I Like Chocolate, You Like Vanilla: What Do the Taliban and the Southern Baptist Convention Have in Common?
The Southern Baptist Convention has been the gold standard of Protestantism since it began in 184⁵¹. It has stood for religious righteousness. It has been a stalwart of the anti-abortion movement. It has formed the thinking of generations of young men and women. It has also been covering up the gross misdeeds of its pastors and preachers and other leaders in the same fashion as the Catholic Church did with priests and other church leadership. In a nearly 300-page report, many of the misdeeds of the Southern Baptist Convention’s clergy are reported and lurid details revealed.
It seems that the Convention covered up the names of sexual abusers. There is a current list of over 700 people who have been accused of sexual abuse or maybe exploitation². Many times these people were moved on to other churches to a fresh new crop of unsuspecting innocents. That act alone points to the actual problem within the Convention. It is not a religious organization. It’s a boy’s club.
One instance serves to demonstrate the nature of the boy’s club attitude prevalent in the organization. A 14-year-old girl was molested by a pastor and she got pregnant³. She was required to confess before the entire church congregation but was not allowed to name her molester. She shouldered all of the blame, by design of the church. In other words, in the eyes of the church, she was guilty of sin but the pastor, being a man, was not. The attitude was that the girl, like Eve, seduced the poor hapless pastor with an apple no doubt, and he just could not help himself.
The point here is that sons of preacher men are apples which do not fall far from the tree. But more than that they’re taught from an early age that men are to be over women. Men are to rule women. Women are just too simple-minded to fend for themselves. Women are so enamored with sex that they can think of little else. However, these same folks forget that David actually sent Bathsheba’s husband to the front lines of battle in the hopes he would be killed so that David could inspect the bathing Bathsheba up close and personal like. They forget that Solomon talked of a woman’s breasts as bunches of grapes. They forget or refuse to consider a lot of the holy writ.
Once you can see into the mindset that allows a religious leader to have his way with a young girl, then it is not hard to understand why that same religious leader would not much care for that young girl to have an abortion, because she’d be aborting his baby. So he has to have a religious justification to force her to keep his baby and that comes in the form of anti-abortion rhetoric. It also comes in the form of anti-gay rhetoric. And it supports authoritarian theocracy.
There is little to no difference between the Taliban zealotry and the Southern Baptist zealotry. Both preach theocracy as God’s law. They say so and that makes it God’s law. It’s kind of like ice cream. It doesn’t really make much difference if it’s chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, or even raspberry gelato praline supreme. It’s all ice cream. And if I look at it from that point of view then a theocrat is a theocrat. Something that is inherently true about any and all beliefs is that they must be limiting. They must be even more limiting if the belief is set in stone. No growth can take place in such a believer. There is not room for anything other than the rigid belief which defines the reality of such an individual.
Throughout history whenever beliefs became so stoic that they could not be adjusted, a great social upheaval was forced. When Henry the VIII found his wives were not able to give him sons he changed the religion of the court. When Pope Clement V realized that his power was being diluted by the Knights Templar he conspired with Philip IV of France to take them down. When religious freedom was withheld from the Pilgrims by Charles I, they took off from England and landed on Plymouth Rock.
History has not been fair with Theocrats, however. Whenever one Theocrat was defeated it has always been by another Theocrat. But then religion is a lot like ice cream. I mean people who like chocolate often cohabitate with people who like strawberry, or even pralines and cream. It’s all ice cream after all and if I believe in vanilla that does not prevent you from believing you like rocky road. There’s no skin off my nose if you like pistachio.
Look folks, the Crusades are over. They’ve been over for a long time. All you Christian soldiers can stand down. This may come as a shock to some of you but two things can be true at the same time. God is a really busy guy. He has lots of aspects. If I worship the rocky road aspect I can certainly try your vanilla aspect. It doesn’t mean I’m going to convert to vanilla and it doesn’t mean that I am going to go to war with you to eat rocky road only. I mean ice cream is ice cream, isn’t it?
If we could agree that religion and ice cream have a lot in common then I’ll bet that we could even find a way to begin to agree on such issues as marriage. Yep, it’s true that marriage has been sanctioned by our religions. But marriage is also a social contract. See, here’s an example of two things being true at the same time. It’s perfectly fine if the state sanctions marriage in its fashion, and religion sanctions marriage in its fashion. If people want to believe in same-sex copulation they should have at it. If it does not cause social unrest then no one should care.
But as long as there are theocratic authoritarians then we are going to have “thought police” trying to force us to believe or think in the way they prescribe. That just can not ever function in a society. It would seem therefore that we as a society have two choices. One choice is to advertise our differences and thereby excite those who find our differences disturbing. Another choice is to mind our own business and let that which goes on behind closed doors stay behind closed doors. I see nothing to be gained by passing laws such as those which forbid a woman from having an abortion or a teacher from teaching about some people being gay. Or even that some people may be so provincial that they never have a chance to see other cultures and therefore are prejudiced toward the culture that they know. Isn’t all that perfectly normal? Is it really necessary to bring all this drama to bear on issues which can be compared to ice cream? Or is it that necessary because we boys have to feel like we are the most important thing or thingy to our women folk? Or maybe it’s because our women folk have to feel like they are the only thing or thingy important to the boys? Either way, it’s much ado about ice cream. Don’t you think?
References
1. (n.d.). Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). Retrieved May 27, 2022, from https://www.sbc.net/
2. Graham, R. (2022, May 27). Southern Baptists Release List of Alleged Sex Abusers. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/26/us/southern-baptist-sex-abusers.html
3. Southern Baptists Refused to Act on Abuse, Despite Secret List of Pastors | News & Reporting. (2022, May 23). Christianity Today. Retrieved May 27, 2022, from https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2022/may/southern-baptist-abuse-investigation-sbc-ec-legal-survivors.html
