The Southern Baptist Convention is being racked…again…by its history of sexual abuse and systematic efforts at covering it up.  I grew up in a Southern Baptist church….mine a split-off from the SBC which it castigated for being “too liberal”….and I know a lot about “hiding stuff.”  My life has been one ego-driven cover-up which is now mercifully being shredded, a dissolution allowing me to see, and even experience, what I so glibly back then described as “the Grace of God.”

Religion, in all forms and expressions, is subject to the whole gamut of “sins of the flesh.”  The riotousness of my  youth and most of my life was covered up with an hypocritical need to “not be found out.”  This is just the “sin” of being human as, per T.S. Eliot, “humankind cannot bear very much reality.”  This is because if we allow reality to intrude into our little self-serving fortress, ou r facade would be in jeopardy and it is easier to just deny what is so very obvious to others.  This “intrusion,” if and when it comes, is always frightening, motivating our “flesh” dimension to double-down in its denial system.  This violation, though, I now realize can be a visitation from “the Spirit of God.”

In the following link, you can read a report of a former notable Southern Baptist Church leader, Russell Moore, castigating his erstwhile church for its hypocrisy on the matter of sexual abuse.  But the “hypocrisy” goes much further than sexuality as this church, like all religious traditions often falls prey to the very human temptation to use spirituality as a facade to cover up “the flesh,” whereas the Gospel taught us we could opt for more human-ness—vulnerability, anxiety, and even despair as the Spirit of God does Her work on us.

A caveat is in order.  Today, long past my Baptist years and its fundamentalism, I am still very proud of that tradition which offered me a “hunger and thirst after righteousness” which is being somewhat sated as I wrestle with that “beast” called “humility.” (See T.S. Eliot quote at conclusion.)  This tradition offered me the gift of Holy Writ, only the Bible at that point, but also an intuitive insight that there is more to the whole of life than the perfunctory.

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T. S. Eliot, “Oh the shame of motives late revealed, and the awareness of things ill-done, and done to others harm, which once you took for exercise of virtue.” (The Four Quartets)

Link to news story about the SBC sex scandal—https://www.rawstory.com/southen-baptists-abuse/