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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. Ohhh yeah. Welcome back to behind the ********. The pot. You know, I would have quit so long ago. So ******* long ago. If this was if this was your real, this was real. Behind in the ********. It's rock and Robert with KU. Katie and Cody moon man Johnson here in the morning with you to help your drive time go by like the moon. The blight. OK, now we're gonna do a new thing where we we're gonna prank call, gonna prank call people whose children are in the NICU and make them think their kids are dead. Yeah, let's get this right how all comedy works in 2003. I am ohgod, yeah, and the girl just has some sort of like. Laugh. Yes, it nailed it. Nailed it. We're back. Support our misogyny by laughing at our jokes. Oh, Cody, thanks. Moon man. Ohv? Ohc? Christ. How's it going? Well, what's up with you? I'm. I'm good. I'm wishing I'd made my real calling as a drive time radio DJ. That's who I learned about 9:11 from. Really? Really? Yeah. Yeah, like, I learned about 9:11 or like, learned that 911 happened from that happened. Yeah, we were. It was the Jeff and Anna morning show. I was driving to *******. I mean, I wasn't. Having because I was a child, but my mom was driving us to school and, like, they started riffing about how a plane. And I think they thought, like, because I remember thinking at 1st that it had been like some prop plane or some **** that some idiot had asked. And so, like, they were just, like joking about how bad you, like, probably making jokes about people with bad eyesight or something. And then when I walked into my first period class, which was health, I walked in in time to watch the second plane hit. It's just like, wow. It might not be that might not have been just a just a kooky mix up. Oh my God. Morning drive time. I I wanted to be a radio show host when I wouldn't we all. I was like, that seems perfect. I wanted to be like an oldies radio station. You don't do **** and look where I am now, baby. Playing the oldies, hanging out with Moon man Classics and the hits. Ohh Jesus. So yeah, Speaking of Jesus Christ. Well, yeah, yeah. The one of that's one of the Jesus is, I mean, there's a couple of them. Geez, I yeah. Just we us famous Jesus. Yeah. One of the famous anyway, whatever we're talking about the Southern Baptist Convention anyway. So in 2004, D August, Bodo, often known as Augie, a terrible nickname, became the executive committee general counsel to the Southern Baptist Committee Commission or convention. Right. And obviously, so the SBC, which is the centralized. Governing body of the Southern Baptist Church, which does not have a centralized governing body. Of course they have an executive committee, which are, you know, because they don't have popes and bishops, not like being popes and bishops, but effectively kind of like being popes and bishops. And August Bodo was like their lawyer, right? And as that guy, it's augie's job to guide them in their responses to allegations of sexual assault, which just become more and more common in the years leading up to 2008 when that group of survivors. Comes to beg for them to do something more than the nothing that they were doing. Yeah, right now there's nothing. Yeah. In 2006, members of these survivors network of those abused by priests held a rally outside of the Executive Committee's office in Nashville, TN. Augie accused the abuse victims of coming at the committee with a quote adversarial posture which he used to justify his opposition to their requests for reform. He was presented with a list of possible procedures to address sexual assault by the committee, but he ignored them. In 2008, after Debbie Vasquez and other abuse victims begged the SBC to set up some sort of internal list to track abuse within the faith. Right. So that's one of the things Debbie and these other victims ask is, like, hey, could you guys keep, like, a list of the pastors who rape people so that, like, if they tried to get a job at a Southern Baptist affiliated church, it'll go like, no, that guy molested a database of some kind. Yeah, but yeah, just like a registry, like some sort of like. Literally the barrier. Yeah. It's see, it's again, like, the least you can do is be like, we should probably know if somebody molests kids tries to get another job where they can molest kids, right? Like, that's again, this should not be, like, a a political issue in any way. Yeah, should not be considered radical. But they don't. This does not pass muster with the Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee. And Bodo drafts the rejection letter that they send to. Maybe Vasquez, when they ask for a form and and and his his justification for doing nothing was the cherished Southern Baptist tradition of church autonomy, right? The executive committee. There's no central power in the Southern Baptist faith, right? We can't tell churches what to do, so we don't have the authority to force them to report sex abuse to a central registry, right? That's just not what we are. Now, obviously, we do things like demand that they oppose abortion and that they say