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Hey, Robert here. It's been like two months since I had LASIK and I'm still seeing 2020. All I had to do was go in for a consultation, then go in for a maybe 10 minute procedure and then my eyes have been great ever since. You know, I healed up wonderfully. It was very simple, couldn't have been a better experience. So if you want to explore LASIK plus I can't recommend it enough. They have over 20 years experience in the industry and they performed more than two million treatments right now if you want to try getting LASIK plus you can get $1000 off of your surgery when you're treated in September, that's $500. Of per eye, just visitmylasikoffer.com to schedule your free consultation. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried true crime. And if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's breaker handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. In the 1980s and 90s, a psychopath terrorized the country of Belgium. A serial killer and kidnapper was abducting children in the bright light of day. From Tenderfoot TV and iHeartRadio, this is La Monstra, a story of abomination and conspiracy. The story about the man who simply become known as. Lamaster. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Doctor, Doctor Peterson, why is it you think all of these these these left wing radicals seem to fundamentally hate the the ideas that built the United States? Well, you know, I mean, it's the, it's the story of Cain, right. You have these this just jealousy, this deeply green jealousy in their DNA. And if, as they say in the the film tombstone, you know you're angry, you're angry at God for for. For being, and I think we all feel that, but this is just the lashing out of children who have not been properly developed in our society. Just thank you. Thank you, Doctor Peterson. Oh no, he's crying. He's he's crying. He's crying. Oh, God. It's OK. It's OK. It's OK. Jordan Balthazar Peterson. Sorry. To be clear. That was I was coming from a photograph from a Sports Illustrated. Ohh. That's good. I do find beautiful one from the 1970s when things were still ordered properly. So I've been looking at my copy of maps of meaning and yeah, terrible book. I apologize. Well, that's all the time Doctor Peterson has for us today. I'm Robert Evans. Let's go to the second portion of behind the ******** where I introduce my Co hosts. Katie Stoll, Cody Johnston. Hello. Hello. How you guys doing? Great guests to cohost. Look, you you'll always be my co-host, even though our other show is paused while we wait for the litigation to finish. Yeah, any day. Any day now. Any day now. I mean, they deposed us all this week, so yeah, it's looking good. Hello guys. It's good to have you back on. Good to be doing this again. And I thought, I'm going to have some of my best friends. We're all going to sit down and talk. What better thing to chat about than a massive, decades long sexual abuse scandal within America's largest Protestant denomination? **** you, man. So well. Like, yeah, I love Robert. Hmm. Good stuff. Yeah. So today our ******* is the Southern Baptist Convention. What do you guys know about the the SVC? Is it a, is that phrase true all all cops are Baptists? Is that. Yes, that is, that is, I mean, actually, broadly speaking, yeah, yeah, like generalized, some of them are Pentecostals and those are the real scary ones. I don't know much. I don't know much. I am the perfect canvas for this story. I wish all cops were Anabaptists, because the Anabaptists were actually pretty dope. But that's a story for another day. Also got massacred in a castle, but anyway. So, but anyway, but anyway, I digress. Yeah, the Southern Baptist, the Southern Baptist Convention, we'll talk about what that means. But like, the Southern Baptist Convention is like the thing that organizes the Southern Baptist denomination. Essentially, Southern Baptists are the largest Protestant denomination in the United States today. There's around 14 million of them, and there's like 46 or 47,000. SBC affiliated churches in the United States, so real big and very, very conservative. A lot of people will argue that like the Southern Baptists are kind of the heart of the conservative movement in the United States in a lot of ways. And at the moment as we speak, like literally the week that we're recording this, a bunch of ****** well, OK, the literal week that we were recording this, they had their annual Southern Baptist Convention where they vote on a bunch of stuff including like the Dude who's going to be, we'll call him the President of the Southern Baptist. And they vote on, like, resolutions and stuff. We'll talk about that at the end in Part 2 a little bit more how that went. But yeah, the the thing that was kind of one of the top stories about the Southern Baptists is both this kind of war between. It's really not between left and right. It's between like, normal conservatives and absolute fascist maniacs, right. Like, Oh yeah, that classic tale. Yeah, that classic tale of, like, people who don't like taxes and people who want to do a genocide. Yes. So that clashes and this has been actually going on for years, but the thing that has kind of sent a curveball in it is starting like a year or so ago, two years ago, something like that, the a series of articles started being published by the Houston Chronicle. About a massive sexual abuse scandal within the SBC. So we're going to talk about that a lot. That's what we're all we're going to be going into today. But before we get into that, we need to do some history, right? Because while over the course of my lifetime and y'all's lifetimes, the Southern Baptists have been a huge force for rigid, regressive, often vicious conservatism, they didn't start that way the very first time. Yeah, it is kind of weird. How different this actually gets kicked off, though, is from where they are now. So the very First Baptist Church was founded in 1609 in Amsterdam by an English dissenter named John Smith. Now John and his fellows again, what are the center is these are folks like, you know, you got that Church of England thing, right? Because you get that king and there's like, you know, wants to ****. There's other stuff than the *******. He wanted to. He wanted to **** like he wanted to. Wanted marriage is any whatever, right? You wanna do **** you couldn't do as a Catholic. There's other stuff going people always get. Well, it wasn't just about that. This was going on too and this was going on to it. **** you and your English history. I don't care anyway, you have these, you have this Church of England, get established, breaks away the Cath Catholicism is illegal, all that good stuff. And then you have these, like dissenters who are not Catholic but also are not. Don't want to don't like the idea of the Church of England and John Smith, particularly in his followers in Amsterdam. The thing they don't like is the idea of the religion being affiliated with the. State government. They don't want a state religion. They think there should be sure separation between church and state. Right. And we'll see about there. Yeah. There's this less about like, yes. And again, this is not because of like, this is less about personal liberty, I think, in their hearts than it is about like, the state will fundamentally corrupt the faith. Yeah. Which it's it's it sure does seem to. Yeah. Yeah. Might have been right on the money there, John. Now, there's some other stuff going on here, including the fact that John and his fellow early Baptists rejected the baptism of infants like the Anabaptists. I think you might be able to tell where the name Baptist comes from by the fact that earlier in history there was a group called the Anabaptists. They don't believe a baby should be baptized. Only adults can be baptized because, like, a baby can't choose to be Christian. Like a A an infant cannot accept Jesus Christ because it's a baby. Ah, yeah, that tracks. That tracks to me. Now, an awful lot of people get murdered over this. Like, it is astounding how many human beings are killed because some folks are like, what if only adults who could consent got baptized. That is a big, big thing. So we can kill each other. So much death comes from the holiness of God. How we should devote to him this is just like, and this is again, so you see, fundamentally the one of the big splits between other Protestant denominations in the Baptist is the Baptists are really focused on personal liberty and autonomy, right? The idea that you can't get baptized until you can fully choose to make an informed choice as to whether or not to to to be a Christian, which I think is, broadly speaking, better than dunking babies in the water. But I also don't think baptism babies has any particular. Back on them, because their babies, they don't remember ****. You could do whatever, like drawing, but if they die? Well, yeah. If they die without being baptized, they go to hell. I'm actually not a Christian, but I do believe that just that's the one that that broke through. The one mentally evil is just for babies. Yeah. And health for babies, baby hell, where it's like you. You have to. You have to. I don't know. What would baby hell be, I guess. Like the like, I mean, just be a pilot. Like just a room full of babies with no adults, right? I have to say that I think being a baby probably is hell, you're just sitting and you can't. You don't even