SBC Gave Stones for Bread

... and they also threw stones

“Who is there among you, who, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone?”

In the days leading up to the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting last week, David Clohessy and I pondered this question from the Gospel of Matthew.

And then we asked this more specific question: “Will Southern Baptists give abuse survivors stones for bread?”

Now that the 2023 SBC annual meeting has come and gone—to the exhaustion and dismay of many—we know the answer.

The SBC not only gave stones, they threw stones.

I had predicted that the SBC would add a half-dozen pastors to a database and that it would be pastors with criminal convictions—i.e., easy ones to document.

If they’d done what I predicted, that would have still been way less than the self-described “bare minimum” of abuse reform that they promised in 2022, but I thought they would at least toss a few names onto a list just for show.

I was wrong.

They didn’t do even that.

They added not a single name of any abusive pastor to a database. Not one.

Instead, they launched a shell of a website—something a teenager could have put together—and they hyped it as a “historic” moment. (You really gotta hand it to the SBC’s public relations people…I expect they’re well-paid.)

And for the record, I was right about that part. Though the SBC actually did next to nothing on abuse reform, they still self-applauded as though they’d launched a moonshot.

It was symbolism, not substance. It was public relations, not real reform.

They dished up stones, not bread.

Furthermore, they also threw stones.

A draconian purge of women pastors diverted much of the media’s attention.

As Rick Pidcock tweeted: “It’s like the Salem Witch Trials, except instead of yelling ‘She’s a witch!’ Southern Baptist complementarian men yell ‘She’s a pastor!’”

Throwing stones at women—"witch trials”—served to divert attention from the SBC’s ongoing and horrific clergy sex abuse scandal.

Maybe that was part of the point. As Professor Susan Shaw observed: “They’re creating a smokescreen. They created this issue around women pastors so that we are actually not looking at their inability to deal with…the clergy sex abuse scandal.”

Meanwhile, kids and congregants continue to be sexually violated by Southern Baptist pastors who are able to act with impunity, because there’s still no effective system of institutional accountability.