that women should be submissive to men, and it works one way but not the other, but not that. But we could, we could not. We couldn't make him keep a list of all the people who rape kids. That's not cool. So that's neat. That's neat. That's the justification. As a result, Augie later said the committee quote realized that lifting up a model that could be enforced was an exercise in futility, and so instead, they drafted a report that, quote accepted the existence of the problem rather than attempting to define its magnitude. Again, this is an and now an ancient Baptist tradition, right? Bad things happen. We acknowledge that there's nothing we can or will do about them, but they happen. We can save their souls. Yeah, reaching well, their souls were probably already saved before the pastor molested. He's surely baptized them, so really it's other people we need to worry about, they're taking care of. They're good to go. To heaven, good to. Go to heaven. Even judged by the standards of his faith, bodo's justifications are ******* nonsense. SBC churches work together to share teaching materials. They have curriculum that is in common across thousands of churches and schools, they share resources to help expand and maintain the infrastructure of their faith, and they pooled together money to fund missionary trips and seminaries. There is ample precedent for at least a voluntary database tracking sex abuse convictions and allegations among pastors, right? It is a thing that would not be out of step. Other **** they have done. To their credit, the Baptist General Convention of Texas did publish a list of sex offenders who had served in Texas Southern Baptist Churches. You want to guess how many names it contained? No 8. Ah, that's where that feels like it's everybody. Yes, that feels like it's everybody. I was searching. I was thinking 20 came to mind and I was like, oh. Oh yeah, I have no idea. But eight, Katie, you have to remember Texas is the smallest state in the Union. It has the least people, right? So there's just not a lot of folks there. Of course, 8 so few. Yeah. Eight seems comprehensive. You know, it seems like they got them all. I feel corner. One for every town in Texas. I remember growing up. That's why. That's why it's eight flags over Texas, a flag for each of the town knows everybody in Texas. So that's right. It's like Iceland like that. Me and my good friend Matthew McConaughey talking about True Detective, where I mostly just say Reggie Ledoux until he hangs up the phone because he is tired. He's got stuff to do. He's got stuff to regular do. Jesus. It's not because he Reggie that over and over. Not because he, Reggie. Reggie Lee doesn't like you. That didn't work. Oh no. No. That was perfect. I might have gone with Reggie, LA didn't, but it's all good. Oh, that's what I meant to do on it. It's it's all a banger. These this is a fun joke for the three of us. Here and and whoever else happens. Yeah, to remember True Detective. And mainly the way that, well, one said specifically once you guys should really check out true 111 sleeper, show that No 2 words from one line of one season of a show from like six years ago, it's not 2 lines. That's a name that gets said a bunch. Yeah, sure. And to be clear, he never says it like a verb or whatever. It's just annoying. Yeah, nearly all of this is just us because it's funny. Why would rush Cole start doing a bit in the middle of a hard boiled detective series? I don't know. So Bodo comes to these sex abuse survivors and it's like, look, there's just nothing we can do. Because of the nature of how the Convention is structured, we can't make people keep a central database. It's just not possible. It would be outside of the traditions of our faith. You want to know something fun? Yeah, maybe. It turns out that for years and probably decades, the executive committee leaders kept a database of sex offenders who'd worked for the Southern Baptist Convention. ******* knew it. Was my guess. Did they show anyone this list? Of course not, right? Like why wait? Wait to say scientifically that it's like against our faith or whatever the justification basically saying it's too hard against our faith, not what we do. But we do it, of course we do it, obviously. Yeah. Come on. And I'm gonna quote now from an interview with Russell Moore. He's a former spokesman for the denomination. It was now a critic of the SBC, and this is him commenting on the Houston Chronicle expose. Quote, allegations of sexual violence and assault were placed, the report concludes, in a secret file in the SBC Nashville headquarters. It held over 700 cases. Not only was nothing done to stop these predators from continuing their hellish crimes, staff members were reportedly not told to even engage those asking about how to stop their child. Being sexually violated by a minister Rajiv. Rather than a database to protect sexual abuse victims, the report reveals that these leaders had a database to protect themselves. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Now, that's always the way. I'm not an expert on morality, but I think it might be arguable that if a bunch of people who were molested, many of whom were molested as children, come to you and say, please, for the love of God, do something to protect us and other children who are a threat and other people who are at risk. And you instead ignore them to protect yourself? Sure. OK. OK. That might be the kind of thing that where I got. Hmm, I would shoot you with lightning bolts for. Whoa. Hey, you can't just put actions into God's mouth and fingers. Come on, you don't know, maybe it's cool with it. It's been a while since I was in Sunday school, but that does strike me as a sin, I think. I think that might be a sin. Should be sinful in this scenario. You laid out, the person said, for the love of God, and in that scenario they would be taking the Lord's name in vain. And I don't know, maybe it's true. That's true. All I don't know. We have to remember. We have to remember Mark 1624 in which Jesus Christ said, and I quote **** them kids famous, famous Jesus say. Not really stick. Because it's also because it's. I have it tattooed across my back. Yeah, **** them, kids. Yeah, most courthouses have it. Yeah. Yeah. Honestly, like a little over commercialized, don't you think? It's printed so much? I don't know. It's like, yeah, yeah, kind of. Anyway, it loses its power a little bit. You're right. We're doing lots of fun bits that distract. These are fun. So. They made this database, which they claim they couldn't do just to protect themselves. And here's the thing, they weren't even very good at protecting themselves or the Southern Baptist Convention because the same pedophiles and molesters kept getting hired again and again, as this devastating segment from the Chronicle investigation makes clear. Quote Doug Meyers was suspected of praying on children at a church in Alabama, but he went on to work at Southern Baptist churches in Florida before police arrested him. Timothy Timothy Redden was convicted of possessing child ***********. But he was still able to serve as pastor of a Baptist Church in Arkansas. Charles Adcock faced 29 counts of sexually assaulting a 14 year old girl in Alabama. Then he volunteered as a worship pastor at a Baptist Church in Texas. You know, it's a really good way to. Protect yourselves against this would be to fire those people. You might say, yeah, that would be the best way to protect yourself against allegations of sexual abuse would be to fire those people and to make clear in no uncertain terms that there is no room for predators in your faith. I don't know. I'm not a PR person, but. Well, it's one of those things, nobody. There would be no realistic reason even given all like the right wing ****. There'd be no realistic reason to be angry if a church, if a if a denomination with 47,000 churches on a semi regular basis found that people who were volunteering or working were child molesters and fired them, right. There's 14 million people, you know, you can't avoid that to some extent. You know, if they were firing them and taking it seriously, just be like, yeah man, it's there's 14 million people in the faith sometimes. Predators are going to try to get in there and all you can do is try to build resiliency around that and make sure those people are are removed when they pop up and and, you know, constantly be sort of evaluating the degree, how you can make people safer from that. Instead. The SBC does nothing. Well, they don't do nothing. They enable these folks a lot of the time. So that's cool. OK. Yeah. Yeah. The other thing, the opposite of the the the opposite. Yeah. I'm going to continue that quote from the investigation quote in Georgia, the pastor of the SBC Affiliated Eastside Baptist Church near Atlanta. Announced it was reexamining its hiring practices after Alexander Edwards, a volunteer youth pastor, was arrested in 2016 on charges of sexual battery involving an 11 year old boy he had met at the church. It wasn't Edward's first criminal charge. While serving as a youth pastor at another Baptist Church 160 miles away in Lee County, South of Atlanta, Edwards was arrested in August 2013 and charged with using the Internet to find a child for a sex act. That case was still pending when Edwards began volunteering at Eastside. He was convicted of the 2016. Charges and the charge in Lee County was dismissed. So that's all good. Seems fine. Ohh it. Now it's bad, Rob. It's really seems bad. It is bad, Katie. But what's interesting about it here to me sounded kind of an intellectual level is that obviously this is all like Catholic Church yet, right? Like you can find switch the names up and these are all stories that you can find within, you know, abuse by Catholic priests. But on paper at least, this, the Southern Baptist Convention is basically has the opposite structure of the Catholic Church, right? It's supposed to at least Catholic Church. It doesn't get much more centralized, right? You have a hyper centralized religious bureaucracy that vets and teaches every single priest and also acts to shuffle them around and hide what they're doing to protect church assets and resources. Among Southern Baptists, pastoral assignment is, in one experts words kind of the Wild West. There's no regulation, there's