know what's happening. But then you get the things you need and comfort from all you got to do. People coming at me really close with their giant faces, I think being a baby is. Probably an incredibly traumatic experience. It does seem difficult having having known a couple of babies. It seems way harder than what I do not envy you, man. And then at one, it starts being good cause you can talk and like, yeah, then you can start to **** around with people, you know. Yeah, yeah. Power. OK. So in the decades that followed John Smith in the establishment of his church, the Baptist faith grows. And it actually has a split very early on between a chunk of Baptists who feel like. Is that the. It's like murder of crows? Chunk of Baptists? Yeah, a chunk of Baptists. Yeah. So half of them are like, I don't know if it's exactly half, but one, a big chunk are like, anyone can be saved. Jesus Christ died for everybody, right? All you have to do, you have to accept Christ as your Lord and Savior, and you're saved by being bada boom. And then there's a chunk. They're like, no, God picked a small number of people all throughout history. I think it's like 160,000 to be elected to go to heaven, and everyone else goes to hell. Is it a thing that only lunatics believe? But it's very popular in this. So as a general Rule, Baptists were the anti authoritarian strain of Christianity in this. They believed in a separation of church and state, they believed in freedom of conscious conscience, and they believed in the value of individual life experience in preaching. And this is a big this starts like because the Catholic Church in this. You don't. Insert your opinions into talking about the Bible. You read the Bible, right, and you do the liturgy and you have this, like creed that you read and it has all been laid down and other people like, your job is to go read the same thing every Catholic hears, right? Your job is not to extemporaneous size from the ******* pulpit, you know. And now that you've got these Protestant denominations and they have some different, there's Protestants who are like, no, because the Bible is inerrant. You preach just the Bible. Baptists are like, well, no. Your God made you as a unique person. And your experiences and beliefs about faith are a part of like what God has given you. So you should share your personal experience with faith with other people, right? This scares the **** out of Anglican and Calvinist leaders. They do not like this. And the main reason why is that the Baptists really extend this attitude that like, well, God made us all the way we are with the capacity to make choices and experience things, and he wants us to share that with each other. So clearly women should be allowed to speak in church. This is a big problem for people. So you you've got, you've got, I don't know, quite past people. Yeah, they're not quite pastors, I don't think. But you have women preaching the word of God in Baptist churches. And that is a real, like, folks get very honry about that and spoilers. They still are today. So, yeah, through the 1700s, Baptists were attacked out of the fear that their beliefs would overthrow male leadership, not just in the church but in government. Right. And they believe that, like men had been put above women. This is part of God's design. There will be chaos. And. And and violence and horror if women use surface chaos in our lives. Crystal Oh yeah. God, I'm sorry. He just pops up. Jordan B Peterson would absolutely have been like, like, if he's in the 1700s, he's never not talking about Baptists. Yeah, like kids every hour of his life and still still claiming that patriarchy doesn't exist and has never existed. And it's made-up by some hierarchies are ingrained within the human soul and older. Older than trees. Promise you, Peterson. Yeah. So I went to quote right now from a very enlightening write up in religion dispatches by Diana Bass quote the Baptist commitment to liberty also shaped revolution among Christian women, empowering them to exercise their spiritual gifts and take up leadership in the emerging religious movement. Indeed, one of the first attacks levelled at Baptists in England was that they scandalously allowed for sheep preachers, including one Mississippi preachers. Right sheeters. That's right, including one misses. Haddaway waiting for you get together, including one misses Attaway, who's Tuesday afternoon Bible lectures in 1645 attracted as many as 1000 eager listeners. Baptist women were among the greatest radicals of a revolutionary century, and they preached a gospel of visionary egalitarianism based in biblical injections like your daughters will prophecy. And there is no longer male and female in Christ Jesus. So there's some radical **** going on in the Baptists, yeah. This **** I love? That's pretty cool. Radicalism way back when. I mean, that does it for me. And a Baptist? Yeah. OG Baptist. ******* revolutionaries in a lot of ways, like, let you you open the door for women and look what they do for you. Yeah, we are abolishing gender sixteenths or 17th Century Baptists. Yeah. Now they're abolishing it. Score crisis, whatever. Specifically. Yeah, it's whatever. So conservatives at the time struck back against progress, as is why they exist, and they accused Baptists. Fomenting revolution and chaos. One pamphlet from the mid 1600s warned that female Baptists quote oh you're going to like this Katie. Female Baptists have quote lately advanced themselves with vainglorious arrogance to preach in mixed congregations of men and women in an insolent way. So usurping authority over men and assuming a calling unwarranted by the word of God for women to use. Yet all under the colour that they all as the spirit moves them wherein they highly wrong and abuses the motions of the blessed spirit. To make him to be the author of such, of so much schism, disorder and confusion, they being rather led by the strong delusions of the Prince of Darkness. To countenance their innate ignorance, pride and Vainglory. Baby, that's what we call word salad. Yeah, you ****** because she's better at it than you. Better at preaching than you, Jordan Peterson. What did I do? So Baptist radicals were met with weaponized Bible quotes about how women need to, you know, stay quiet and submit to their husbands and all that good stuff. And England, a whole lot of Baptists gets get jailed for doing Baptist stuff. And when they refused to stop anyway, you know, things get. Anyway, this is part of why a lot of Baptists wind up in North America, right? There are crackdowns across Europe of Baptist communities, and they're like, well, let's go colonize a place. Now, this is where things start to go wrong, because #1 they're now becoming kind of implicit in the genocide or the series of genocides that are about to follow. Yeah, but also because it's North America in the 1600s, they're going to start to become complicit in slavery. This is where things go awry. Pretty good for a while, though. For a while I like. And the episode where we were, no. Yeah. So the Baptists know he had a good 30 years. Now tell that that's like, yeah, 30 years. Not even someone's lifetime generate generation. Yeah, that's not bad. I mean, that's. Yeah, good for the time. It's it's longer than we have left and as a United States. So, I mean it's disappointing. Yeah, it is disappointing. It is. This is a there, although it ends. This is this is a story that's going to end on a kind of hopeful note. So that's good. This won't be as sad as a lot of things. And although, boy howdy, it's gonna be a rough road to get there. So in the old country, right, Baptists had lived in a slave state as well, the British Empire out most of the countries in Europe, slavery is, if it's not within the country itself, the country's economy is heavily reliant upon slavery and like colonies and stuff, right. So obviously Baptists and you know. But personal ownership of slaves was not really much of a thing to the nearly to the extent that it became in like the US S and Baptists were radicals. They they did not tend to have a lot of money. So you didn't have before they kind of came to the US I don't think they were really Baptist slave owners certainly not is any kind of organized group right. Maybe there were some individuals who did but in the United States Baptists because so many of them come over in very short order they are the largest Protestant sect in the new you know first thing the colonies and then eventually and. The new United States and because there's a lot of them, and because, you know, when you travel to a country that's in the state of being born and that is appropriating and and stealing a great legal land, a lot of them wind up being rich. And they get wealth and they get power and they get slaves and they stop being quite so cool and radical. So the First Baptist had been big. One of the foundational things about being a Baptist is that they are a non hierarchical religion, which means that they abided by no state interference in their worship, unlike the Anglican Church. And they also have no bishops or popes. Their radicalism actually extended beyond that. Baptists had no unified creed. So like the Nicene Creed or whatever like that. They don't have anything like that. There's no liturgy. There's nothing that if you are a Baptist, every Baptist like reads this thing and like every Baptist goes straight other than like the Bible. But again, there's a lot of. Freedom and like how it's preached and like whatnot. So the Baptists in the United States very quickly start to split along kind of the same lines as the rest of the new country splits. Northern Baptists continue to hew to this anti hierarchy intellectual tradition and a lot of them do become abolitionists. A lot of Northern Baptists, Baptists are part of the abolition movement. But in the South, Baptists who had accumulated wealth and power and slaves start to see things very differently. Now they still reject choice, hierarchy, and they claim to not have a creed, but a growing number of them start to argue that slavery is not just acceptable, but is divinely inspired. The actual will of God, Doctor Richard Furman, who is an early Southern Baptist leader, wrote in a letter to the Governor of South Carolina quote. The right of holding slaves is clearly established in the Holy Scriptures, both by precept and example. Now this causes a rift because by the 1800s the, you know, mid 1800s, the 1840s. Slavery. I don't know if you guys know this kind of a contentious issue in the United States. