church, estimates that of her 30
school friends in the Alabamian Bible belt, only ten attend servic
es. “I’m an outlier,” she says. “It’s not just the sexabuse scandals.
People of my age are turned away by the positions on race, sexual
ity and gender.” And also, she adds, by white evangelicals’ embrace
of Donald Trump, another alleged sexual predator. Southern Bap
tists “were supposed to be part of a moral majority”, she says.
The group’s politicisation has on the face of it provided a coun
terweight to secular decline. Voting in lockstep, white evangeli
cals have punched well above their dwindling numbers. They rep
resent a plurality of the Republican coalition and are by far the
country’s most powerful special interest. If America is about to
lose the right to legal abortion, it will be by order of a conservative
Supreme Court majority assembled to please them. Yet a cultural
minority will struggle to win a culture war. And the damage white
evangelicals’ political overreach is storing up is already obvious.
The Catholic church has survived the dire failures of its priest
hood in part by emphasising other strengths, including the vigour
of its charities, its growth in developing countries, and their abil
ity to replenish dwindling richworld vocations and congrega
tions. In their partisan fury, America’s white evangelicals seem
more intent on kicking their tradition’s crutches away.
A secular decline
Southern Baptists’ core strengths are their decentralised structure
and commitment to evangelising. Both attributes, emblematic of
America’s singular religious tradition, contain the potential for re
thinking and regrowth. Yet politicisation has blunted them in fa
vour of groupthink and hostility to outsiders. Black and immi
grant Southern Baptists, possible sources of renewal, have joined
progressives in the rush to the exit. Dissident thinkers such as
Russell Moore, a critic of the church’s response to the abuse scan
dal, and Beth Moore (no relation), one of its few notable women,
have been driven out. New baptisms are close to record lows.
The sexualabuse scandal is emblematic of these wider institu
tional failures. Conscientious evangelicals consider it proof of the
persistence of sin. An alternative readingisthat it indicates an in
stitution that has abused its power overitsown vulnerable mem
bers, just as it has in the public square.nLexington
White evangelicals look even less able to self-correct than the Catholic church