no central authority. Churches make their own policies for deciding who can be a pastor there, and many smaller congregation, all congregations. All it takes is being a good speaker and getting enough congregants to say, yeah, this guy's the SBC's. Response to allegations has likewise been decentralized, with some leaders like Paige Patterson taking action to help abusers, but with most abusers seeming to slip through the cracks because there's nothing but cracks. Yeah. Now one thing I find fascinating here is that as different as the SBC system is, at least on paper, from Catholicism, the guy who was probably the leading expert on why the Catholic Church is a ****** ** den of molestation immediately realized the SBC had the same problems. Have you guys heard of the Reverend? Mrs Doyle. ******* cool, dude. He is a priest and a former lawyer for the Catholic Church. In the 1980s, he was the first major insider to blow the whistle on child sex abuse by priests. And so he gets my coveted good Catholic Priest Award, which I have only given out to him and the guys from the beginning of Jesus Christ, Vampire Hunter. Which is a pretty good thing you had so few printed. Yeah, I did. Well, I mean, I'm gonna be honest, Katie. I had a couple of storage facilities full of awards here. I'm taking a bath on this one. I'm looking. I keep trying to give him out, but I'm underwater here, like I can't get my head above her. Life is long. Maybe you'll be surprised. You gotta do something. The good reverend became an activist after leaving the church, and he wound up working with a number of victims of Southern Baptist pastors. The stories they told him and the actions taken by the SBC to keep things quiet sounded familiar. In 2007, he wrote letters, including one to SBC President Frank Page, warning him, hey, I think you guys are doing a Catholic Church, right? So Paige responded that they were, quote taking the issue seriously, but that there were serious limitations to what they could do because of course we don't have any power over the churches that are, you know, obviously, right. Obviously there's nothing to be done. How would we even, yeah, in March of 2019, Paige resigned as President and CEO of these SBC Executive Committee for what we currently know, only as quote a morally inappropriate relationship in the recent past. Yeah, baby, you sweet. Surprising. So this guy who ******* this this good, this Catholic Church whistle whistleblower reaches out to Frank Page, who's the head of the SBC, right? He's their their president, which is like an elected kind of position reaches out to in 2007 and says, hey, there is a sex abuse problem that is systemic. You guys need to deal with it. Pages like we're taking it seriously. This is a challenge. There's a lot of limitations on what we can do. But trust me, I take this seriously. 12 years later, he has to resign from the SBC Executive Committee. Because he has a morally inappropriate relationship. We don't know anything else. We don't know the age of that person. We don't know the degree to which consent was or was not involved. We don't know what exactly happened, right? That could mean, because, again, of how these kind of people defined sex, a morally inappropriate relationship could be he had a perfectly consensual relationship with an adult that was outside of the bounds of marriage. Or it could be that he was diddling like a 9 year old, right? Like all of that spectrum. Yeah, yeah, no idea what he did. One of the most important things for Southern Baptists is what's called the. Great Commission now as and the fact a lot of them call themselves Great Commission Southern or Great Commission. Baptists now instead of Southern Baptists. And this believe that the Great Commission is like the Super special mission that God left for them to do, to like, recruit all the people that you can. Umm, and obviously, evangelicals believe the most important thing you can do with the gospel is to win souls for Christ, right? Like nothing else matters more than that. This is why groups like the Joshua Project keep a database of uncontacted peoples so they can convince dumb. The missionaries to go and get killed or spread disease trying to share Jesus stuff with people who are perfectly happy living wherever the **** they already are. Now, the legitimate belief is that people, they're legitimate belief. The legitimate belief here that kind of drives this is that people cannot be saved without choice, and they can't choose to accept God without knowing about it. So the logic goes, since the afterlife is eternal and this life is not, no amount of suffering in this world is worth more than preventing damnation in the life after this. On a small scale, this does lead some individual missionaries. Take on terrible risks and live in privation to share their faith on a big scale. It means that true believers in this might do anything to avoid ******* up, say, the money that funds missionary activities. And this brings us to the story of Timothy Redden, the director of missions for the Central Baptist Association. Now this is. I think it's time for an ad break. Maybe it brings you to an ad break. Maybe. Speaking of evangelism? You know what? I'm a missionary for Katie Cody. Products and services that support this podcast products and OHS podcast you're spreading real good news. Let me quote good word from Isaiah 2613. Jesus Christ cannot save your soul, but the incredible products offered by Blue Apron and Shopify can. Amen. Amen. Praise him, him being blue apron. And Shopify. Sure. Yeah, that's OK. Yes. Before we come, come back. Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 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. For anyone who hates their phone Bill, Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for just $15.00 a month. 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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. We're back at Cody was just regaling us with the story of the years he spent as a rodeo clown in Arizona. Not a joke. Look it up. You can find the videos online. They are out there. Let's get back to the story. Mm-hmm. Alright. I guess I've got more, so I got more to say about it. But there's people, people can listen to the some more news episode that, yeah, we got a whole. They can find it. It's easy. Just Google about this. We have all talked about it. Of course we have. Constantly now. So we were talking about how obviously, if nothing matters more than winning souls for Christ, then nothing that the Southern Baptist Convention does matters more than funding missionaries, right? And so anything is justified if it stops ******* up the money that allows you to send missionaries, places. And this brings us to the story of Timothy Redden, the director of missions for the Central Baptist Association. This is a very prestigious position, coordinating the activity of missionaries for 22 pretty prominent churches now in 1998. While he was doing that job, he was caught with child *********** and sent to prison for more than two years now. I might say that one thing that being caught with child *********** means is that you should not be the head of a sending people to missions or maybe ever close to children's content. So yeah, he did say he did promise if this makes you feel better. During the sentencing, he told a federal judge that he would never molest a child. Didn't make me feel better. Doesn't make you feel better, so I tried. He's prepared for it, but he serves his term, he leaves prison, and he gets a job as a pastor for one of the churches he had previously been a mission coordinator for. So you would assume they might have ******* known about the child **** arrest. Shouldn't ex convicts have a chance to do some things? Yes, perhaps not teach children if the arrest is for child ***********. Look, if he wanted to be, I don't know, putting in drywall or something, right? And again, that's nothing. It's putting in drywall. But you don't tend to spend a lot of time teaching children as a contractor. You know, whatever job he has after getting out of prison, it probably shouldn't involve little kids. Yeah, installing like that, we can all agree on that. Yeah. At locations that are certain distance from schools, from from schools, sure, yes. A number of things he could do that that don't put him near children. Instead, he becomes a pastor. Umm. So yeah, he becomes a pastor at one of these churches he had worked for before, and in July of 2018, he was arrested for attempting to solicit a 14 year old for sex in an online chat. Thankfully, that 14 year old was actually a Homeland Security agent, but who knows what he actually got up to even. It was just being creepy. Outside of that, fingers crossed he didn't actually get to molest anybody. But you know, we'll never know. Coordinating missionary work de facto puts you in contact with lots and lots of young people, right? That's kind of who does mission? Mostly, most missionaries are young adults. There's a lot of teenagers and young children who go on mission trips sometimes because their parents are missionaries, right, and they all live in, you know, whatever foreign country they're doing a mission. And obviously, by the way, there's a huge ethical question about, like, colonialism and mission work and all. We're not really going to get into that today because that's much too big of a subject for for right now. But we will be talking about because of what mission work is. There's a lot of little kids around if you're going to be working in that kind of environment. And this brings us to our next story, and I'm going to quote again from the Houston Chronicle. George Thomas Wade Junior had been spreading the gospel as a missionary on African training farms and in Bush villages for six years when his Southern Baptist supervisors learned a horrifying secret. The supposedly devout man of God was molesting his own daughter. Supervisors met once privately with the girl, who was attending boarding school in Johannesburg, and later consulted leaders based 50 leaders based 50 or 7500 miles away at the Richmond, VA, headquarters of what's now called the International Mission Board. Wade promised to stop the supervisors. Said his daughter. Said she was told to forgive Wade and was sworn to secrecy. Here's