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of people disagree. Did they smooth it out? Yeah. They smooth it out? Yes. They smooth it out about it. Was there some sort of fight? There's a people call it the big disagreement that everything was fine after that. Everything was fine after. Yeah. Civil debate. The civil debate. And then everything was good. That's what we had. It happens, obviously. The Civil War starts in 1860 in the United States. It happens a bit earlier for the Baptists in 1845. There is a fundamental rift within the Baptist faith over the question of whether or not slaveholders can be missionaries. That's what kind of again, there's been a bunch of arguments and debates. But, like, fundamentally this issue is kind of like winds up being the thing that that sets the kettle of boiling. Like, can slaveholders go out and preach the gospel? Can you, can you go out and win souls for Christ while owning human beings? Right. It's a good question. That is a good question. Easy question, but also easy question. The Northern Baptists would say very easy question, no. But the Southern Baptists say yes. And the Baptist faith splits. And the very first Southern Baptist Convention takes place in Augusta, GA in May of 1845. And I'm going to quote from a write up in patheos's Daylight Atheism blog quote largely comprised of slaveholders. The Gathering endorsed the peculiar institution. Slavery was biblical abolition. Sinful Baptists of the north were wrong to oppose slavery. Abolitionists bore responsibility for the Baptist division. Baptists of the South have been patient with the agitators. But enough was enough, right? We've it's just again, tails, all this time we've been very patient. We've been very civil with us needing the slaves. But you, you people need to calm down. That's such a. It's amazing how the same thing is is happens forever, all the time time. Might be some sort of flat circle. I've heard so I've heard that, I've heard that. Reggie Ledoux I did have I I did an event in Austin recently and I I had a lunch and a couple of lone stars there and I considered I should have done it. I regret not doing it. I should have bought a 6 pack of Lone Star to walk into my book signing. Just like, Oh yeah, pounded 6 Lone stars while like, ranting about nihilism to the audience. Take out your knife and start carving the empties. Yeah, yeah, Robert, I see that in your future. I want. I really want that for you. And doesn't want to grow up to be rust coal, like, honestly? Beautiful talking. Harrison's characters name? *** **** right. You're Woody Harrelson's character. Nobody. Yeah. Anyway, whatever. Great. Great season of television. Never watched the show again after that start saying Harrison had to be good. Yeah, not worth. After that, we needed an ad break. Know who we Reggie Ledoux. We Reggie do. Cody, you ******* Reggie Lee did it. You did it. So go, go, go. Watch the first season of True Detective again. And also listen to these ads. They're the same length. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. 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Is there anything that we haven't talked about or or I should have asked you or you'd like to add that seems relevant? You should have asked me why I'm missing fingers on my left hand. A story about sacrifice. I think his suffering drove him to try to alleviate suffering. And the shocking discovery I made where I faced the consequences of writing a book I thought would help people? Isn't that funny? It's not funny at all. It's depressing. Very depressing. Religious history is back with more. Listen to revisionist history on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. I've never seen less enthusiasm for a great idea in my life. Ohh, we're back. Boy, that was pretty good show, True Detective. Pretty good. Show that. Enjoy it. Yeah. So the Southern Baptist faith grows rapidly after 1845. And it, you know, it's got, there's a lot of slave money behind it, which allows them to do things like set up a **** load of schools and build a really, really powerful publishing arm to start pushing out newspapers and magazines all over the primarily the South. Now the faith is is decentralized on paper again, there's no central church, there's no Pope, but you start to have these very wealthy institutions arrive. That are putting out content for schools, that are putting out like stuff, you know, training pastors and whatnot, and as a result, things. Even though the Baptists, Southern Baptists, say that it's decentralized, things get very ******* centralized, right? You start to congregate a lot of power in these institutions that are influential for the Southern Baptists. And of course, because the men who are funding them and running them are slaveholders, supporting slavery becomes a religious creed. The Southern Baptists in 1851 Baptist News editor wrote, quote as a question of morals, it is between US and God. As a question of political economy, it is with us alone as free and independent states. Right? That interesting word choice. That word. What's that word? What's that first word you said? In what? Yeah, states. Oh my God, it's cool. So in 1856, a prominent Alabama Baptist leader label slavery quote as much an institution of heaven as marriage, basically saying of course there will be slaves. Heaven. It wouldn't be heaven if I didn't known people. I'd be happy without my property. Yeah, it's amazing tying slavery to marriage. Yeah, it is. It is interesting. Interesting. Make my stomach churn every time I think about how recent all this **** is. Like, it's not all that far to go, actually. 50, ****** ******* God. This is like 100 years before Martin Luther King is is marching around. You know? It's like not that distant from us. It's lifetime like, I mean, not 118. The parents knew people who'd been alive in this. Absolutely, absolutely. Or at least could have. So the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary is founded in 1859 in Louisville, KY, and it provides the Southern Baptists with a place to train their clergy. Again, part of the thing with Baptists is that they're supposed to be no centralized control over clergy. People are not like, it's not like, you know, if you like being a Catholic priest, it's like a whole ******* deal, right? Like you gotta like, it's like becoming a mechanic or something. You can just get declared asset like if your congregation. Says, hey, we like this guy. He's the pastor. You're the ******* pastor, right? But now they also have a seminary that is training people to be pastors, which is very centralized. Oh, and by the way, the four guys who own the seminary own 50 slaves in between them. So when Abraham Lincoln was elected, no, yeah, it's fun. It's good times. It's good times. So Abraham Lincoln gets elected, and the very normal dudes at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary reacted, as you had expect, by immediately arguing for secession. Now, some Baptist leaders had been arguing for secession in the early 1850s, and the Southern Baptist faith overwhelmingly supported the Confederacy in the Civil War that followed, which should not be a surprise. And in 1863, meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention. SBTS founder John brought us, seen by some as almost the founding father of like the Southern Baptist Convention, wrote and submitted resolutions pledging Southern Baptist support for the Confederacy. Now, Cody, I know you're just like on page 105 of your U.S. history textbook from middle school, but I'm going to spoil something for you. Civil war doesn't go great for the Confederacy. Yeah, I know, and I'm sorry. I know you were just getting there, right? But the flags are still around. It seems like it was successful. I I see why that's confusing, Cody. But no, it does not work out. Victory, right? We're celebrating. A victory. We're actually kind of getting to some of that. So. Oh, good. Yeah. So the South S loses the war and kind of as a result of the South losing the war and a number of things that happened with it, there are rather fewer living Southern Baptist men in 1865 than there had been in 1860. Now, emancipation and the end of the war leads eventually to something that kind of starts to approach equal rights for black people. Right. And obviously, this is not an even, you know, you've got your reconstruction period where things are looking good. They've got this horrible crackdown. Uh, you've got the establishment of Jim Crow laws and the SBTS, the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. And thus the leadership of the faith are hugely in favour of Jim Crow and then finding ways to reduce and eliminate any kind of legal equality that black people might have. The people who are kind of running the Southern Baptist Convention oppose equality and support the separation of white and black people. Professor William Wilson assured his students whites will rule in the South. Still now some Southern Baptist leaders like Broaddus did evolve their views as time went on. Brought us eventually came around as believing slavery was wrong. In 1882, I don't give him a lot of points for that. Like, you'll see defenders of Southern Baptist leaders being like, well, look, no. Brought us realize that it was wrong. It's like, yeah, in the 1880s. Like, yeah, yeah. Look, man, if you're, like, raised in the slaveholding South and in, like, 1850 or like, you know what? This is wrong. **** it. I'm an abolitionist. Now you get a lot of points. It's hard to evolve beyond the things that your culture considers fine when they're amoral. That's a that's that takes courage. 