Blaming Satan

... because it's so much easier than taking responsibility

When I saw this post in a thread from Southern Baptist Convention president Bart Barber, I cringed.

Really? Is that the best Barber can do?

For decades, the men who ran the Southern Baptist Convention “lied, engaged in cover-ups, sided with those who were credibly accused of abuse, and vilified victims of abuse.” Yet, rather than earnestly dealing with the SBC’s ongoing institutional recalcitrance, Barber says that predators molesting church-kids are “a plot from Satan.”

Such an easy scapegoat.

Blaming Satan is so much easier than earnestly reckoning with the SBC’s decades of horror…

…so much easier than making amends to the hundreds harmed and imposing consequences on countless complicit cronies…

…so much easier than implementing meaningful reforms that prioritize kid-protection over institutional protection… and

…so much easier than holding accountable the real flesh-and-blood pastors who commit assaults and those who enable them.

Blaming Satan is a deflection from reality.

Predators use Southern Baptist churches to molest kids because they can readily exploit the massive safety gaps in the SBC’s system. That’s something SBC leaders could actually do something about… but they still don’t.

And even if a “plot from Satan” were involved in the predations of clergy child molesters, that doesn’t explain why SBC officials don’t fight back against that plot. It seems they use Satan as an excuse for their own passivity.

A systemic lack of accountability is not the fault of Satan; it’s the fault of men (and yes, they’re almost all men) who turn a blind eye, cover for their colleagues, refuse meaningful reforms, and prioritize institutional protection over the protection of kids against clergy predators.

Barber’s “plot from Satan” language hit me particularly hard, perhaps because it connected with prior satanic rhetoric that’s been flung at me.

After months of sexually abusing me when I was a kid, my pastor-rapist began insisting that I had “harbored Satan” and that I was “Satan’s ally.” Yeah… he blamed Satan for what he himself had done to me.

And finally, to drive home his point of how evil I had been under Satan’s influence, he essentially conducted an exorcism. He made me kneel in his office while he stood over me, praying long and loud for God to cast Satan from me.

I was terrified and couldn’t figure out how Satan had managed to invade me.

But for that Southern Baptist pastor, Satan was a friend who gave easy cover. Satan assured my silence. What good Baptist girl would ever want to tell people that she had harbored Satan?

Years later, that satanic nightmare from my childhood was cruelly resurrected when I learned that former SBC Executive Committee president Augie Boto had invoked Satan as a tool for discrediting me. Boto wrote that my advocacy efforts were part of a “satanic scheme” and referred to my work as “the devil being temporarily successful.”

So, Bart Barber’s invocation of Satan was far from a one-off. To the contrary, Southern Baptist officials seem to like invoking Satan.

Why? Because it doesn’t require the painful self-examination of looking at their own role and their own complicity in the SBC’s betrayal of kids and congregants.