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Thursday, June 16th, 2022

Patriarchy and purity culture combine to silence women in the Southern Baptist Convention – and are blocking efforts to address the sexual abuse scandal

Author:     Julie Ingersoll
Source:     The Conversation
Publication Date:     June 15, 2022 | 3.33pm EDT
 Link: Patriarchy and purity culture combine to silence women in the Southern Baptist Convention – and are blocking efforts to address the sexual abuse scandal
Stephan:   You will remember that a short while ago I published an article reporting that the Southern Baptist Convention had just been told that on the basis of the evidence they had a major sex problem, both pedophilia with underage children and with women generally. Here is a good exegetic essay on what is going on and why in the SBC.
Rape survivor and abuse victim advocate Mary DeMuth speaks during a rally protesting the Southern Baptist Convention’s treatment of women outside the convention’s annual meeting in Dallas in June 2019. Credit: AP Photo/Jeffrey McWhorter

The Southern Baptist Convention 2022 annual meeting overwhelmingly voted to approve reforms to address sexual abuse in the denomination. A devastating yearlong investigation had recently documented widespread claims of sex abuse including accusations of rape, cover-ups and gross mistreatment of women seeking justice.

In 2019 the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News partnered on a series of investigative reports on sexual misconduct by Southern Baptists with formal church roles. Subsequently, the annual meeting of the SBC held in June 2021 voted to authorize an investigations firm, Guidepost Solutions, to conduct an independent probe of its executive committee and its handling of sex abuse. The report and the list of alleged offenders has recently been made public.

I am a scholar of evangelicalism, gender and American culture, and over several years of my research I have seen how deeply ingrained aspects of conservative white evangelicalism force women to stay silent. In […]

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