1882, I don't really care that you came around and you know. Radical anymore? Like, yeah, like, yeah, yeah. That's not really like, good, I guess, but OK. But he also argues against those in the faith. What he does do is he argues against Southern Baptist once the war is over and they've lost. He does argue against people within his his religion who think that black worship is less acceptable to God than white worship. And as a result, there's start to be a few Black Southern Baptist churches now. This is a more significant chunk of the faith now. It's still not most and it's like 7% of of SBC churches are are majority black. But Black Southern Baptists do grow to be a more significant chunk of the faith throughout the early 1940s and particularly in the modern period, an actually kind of disproportionate chunk of pastors are black. But yeah, the Southern Baptists, black Southern Baptists do become more of a a factor in in the faith even as kind of leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention. Take advantage of this racist system that they've built in the post war S and For more information on that, I want to quote from an investigation published by the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Yeah, that's actually kind of a spoiler for where some of this, but this is the same institution that we were just reading a bunch of arguments for why God loves slavery. Quote Joseph Brown, the seminary's most important donor and chairman of its board of Trustees, 1880 to 1894, earned much of his fortune by the exploitation of mostly black convict lease. Laborers Josephine Brown's coal mines and iron furnaces coerced the full extent of Labor from Georgia convicts by employing the same brutal punishments and tortures formerly employed by slave drivers. The legal system and trapped thousands of black men, often on trumped up charges and without any due process protections, and earned money for sheriff's and state treasuries by selling their labor. It was worse than slavery. Investigations of Brown's Dade Co operation concluded that if there is a hell on Earth, it is the Dade coal mines. Brown reaped enormous profits from his: iron businesses. His 1880 gift of $50,000 was instrumental in saving the seminary from financial collapse. At his death, the seminary honored him for his service as a trustee and for the generous financial support he had provided. OK, Yep, pretty bad. That guy's pretty bad stuff. So as you might guess, though, the SBTS recently has done some broadly admirable things in terms of grappling with its legacy. But of course, even in these, again, broadly, Admiral, because there's some really good work they've done on kind of the ****** ** parts of their history. They also still toss some ******** up in there, for example. Again, most of these Southern Baptist sources you'll find grappling with their legacy. You'll note that guys like Broaddus came around and that other theological leaders, specifically William J McLaughlin, loudly repudiated the children of Ham stuff, which is do you guys know anything about that is also a thing in the Mormon Church. There's this idea, children at Cam. Yeah. There's like some **** in the Bible about these, like, children, these city, you know, there's all these cities God gets mad at and the Old Testament for, like, stuff. OK. So Hamza city, yeah, yeah. The Mormon Church will be preaching that kind of **** up until, like, when we were little. It's, you know, so but some guys in this. In this kind of like late end of the 1800s, very early 1900s, there are some Southern Baptist leaders who are like repudiating that. But, and this is good, it's important in your analysis of racism to mention stuff like that. But then after doing some really good research, you get lines like this quote, several faculty and trustees lamented the prevalence of lynching in the South, which is like, why would you even include, like, the fact that someone like, yeah. Lynching seems ****** **. That's not that's not pointing anybody's Greiner, right, bringing down our property values? What a bummer. Like, such a weird word for that. It's weird. Like, maybe just don't even include that, right? If somebody did something to try to stop lynching, sure, of course that's a part of your history too. You know, they felt like they felt it's a bummer about it. But also, this is going to be a pattern that this exact kind of thing where you're like, well, we're not going to do anything and we're not going to take any action to try to make this less common. But we'll say it's bad, right? That is a real strong through line in the Southern Baptist Convention and the seminary. All that good. So while they lamented lynching, the SBTS approved of the Lost Cause mythology which spread in Southern Baptist schools and churches, and that, Cody is a big part of why you see so many Confederate flag stickers on cars. This is a historic take. We'll talk, we'll do a whole thing on the lost cause at some point. But basically it describes the Civil war as a conflict caused by not the South's desire to, in, like, maintain a nightmare system of, like human ******* but because of the South need to uphold their honor. And, you know, states rights and all this is, there's this, like, noble culture that like and may sometimes like the people who are smarter about it, be like, well, slavery was bad, but it wasn't any worse in the South and it wasn't all these other places. And like, there was all these good things. And it wasn't just about, like, obviously, it was about. Delivery. The Confederates at the time were like, yeah, it's about ******* slaves, literally. Yeah. Google. They weren't Hoy about it. It's all there. Yeah. Archibald T Robertson, a prominent professor at the SBTS in the early 1900s, supported and taught the books of Thomas Dixon as, like, Major Southern Baptist, like texts in their schools. Do you know who Thomas Dixon was? He wrote the clansman, which was adapted in 1915 to the film The birth of a nation. You guys books are all over Southern Baptist schools in the early 1900s. That's cool. Yeah, it's good to be educated. Yeah, now the SBT, reading. Reading is important. It's great to learn because knowledge is white power. Knowledge is white power. Ohh Christ. So SBTS faculty supported segregation until 1940, which, if we're going to be totally fair, means they were ahead of a lot of the United yeah, they beat some folks. They were not the last. You know that that's 1940s when the SBTS admits its first black students again. And this is the school that can, like, train people to become pastors. The process of giving up segregation was uneven because there's a bunch of Southern Baptist schools and stuff, but the SBTS integrates. Like, as a general rule, they integrate their classrooms in 1951 under the advice of Southern Baptist Convention President Ellis Fuller. This puts them like three years ahead of the federal mandate. In general, SBTS faculty and much of the Southern Baptist leadership supported the civil rights movement with hesitation, but apparently with some honesty. And in 1961 they invite Doctor Martin Luther King Junior to speak, which isn't nothing. So they are. They do like while there is this strong conservative chunk. They are able to like, they're not on the side that's you know. Anti Martin Luther King. Yeah. They're not like fighting tooth and nail, right, right, right. It's it's just kind of more like, well, I guess we're getting dragged into the present. But maybe that's not bad, which is not the worst that anyone in America handles things. Yeah. The best. I don't give them a lot of credit. Yeah, but not the worst. Yeah. So, yeah, let's give him a see. Give him a see, see. So, but yeah, by the early 19 C minus. By the early 1960s, a huge chunk of the faith had become quite liberal in their doctrine and progressive on a whole host of social and political issues. A lot of this has to do with the growth of of of black churches, black Southern Baptist churches. And yeah, only about 6% of Southern Baptists are black, but something like 1/5 of their churches are headed by black pastors. And in this. A lot of those folks are kind of more liberal. A lot of