Russell Moore and irresponsible authoritarianism in the Southern Baptist Convention

Anthea Butler reacts to the release of a long letter of 05/31/2021 by Russell Moore, resignation letter from last year when he left his post as head a year ago as President of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, a post he held from 2013 until this year.

Russell Moore burning down the SBC as he leaves was not on my bingo card this yearhttps://t.co/kUbiRiXC4Q

— ProfB (@AntheaButler) June 5, 2021

Paul O'Donnell and Bob Smietana report on the story for Religion News Service, Leaked Russell Moore letter blasts SBC conservatives, sheds light on his resignation 06/02/2021. Some of the reporting may be a bit confusing about the date of the letter. The one Butler links in her tweet is dated May 31, 2021. But he says there, "Some of the letter below is almost verbatim what I said to my own board officers last February." Russell Moore to ERLC trustees: ‘They want me to live in psychological terror’ RNS 06/02/2021.

The letter is mainly about the denomination's handling of sexual abuse and family violence by pastors and church staff. The SBC has a decentralized structure in which individual churches are independent entities, although the denomination exerts a great deal of policy and doctrinal direction. That decentralized legal structure has made it more difficult to hold the domination itself legally accountable than it is for the Catholic or US Protestant denominations like the United Methodist Church or the Episcopalians, where the denomination more directly controls local churches including assigning their ministers.

As Chrissy Stroop wrote last year, the SBC has been in a longterm radicalization process, which still continues, becoming even more insistent on very conservative views. (Are the Southern Baptists, America's Largest Evangelical Denomination, About to Get Even More Conservative? 03/10/2020):

These days, the range of acceptable political opinion among white Southern Baptists ranges approximately from very right-wing to ultra right-wing. But even as the SBC struggles to come up with an effective response to numerous cases of abuse and coverups that have come to light in recent years, some of the prominent ultra-right-wingers are clamoring to suppress the merely very right-wingers, whom they disdain for being “too liberal” and blame for declining finances in the SBC’s central structures.

The primary target of the ultras’ ire is Russell Moore, head of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, a body that was formed on the foundations of the older Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty (with which the SBC cut all ties in 1991) and the Christian Life Commission. The ERLC’s founding was part of the culmination of the SBC’s so-called “conservative resurgence,” a purge of liberals from SBC leadership and institutions that dominated SBC life in the 1980s and 1990s. The hostile takeover was led by men like Paul Pressler, who stands credibly accused of molesting boys over decades, and Paige Patterson, who was disgraced in 2018 when audio surfaced of him counseling an abused wife to stay with her husband and to try to change him through prayer. [my emphasis in bold]

The fervent embrace of Donald Trump by conservative white evangelicals/fundamentalists is very much a part of this process. The radicalization of the SBC is part of the larger story of the Trumpification of the Republican Party.

Stroop is also right to emphasize the issue of authoritarianism in this connection:

The SBC’s “conservative resurgence” was essentially an authoritarian coup. Indeed, since the 1980s authoritarianism has arguably become a defining feature of white American evangelicalism. Since authoritarianism is characterized by a paranoid need to identify both internal and external enemies, the vicious trajectory of an empowered authoritarian movement rarely if ever stops after a single round of purges. Meanwhile, the ends justify the means for the zealous adherents to a particular authoritarian ideal, who protect their reputations and that of the organizations they represent above those who inevitably fall victim to abuse in authoritarian environments.