Liberty as a Cloak for Vice: Orientation and Order in the Southern Baptist Convention Sexual Abuse Scandal

ABSTRACT

In 2019 a series of articles detailing decades of sexual abuse in Southern Baptist churches. Reports revealed that the convention and its congregants downplayed rather than confront the abuses by relying on two doctrinal components, congregational autonomy and scriptural inerrancy, to excuse inaction and silence survivors. Kenneth Burke argues that orientations such as the Southern Baptist Convention is governed by a moral order that is established, maintained, and enforced by a group of rhetors he terms “priests” who are granted ownership of the key rhetorical components. Building from Burke’s positions, I argue that when confronted by moral failings, priests will use their associations with the symbols of authority in an orientation to rationalize inaction. Priests will argue that to act would be to reject core terms in the orientation’s identity and rely on communal allegiance to bypass responsibility. This rhetorical maneuver is demonstrated in the Southern Baptist sexual abuse scandal. The leadership of the convention and local congregations relied on key denominational terms to champion inaction when confronted. However, a closer inspection of their rhetoric on other issues, such as women in ministry and LGBTQIA + issues shows that their operations are more complicated than advertised.

KEYWORDS:

• organizational rhetoric
• Burke
• Baptist
• apologia
• order

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Burke (1937) argues that they may be contested at times by “prophets” who seek new interpretations that threaten the priests’ communal standing (p. 223). Prophets “challenge” the priests’ tenets and “lay claim to a place in the social structure by undermining the [priests’] credibility” (Milford, 2013, p. 119). As a result, priests strive for interpretations that ensure their order, orientation, and position is perpetuated.

2. Fundamentalists used the concept of scriptural inerrancy to enforce theological conformity. They voiced apprehension that congregations and seminaries were abusing the priesthood of the believer doctrine, which held that each Christian was able to interpret the Scriptures for themselves and served as the centerpiece of congregational autonomy and reevaluated this tradition out of concern that moderates were misapplying the principle. Drawn from I Peter 2:5 which refers to Christians as “a holy priesthood,” the “priesthood of the believer,” Farnsley (1994) writes, “was a hallmark of Baptist belief. To them such a priesthood meant that no believer stood above or below any other, or, more to the point, that none stood between any other and God” (p. 77).

3. The verses read, “Jesus replied, ‘Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning. I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery.’” It is important to note that Jesus’s instruction in these verses is explicitly directed toward the husband and not the wife, which in this case was the aggrieved party.

4. In the epistle to the Romans, Paul the apostle specifically mentions that she was serving before he was. For centuries translators simply refused to believe it was a woman and used the masculine Junias, but in latter centuries scholars pointed out that the name’s spelling was definitely intended to be feminine, meaning that Junia was absolutely a woman of position in the early Christian church (Hartmann, 2020).

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Mike Milford

Mike Milford is a professor at Auburn University. His research uses critical tools to better understand discourses of power and its abuse in organizational rhetoric.