they're not the only ones there's, you know, there's this, this is the 60s, right? Like, there's this kind of progressive wave that's sweeping. Or a lot of the country. Now, as I've noted a few times, there is no creed for Southern Baptists, but they do have an, what they call an outline of faith, which is basically a creed. It's called the, yeah, it's called the Baptist faith and message. One thing that does legitimately separate the SBC from other faiths is that the faith and message is edited and revised over time and reflective to democratic or at least kind of quasi democratic pressure, some segment of people within kind of the faith every year kind of like vote on. Things that will be ways in which this will be like added in like different motions and stuff. So it is much more the Southern Baptist Convention is much more able to kind of move with the times than a lot of denominations that that are. So you know for as large and as centralized as it becomes it is kind of more reflective, able to be more reflective of the times and I'm going to quote from a write up by religion dispatches here. The first version was issued in 1925, during the heyday of the fundamentalist modernist crisis. In 1963, revision toned down the fundamentalism of the older statement, articulating more strongly Baptist latitude and doctrine that favored the liberty of conscious conscience. So you see, you've got this throughout the early part of the country, while there's also, you know, the things going on in the country about, like the civil rights movement and all this other stuff within the Baptist faith. There's this debate over fundamentalism. Is the Bible perfectly inerrant and unquestionable? And something to be taken totally literally. Or can we be like, not lunatics about how we read the Bible? Right. And in kind of this. For the middle of the century, the people who are like, yeah, let's adapt our faith to the modern era and, like, be different than people were in the 1920s and or in the 1860s or whatever. Those folks are winning. Like they're winning for a while now. This opened things up for Baptist churches that might in the future come to embrace and support even more. Radical ideas, women's rights, gay rights, all that good stuff. So, and indeed, Baptists for a time were some of the most liberal denominations. From 1965 to 1968, when abortion was kind of starting to become a hotbed issue in the United States. Baptist publications did not mention abortion like there's no evidence of it being an issue at all, nor did any Baptist body take action on it one way or the other. In 1970, a poll by the Baptist Sunday School Board found that 70% of pastors supported abortion to protect the mother. And 71% in the case of rape. In 1973, a poll by the Baptist Standard News Journal found that 90% of Texas Baptists believe the state's abortion laws were too restrictive. Cannot emphasize how different things were back then. That's wild. Yeah. And again, we talked about this in our episodes on the the religious right and the moral majority. This is it's it's not that big. It is starting to become politicized. And obviously Catholics have always been against it, right? But ******* Protestants don't have a long history in the United States of giving a **** about abortion. Now, 1973 is the year Roe V Wade, you know, happens, and the Southern Baptist Convention endorses the right to choose. And their big voting magic that year. Now, this makes some people happy, but it makes a lot of people angry, and it particularly infuriates a ******** named Larry Lewis. Larry is a Saint Louis pastor who went on to run the North American Mission Board. This is like the board that's we will be talking about them a lot later. They're like the folks running the SBC's like mission because like, that's the whole big deal for them going out and preaching to people. So in 1979, Larry Lewis picks up a newspaper that listed the Southern Baptist. Convention alongside the Unitarian Church as supportive of abortion as he later recalled. Quote that bothered me a lot. So now I'm going to quote from a write up by the Baptist press who suck and should gargle glass quote. So Lewis did something about it, proposing a 1980, the first of more than 20 pro-life resolutions adopted by the SBC over the next few decades. When Lewis became HMB home Mission board president of in 1987, one of his first actions was to create the Office of Abortion Alternatives to help churches establish crisis pregnancy centers. We did an episode of it could happen here on crisis pregnancy centers. Not great stuff, not they, not help. IMO no. I I would say not. So. You know, this is again, we have a couple of periods, one in the late 1600s and one now where like things were going great for a while and now they start to get ****** ** again. So Lewis was just one of the conservative white leaders of the church who started in the 1980s flipping the **** out about how the evil liberals were taking over America's most racist faith, most particularly and most significantly some of the leaders this scared. There two guys named Paige Patterson and Paul Pressler. Now, these were both prominent Southern Baptist names. I know, I know. You just know. Oh my God. You just know. ******* page pressler. You or ******* Paige Patterson? Or Paul pressler? Both of those guys, you know, have, like, opinions about inner city crime that are basically like basically a ******* neo-Nazi tract from the 1970s. Like, yeah, absolutely. Racial profiling. Oh my God. Species or some ****? Yeah, like, yeah, I am a nominative determinism list. For example, you hear the name Doctor Jordan B Peterson. You know what that guy's going to be serving? He's going to have a lot of opinions about snakes and gardens. I I had to make an order N is time for another outbreak. Unless yes, you know who else has strong opinions about racial hierarchies? They don't believe there should be any hierarchy if you only hierarchy, jeez, believes in is the hierarchy of children on the private hunting preserve. They keep going off of the coast of Indonesia and the people who hunt those children, as God intended. Promo code. How do you brisket? Yeah, however you want. It's not going to work. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for none of that. 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Is there anything that we haven't talked about or or I should have asked you or you'd like to add that seems relevant? You should have asked me why I'm missing fingers on my left hand. A story about sacrifice. I think his suffering drove him to try to alleviate suffering. And the shocking discovery I made where I faced the consequences of writing a book I thought would help people? Isn't that funny? It's not funny at all. It's depressing. Very depressing. Religious history is back with more. Listen to revisionist history on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. I've never seen less enthusiasm for a great idea in my life. Ah, we're back. So we're talking about Paige Patterson and Paul Pressler, who are not wild in the and again, this is kind of the 80s is when this all really ramps up. But the 70s, the Carter administration in particular, is when these guys all start being like we got to take our faith back from these ******* liberals now. Paige had started preaching as a teenager, and he moved on to occupy several positions running churches across the filthy ***. S He became president. Some scabby. Teen up there telling me about God and line. There's yeah, yeah, nobody. I voice cracking. All the better. It's like every time I see Mormon missionaries and it's like. My dudes, this is your first time out of the house. What do you what do you know about life? Do you have a door to door to? Like, come on, man. Like, are you offering what do you go work at a Sparrow or some ****? Like get some life experience, you know? Opening at Dairy Queen. Yeah, seriously, dude. Like what? Come on. Anyway, so, yeah, page starts as a teenager. He becomes president of Criswell College in Dallas, TX. There's my city of hate in 1975. Now. Criswell is a private Baptist college. It started as a Bible institute, and as its president, it was Paige's job to inculcate new generations in the doctrine of biblical inerrancy. He is one of these fundamentalists, you know, and he's not a big fan of Roe V Wade. He does not like the idea either that women can be ordained as ministers, which is starting to happen. He's really doesn't like that. And again, that's very anti Baptist originalism, right? Like you need to go back. Yeah, my do be a little more conservative. Maybe. But no, he doesn't like this and he believes the Bible included quote an assignment from God in this case that women that a woman not be involved in teaching or ruling capacity over men. Says who? Says you. Says him. Well, it's very revealing of his attitude too, because if it's like a normal person to be like, well, yeah, why wouldn't. I mean, if it's all that matters, to preach is like your relationship with God. And God loves everybody equally. Why wouldn't a woman be able to preach? And his attitude is if you are a preacher, you are ruling. And women can't rule, like, and it's like, yeah man, maybe that's maybe you shouldn't be doing anything. Like maybe **** you entirely. Maybe you need to sit down. Yeah, yeah, maybe you need to sit the **** down, bro. So Paul Pressler was a judge and an extremely rich kid whose father was a Harvard graduate