Trumpism: It Felt Like Déjà vu with Southern Baptists
When Donald Trump came on the scene, it felt like déjà vu with Southern Baptists.
For years, I had listened to their self-righteous rhetoric as they shrugged off the reality of widespread sexual assaults committed by pastors against women and children. So, when I saw the overwhelming majority of Southern Baptists championing a president who bragged about assaulting women, it felt like more of the same.
Their minimization of horrific conduct was a pattern I had already seen up close. I had lived it.
Not only were many Southern Baptist leaders willing to turn a blind eye to a politician’s sexual assaults—just as they did with pastors—but they were willing to overlook so much more for the sake of proximity to power.
Even basic civility was given the boot. That too seemed a resurrection of how they treated clergy sex abuse survivors who dared to speak out—demeaning us, calling us names, and vilifying us.
After Trump was voted out of office, I watched as Southern Baptist leaders used their mantles of spiritual authority to amplify the big lie of a “stolen election.” With that, the fraud of everything they professed seemed complete. As the country’s second largest faith group—and as a mighty voting bloc—Southern Baptists were willing to sacrifice democracy itself for the sake of an ends-justify-the-means bargain for power.
“How could they?” many asked, as if Baptists’ support for Trump was mysteriously incongruous with their morals. But for me, it seemed only one more illustration of their true selves, not some aberration. They had already shown themselves when they chose to sacrifice the safety of children to preserve their own institutional image and power.
Southern Baptists normalized and minimized the sexual predations of a president in much the same way they normalized and minimized the sexual predations of their clergy colleagues. Then, with nary a care, they left the rest of us—now the whole of our democracy—to deal with the fall-out.
With an identity and beliefs rooted in an authoritarian theology, they wound up supporting an authoritarian president.
This is an excerpt from my new book, Baptistland: A Memoir of Abuse, Betrayal, and Transformation.