One day after the removal of a prominent seminary president following a series of contentious remarks about women, Southern Baptists have begun a public reckoning.
The forced retirement of Paige Patterson, the president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, has broken a dam of anger, resentment and recrimination both for his comments about abused women as well as apparent efforts by the seminary’s trustees to protect his reputation even as they eased him out.
While not discussing Patterson by name, Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., sounded an alarm.
“I have to see it as the judgment of God upon a denomination and the larger evangelical movement for decades of failure in dealing rightly with questions of sexual abuse and misbehavior,” Mohler said in an interview with RNS.
Mohler warned that the impact of the #MeToo movement on the denomination was just beginning and that “we’re going to discover this problem is far more widespread.”
He was referring to comments by Patterson in a 2000 interview and a 2014 sermon in which he boasted that he once advised a woman to stay with her abusive husband and objectified the body of a 16-year-old girl as “built.” Both resurfaced in the past few weeks in the media. On Tuesday (May 22), The Washington Post reported that in 2003 Patterson asked a…
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