and the vice president of ExxonMobil. Good Lord. Ohh yeah. Yeah, you you didn't stop ******* talking. That's the good stuff. Ohh when we hear about this ***** ** ****. So Paul goes to Princeton. And in his. Just gonna say prison. I don't normally use Wikipedias as sources, but his Wikipedia biography is clearly written by like somebody he paid to upheld. Yeah, yes, yeah. And it includes lines stating that he, quote, confronted theological liberalism head on, having never wavered in the faith acquired in his youth, unwavering. That's right. These, these guys, both will have several positions within the SBC. Patterson's going to lead it for a while. And being guys who suck, they were both good friends and together the two catched. Plan this isn't like the 1970s. They sit down. This is like part a huge part of Southern Baptist lore. Today, these two ******* sit down at the Cafe du Monde in New Orleans and a former Southern Baptist leader who now preaches against this kind of ****. Russell Moore describes how they quote mapped out on a napkin, how the convention could restore a commitment to the truth of the Bible and to faithfulness of its confessional documents. Now it took these guys like a decade to organize the kind of ******* that it it took to wrench the Southern Baptist Convention to the far right. But Patterson and Pressler used their influence methodically to Weld together Southern Baptist conservative pastors into a voting bloc capable of manipulating the conventions procedures in their favor. In a write up for the Atlantic, Jonathan Merritt describes what all came together. The two men successfully executed their strategy in the subsequent decades, a movement they labeled the conservative resurgence and their opponents dubbed the fundamentalist takeover. Whatever one calls it, the result was a purging of moderates from among denominational ranks, the codifying of literal. Interpretations of the Bible and the transformation of the Southern Baptist Convention into a powerful ally of the Republican Party. Good stuff, huh? We did it. Great stuff. Yay, we're catching up. Yeah, so Patterson impressed me and their allies. They see the 1963 revision of the faith and message, which is, again, that creed. That's not a creed as a mistake. They call it, quote, an open door to a less biblical church when they began to take over **** in the mid 80s. And that's really when this starts to come together. Like 8485, support for abortion was one of the first things to go, but as religion dispatches notes, they quickly moved beyond that. Quote among their first targets were women, the Baptist Women in ministry. By 1987, approximately 500 women had been ordained by the SBC, and most especially women in the home. Southern Baptist fundamentalists busied themselves by creating an entire movement called Complementarianism, a theological doctrine of equal but separate sexes, based on the joyful submission of wives and the restriction of female authority. In 1998, they succeeded in adding a new article to the Baptist Faith and message on the theology of the family. The wife and husband are of equal worth before God. Since both are created in God's image. The marriage relationship models the way God relates to his people. A husband is to love his wife as Christ loved the church. He has the God-given responsibility to provide for, to protect, and to lead his family. A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ. Sounds like it sucks. Sounds. I mean, sounds exactly what I expected. Like you're you're describing my actual hell yeah, a good buddy. It's equal. Equal. They're equal health. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Like men are trapped in this, like hell of machismo where they're they're forced to deny all the aspects of their, of their personalities that, like, aren't this kind of toxic masculinity. And women are trapped in like, an eternal prison. It's great what God wants. It's the same but different. Yeah. I actually had a buddy when I was growing up. Was a lot older than me. We played DND together and he was. I'm actually, I think it was his church. I'm not sure was his church or his wife, but he he he gets, you know, hitched and he gets married. And wife's a lovely person. They they seem to have, they're still together, seem to have a good relationship. She's very much like that kind of more. Forceful, one of the two. But they had they, they, they they went to their wedding, was in this, like, very fundamentalist Southern Baptist Church. And I'm not sure, maybe the preacher could, like, read the vibes of the actual relationship, but he spent like 10 minutes talking about the importance of, like, the woman submitting to her husband. It was like, super awkward. There are all these glances between people of like, OK, buddy, you're really going on about this, huh? Uh, it's fun stuff. So very fun. Yeah, it does sound fun, yeah. Texas Small town churches. Good, good places. So hierarchy and patriarchy were now written into a Nauta Creed creed that churches had to accept in order to consider themselves Southern Baptists. This caused yet another major, major schism. A lot of moderates left the convention and started to make new denominations. And in fact, more recently, President Jimmy Carter, History's greatest Monster, renounced his membership in the church. He told one interviewer at its most repugnant the belief that women must be subjugated. The wishes of men excuses slavery, violence, forced prostitution, genital mutilation and national laws that omit rape as a crime. But it also costs many millions of girls and women control over their own bodies and lives, and continues to deny them fair access to education, health, employment and influence within their own communities. He's he's he's been pretty solid for a while, but also it's worth noting again to talk about how this changes. Carter is considers himself a member of the Southern Baptist faith for a long time. Like because, again, this shift is not all that old, you know? No, yeah, I mean, you keep saying that's like a whiplash kind of a shift. Yeah, because it and it's happened a couple of times, right? You know, with with the the slavery and everything, too. So Patterson and Pressler did not give a **** about the things that Jimmy Carter has an issue with, and they celebrated their victory over their great enemy women by carrying out a mass wedding ceremony in the year 2000. They led 5. Continuing you don't have. Yeah. Yeah. It was a voluntary word that other than my. Yeah, no, but please don't stop. They led 550 couples to renew their wedding vows, only this time with more misogyny, because they've added these misogynist planks to the faith. Quote wives reciprocated and in one accord, pledging to graciously submit and honor their husband's role as servant leader while acknowledging their responsibilities and white as wife and mother as quote priority above all else except God. Makes me unhappy. Except yeah, yeah, I know this happens. I understand. But it's like. It's there's a lot of reasons this is funny, including the fact that all of the dudes who are ***** about this are the same kind of people who will point out like, well, Islam means submission, and it's like, man, your faces have the same ******* problems. Chill out, dude. Face. Yeah, and I do think about a lot. Lately how do you not all the time just about the way people participate in their own oppression and and the stories that you're told and growing up in communities and environments like this where you, you know or whatever figures that push you into thinking that this is who you are and what you're worth and what your role is and that and you become that's that starts to feel like safety. You know for a lot of these people it was probably very dangerous. Present to consent that your husband has control and that you relinquished that, I'm sure that they. Were I'm sure that there's a lot of abuse. I know we're getting into stuff. OK, Katie? Boy is there. Yeah. So convention leadership was in lockstep behind all of these changes. A statement signed by many prominent Southern Baptist pastors and teachers affirmed this stating quote. We are convinced a denial or neglect of these principles will lead to increasingly destructive consequences in our families, our churches, and the culture at large. Now, for most of the 21st century, the Southern Baptist Convention has been a reliable reservoir of the most regressive attitudes of our era. Gay pastors were also banned in the SBC. Organizing documents. Interestingly enough, here's a fun fact for you kids. You know who's not banned for being an SBC pastor? Sex offenders? What the ****? But that's just fine and dandy. But no. But yeah, but. But maybe. What you're failing to account for is that page Patterson has a lot of friends who are sex offenders. Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't realize that he was looking. He's got a bunch of buddies who were doing sex crimes. Well, you gotta protect your buddies, OK? You gotta. Who among us Baptists hasn't? Look, like if Katie, if, like, you were trying to get a place in your landlady, you know, called me as a reference, like I would say, Oh yeah, Katie, she's got like a 750 credit rating or whatever. Is that good? What is good for credit? That's good, right? I think that is good. I know that. That is good. No, that's good, 800. I don't know. What I don't know. I don't know. Credit is a very. Excuse me. Everybody listening. 750 is a very good credit score. Don't listen. You didn't see Sophie go, man. But I will. What's important, Katie, is I will lie to your landlord about your credit. Thank you. Thank you so much. And in the same way, Paige Patterson is gonna make sure that his friends who were repeatedly committing sex crimes can be bad, pastors in the Southern Baptist could be there in the same way as the phrase that you just used. And I wonder maybe if they're not comparable situations, but we can leave it at that. We don't have to explore that. We don't have to explore that. You know, we can't explore Cody. Katie, there's a guy named Darrell. Billiard now in the 1980s. Him Gilliard is one of the Darrell a garrell Darrell. Darrell Gilliam. Darrell Darrell would be amazing. So he is one of the SBC's like prominent black pastors, and he specifically there's this guy, let me pull up his name, whose name will be familiar to a lot of people. Who is like one SEC. There's this pastor named Vines who's like another prominent black, like the the, like most kind of like celebrity SBC Black preacher. And Gilliard is considered to be like, oh, this is like, he's he's the new version of this guy who's like huge for us, makes a **** load of money very popular. And he's a protege of Paige Patterson, who calls him, quote, the nation's next great African American preacher. He becomes prominent when he earns several appearances on Jerry Falwell's national TV show. Super charismatic, and he has this back. Story. He has this, like, lurid story about how he's like a raised as a homeless orphan, you know, in in a poor place. And it's none of it's true. It's like all lies who's not raised as a homeless orphan. But that's a good story. And now I'm going to quote next from the problematic source Baptist news they're getting in 1985, Gilyard was hired and then forced out of positions at three Dallas area churches, Victory Baptist Church in Richardson, Concord Missionary Baptist Church in Dallas and Shiloh Baptist Church in Garland. He was similarly hired and. Forced to resign at Hilltop Baptist Church in Norman, OK, at least 25 women in the Dallas Church publicly accused him of sexual misconduct. So that is how the Southern Baptists, when they have to admit that this is a thing that happened, talk about it, right. That's that's their summary of this guy's crimes. It's actually quite a lot worse than that. But that already sounded bad, but that already doesn't see. Yeah. Wait a second. Hold up. I'm going to quote from an article in the Houston Chronicle by Rob Downen by Rob Downen. Sorry, rob. About what was actually going on with with with Monsignor Gilbert. Two years after Gilliard's 1991 ouster, he began pastoring a non SBC congregation a few blocks away from Vines's Mega Church in Jacksonville, FL. While there, he was convicted of sex crimes involving 2 teens. He faced multiple civil suits, including one eventually settled from a grieving widow who alleged that she was raped and impregnated by him during counseling sessions. Oh my God, very bad dude. Now, a big part of how he's able to do this is he is personal friends with Patterson and with Vines who are like. ******* running the SBC in a lot of ways. And so he'll tell his victims, like, hey, you know, if you have a problem with what I'm doing, like, take it up with ******* Paige Patterson, you know, take it up with Vines, right? These guys who are like the the and. And for his part, as these, he keeps getting kicked out of churches, you know, for doing sex crimes. Patterson backs him to the to the hilt, to quote from the Houston Chronicle quote. Patterson wrote that Gilyard was not guilty of the allegations or morally culpable. He said that Bailey, one of the this guy's victims, must forget the past and should refrain from making public statements while Patterson works to rehabilitate the gifted young preacher from his mistakes, sorrow, and humiliation. He is no longer a problem to you, Patterson wrote. He is worth salvage. Will you agree not to disparage him any further, thus giving me a chance to help Darrell count for God and for good? ******* good, huh? Uh-huh. Yeah, that's cool. Can we all agree to not disparage this poor? Don't disparage him with your talk of him ****** shows about his abuse. A cruel he's in pain. Yeah, he's good at talking in a pulpit. Guys. Do you not understand the stakes here? But also, this is the argument they make, is that, like, well, honestly, it's not that bad if he's committing multiple sex crimes. As long as he's winning souls, that's what matters. The the victims as mattering. You suffer. Well, it's also just like, you know, if you're a victim, you know, that's bad and everything, but you just suffer once, right? It's just a few minutes. Whereas if you win a soul to Christ. That's an eternity of torment that they're saved from that. And The thing is, that is the logic. Yeah. And here's the I mean, this goes so much deeper than that, but that if that is what you believe, by God, you can justify damn near anything. Anything. Yeah. Yeah. Which is a problem bigger than this, but this is one of the reasons in which that's a nightmare problem. So with Patterson's help again, Gilliard repeatedly gets jobs preaching at one point to more than 7000 people at a church in Florida, and Patterson would later. Claim that since he'd been part of the panel that had investigated allegations against Gilliard and quote, got him to confess that guilt publicly, it was fine for him to help Gilliard get jobs to preach elsewhere. He said he was sorry. What more do you want from me, effectively the leader of the Southern Baptist Convention people? What else can happen? What can you do? Yes. Now, in 2000, the same year that he remarried 550 people with his buddy, the Judge, Patterson sent a letter to a pastor asking him for advice on stopping sexual abuse in a church. This pastor writes a letter to Paige Patterson is like, hey, I am concerned about sexual abuse happening within my church. What is your advice for, like, avoid, you know, for protecting my my have a reasonable thing to do, right? You're leading a church. This is the guy who's running things. You want his advice? I don't want anyone to get hurt in my congregation. Paige's advice was for him, to quote, hold lunch. In one hour awareness seminars. Not because they'll stop abuse, but so that if there is ever a lawsuit over sexual abuse, it will look like the church did something to. Yeah, you smooth it over. You have these exact seminars. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Now, not long after all this again, early 2000s. The Catholic Church's sex abuse scandal blows wide open. I don't know if you guys have heard about this, but there's been a couple of problems within the Catholic Church about sex abuse. What are two? I'll have to look 1000 a year for centuries. You know, not that big. The deal. But yeah, so this is a big, big story. And because it's a big story, it it it kind of it. Again, there's, there's a couple of things. There's this anti democratic, very right wing, very centralized thing happening. But there's also still, if a bunch of Southern Baptists have the mood, take them by something that happens, they can pass resolutions that are like good broadly speaking. And so that that year kind of inspired by what happened within the Catholic Church, they pass a resolution on the importance of. Sexual integrity for clergy who were to be quote above reproach morally. They also urged churches to quote discipline those guilty of any sexual abuse in obedience to Matthew 18617. I'm not great at reading the numbers of Bible verses, but that verse reads quote if your brother or sister sins, go and point out their fault just between the two of you. If they listen to you, you have won them over. But if they will not listen, take one or two others along so that every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses. If you still refuse to listen, tell it to the church. And if they refuse to listen even to the church, treat them as you would a Pagan or a tax collector. Now, again, there's a page. Yeah, yeah, man. ******* wait. How did the Bible? Classic libertarian rant? Yeah, yeah, that's one of those verses that, like, if you're the kind of guy who makes your own license plates and then shoots at police during traffic stops, like you're a big fan of that one. Yeah. Umm, but no, you can. Obviously, again, like everything in the Bible, there's a reasonable interpretation of that, which is the Christian Church is essentially this, like radical social movement that doesn't want to be torn apart by like, petty disputes. So it's saying, like, hey, if you've got like if if someone does something kind of ****** ** first talk to him one-on-one and try to get them to see that they, like, did something that was like hurtful or negative. And if that doesn't help, bring other people along and try to, you know, you gradually get to the point where group intervention and you don't, you start the opportunity. Exactly. And if they don't? Yes. And then you, you know, then maybe they need to be out and stuff. Right. Not an unreasonable. Person's a ****** in the. Yes, exactly. And I this, it's, I don't know, the Bible verse is probably talking about like, yeah, what if a guy doesn't want to share his fish, you know? Right. Right, right. Yeah. Yeah. They were talking like, what if a guy is systematically molesting women as part of a network of churches that include more than, like, a tax collector? Yeah. What if? So what if I want something worse for this person? Damn how I treat a tax collector. Yeah, exactly. Now, again, there's a number of ways you can interpret this. Southern Baptist leaders tended to take it to mean if some if a if a pastor or someone else who is affiliated with US molests somebody give them another chance, move them, give him another chance, and you give me another chance. Then give him another chance. You give him another chance. It's also, I mean, it's cop ship and it's Catholic priest **** right? Yeah, exactly. Like, OK, well, let's move you to another place and then people where where it happened, they'll forget about it, and you go to another place and then it happens and let's just put you around people who don't know who you are. Exactly. Let's remove you from the community that now has some immunity to you because they're aware of that. You're a creep and let's put you in a new place. It's good. Oh, good. Stand good, Cody. Cool. Good. Yeah. Yeah. In 2003, popular Illinois Pastor Leslie Mason was caught molesting 4 young girls. State leaders told him he would be fired and lose severance pay if he did not resign. Interesting that they gave a **** about that. I would say fire is asked because he molested 4 girls. Yeah, but maybe not. Like, maybe, yeah, yeah, maybe fire him from a cannon. I don't know. So he he gets convicted and is sentenced to seven years in prison in a plea deal, which drops all but two of his charges. He gets, I mean, probably something messed up there. Whatever. He goes to prison. So he gets out after he does his time, and he goes right back to preach at a new SBC church just miles away from his old one. He becomes a rising star within the church, again, traveling around the state in preaching until his past charges are publicized by a writer with the local. Baptist newspaper. And again, you could see this as a success for the fact that the Southern Baptists have set up their own media arm, right? This is a member of the Community who is exposed. This guy, right? Which is dope, right? That's unequivocally a good thing. Good journalism. Good on you, buddy. But people don't react well to this. Angry readers deluge the newspaper and condemnation against the newspapers expose pours in from the Illinois State Baptist Association director Glenn Aikens complaints quote to have singled out Les in such a sensationalistic. Tanner ignores many others who have done the same thing. You could have asked nearly. You could have oh, wait. You could have asked nearly any staff member and gotten the names of several prominent churches were the same sort of sexual misconduct has occurred recently at our state. That's bad, too. OK, the **** you mean? They're ******* names, buddy. Go do that and then go do that. Then do that. Oh my God. It's like Derek Chauvin's lawyer being like, look, he was just doing what cops are trained to do when he murdered that man. It's like, yeah, I do not see how that's worse. I'm watching we own this city, this HBO show about dirty cops in Baltimore. And that's what it is. It's like 1 after the other will like, yeah, well, that guy's doing it. This guy. Yeah, this guy, man. That's that's why it's bad to be you. Like. Yeah, right. Do you not get it yet? And yes, it's like when you're staring at something like, yes, that's the problem. This is the problem. You are a problem. Yeah, man. So obviously abuse. My church officials did not start in the early 2000s, right? I'm sure that no, no did Southern Baptist. But under the raid of Patterson and Pressler and their acolytes, deliberately hiding and supporting the rehabilitation of pastors who assaulted children becomes basically official policy. Debbie Vasquez was molested at age 14 by her pastor in Sanger, TX back in the late 1970s. She was assaulted several times before being impregnated by a married pastor more than a dozen years older than her for years. She kept the secret. But then in the early 2000s, while the Conservatives tightened their grip on the Southern Baptist Convention, stories like Masons began to filter out. She decided it was time to take a tremendous risk and try to do something. And I'm going to quote next from an investigation published by the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express News. I think I said just the chronicle earlier. It's a joint kind of big investigation between the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express News that honestly deserves the ******* Pulitzer quote. In June 2008, she paid her way to Indianapolis. Where she and others asked leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention and its 47,000 churches to track sexual predators and take action against congregations that harbored or concealed abusers. Vasquez, by then in her 40s, implored them to consider prevention policies like those adopted by faiths that include the Catholic Church. Listen to what God has to say, she said, according to audio of the meeting, which she recorded. All that evil needs is for good to do nothing. Please help me and others that will be hurt days later, Southern Baptist leaders rejected. Nearly every proposed reform. Now, in the years that followed, that's 2008. In the years that followed, more than thanks Obama, 50. Yeah, that thanks Obama. More than 250 Southern Baptist pastors, leaders, and volunteers would molest or sexually assault children and other members of their congregation. More than 700 victims have come forward to date in total. Many would do it more than once in multiple churches, and we'll tell that story. And we'll also tell some stuff that's less depressing in Part 2. Oh, I can't wait. Part of that I look forward to. Yeah, aspects of that will be very cathartic. Others won't. Others share won't. Kidding. Cody, you got any real? You got any plugs for us at the end here? Oh, boy, we sure do. Boy, you can check out our other shows. Some more news is available on YouTube and where you get podcasts. Even more news is available where you get the podcasts. And our tweeted tweets are online. Our tweets are all your tweets are. You go to get the tweets at the tweet store. You should invest more time in my other Patreon social media, some more news. You should not. We should all get one tik T.O.K together. Yes, that's kind of what I was getting at. I'm actually, I actually think maybe we should and we should talk. We could have some real fun in that, in that environment, just like. Yeah, the kids. Kids are dabbing a lot. These are these. I think, I think that what the kids want or more of us, you know? Yeah. Paul Ryan loves ******* like. Yeah, kids have. Come on, guys, let's do. So I'm sorry, Katie. I cut you off. No, no, I wasn't going anywhere good. He was just going to say that we should make our Tik T.O.K be Paul Ryan themed. Just like bring him back, you know, like go hard crying, bring back. That will hit with the teens. Yeah, I think the teens are the teens are ready for a bright vice presidential candidate who does cross. They weren't ready before, which is why. Yeah. Now that the perfect age to see that picture of him in working out, you know, that post. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I think I speak for everyone when I say we've all suffered enough. We do die. I mean, it would be fun. You know what there, though, that picture of Paul Ryan. Good. What we could do with it because it's a it's a piece of that picture. Paul Ryan is a piece of one of my favorite kinds of content, which is official Republican Party communiques attempting to, like, get people *****. It's like. Like a species of Republican Party propaganda. And it's so embarrassing every time you include Don Junior's hunting photo as part of. Ohh for sure, they're they were they did their best. They did their best. So my God, it's so funny. It's never not funny. This is the fun and uplifting note to end this episode on. Yeah. Go team, check out our Paul Ryan Tik T.O.K. Where we go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Use one of those AI bots to make uncomfortable ******. Videos of Paul Ryan Fellating himself with a bullwhip while standing on top of a Dodge Dart with that Oh no. Oh no song going in the background. That's right, do it. No, God, that one. I don't need to sing it. You know it. And oh, we're done. We're done. Behind the ******** is a production of cool zone media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it then after just 18 months of podcasting with spreaker. I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break your handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. 1980s and 90s a psychopath terrorized the country of Belgium. A serial killer and kidnapper was abducting children in the bright light of day. From Tenderfoot TV and iHeartRadio, this is La Monstra, a story of abomination and conspiracy. The story about the man who simply become known as. Lamaster. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Roy Wood, junior, host of The Daily Show podcast beyond the scenes and we are back for season 2. Beyond the scenes is the podcast where we take the topics and segments that were on The Daily Show and give them a little more love. This season, we're bringing back more Daily Show writers, producers and correspondents, more experts, giving us some extra knowledge you can't get anywhere else. Don't miss it. Listen to beyond the scenes. On the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.