the ******* kicker. Are you guys ready for this ****? There's a kicker. No one told Wade's wife, also a missionary, what he had done. What? Wow. He molests their daughter. Everyone at the church knows they don't tell his ******* wife. That's horrifying. That's a ******* nightmare. You know that is a ******* nightmare. Yeah, it's outrageous. You do learn. And to know that everybody, everybody, you're God, oh God. And you've like, this is again is problematic as mission work is. This is you've dedicated your whole life to mission work and like this. Like, my God, what a *******. Yeah, that's a betrayal right there. That's like right up high, high level betrayal that gets, you know, one of the things I am running out of is my awards for greatest betrayal, which I get out of here. OK. So, yeah, that warehouse is. Yeah, a lot of echoes of that was very empty. Yeah, yeah. I may move some of the best Priest awards over there. Just split it out. Seems like you're good. Yeah. Maximize your space, you know? Yeah, exactly. That seems smart. So his daughter was never again. Asked about the abuse, which by the way, uh continued. He keeps molesting his daughter. She attempts to kill herself when she is 15. She's still alive. This is oh boy. I think this is the early 2000s. Uh, I just like to know where when we are in time. Yeah. So his his daughter, you know, he keeps being molested by him. She attempts suicide. She does. Does live. And she later testifies. Quote I felt stupid for having told anything to anybody. The concern was for my father. It didn't matter what happened to me. And again, her soul saved, right? She's been baptized. Her dad is winning souls. So whatever he does, whatever he does, kind of worth it. That's how the math works. Just so baked in this idea that the man, the ruler is the ruler of the household, and he specifically is the ruler of this congregation. And look me, I'm not a believer in the divinity of Jesus Christ, but there's a historical case. There were certainly a guy in individuals that some of those stories were written about. And I have to think that any one of those people who was like the, the actual historical, you know, individuals, rebels in a lot of ways, who, you know, we get our stories about Jesus from, if explained to this, if you could go back in time and explain this story to them would like get a stick and start swinging, you know, like they would they this, this is like, **** right. Like this is ******* up behavior, you know? Yeah, like by anyone, right? Any moderately again. That's the thing. Like you talk about like, like, I don't know, a *** **** ******* atheist or degenerate weirdo hippie in the world who wouldn't like ******* burn down a building if this was done, like, to their family, you know? But these people, these men of God, love this ****. They're totally down. So, uh, the Southern Baptist Mission Board is the world's largest sponsor of Protestant missionaries, and their official policy is revealed in 2019 was to keep misconduct reports, allegations of rape and child molestation inside the church hierarchy. Rather than involving law enforcement or often even telling both parents, the focus was on protecting the Great Commission, not the victims. In Wade's case, he was sent back home quietly. His wife did not. Find out for three years until, oh, sorry. Here's the date. Katie. In June of 1985, she learned her husband had abused three additional girls as well. My goddaughter. So she finds out not as only that her husband's molested their girl, but now three other girls have been molested while she's been married to this guy. And no one had told her, just that. Nobody. So yeah, this all comes out because her daughter gets pregnant at age 17. Not with the dad anyway, but she's preparing to get married to, like, the the the father of the baby. And Dad decides he's going to officiate the wedding. And for whatever reason, this is like kind of the straw that breaks her back. And she suddenly blurts out to her mom that, like, I can't, I cannot let my dad perform the wedding ceremony, like, because he's been ******* molesting me for years. And that's when Diana Wade finds out. What ******* happened? Wow. So again, she calls the cops right away. Her husband is arrested, he is charged and convicted on five counts of felony sex abuse, and he goes to ******* prison. Next, Diana does the natural thing and files for divorce, right? Pretty clear. Like, I don't think that needs explaining to reasonable people. One of the first steps. Yeah, right. Yeah, not according to the church. The church, who is her employer, warns her that her divorcing her husband is, quote, an unpardonable sin. This is really upsetting. Not that I don't know that this **** happens or happened. It's a ******* outrageous, yeah. So. Diana had, by her own admission, never wanted to be anything but a missionary. But she was traumatized, as was her daughter. And so she asks the church that she'd given so much of her life to if they could compensate her for the counseling and medical bills that she and her kid are going to have to go through. Right? Reasonable bare minimum. Bare ******* minimum. The SEC says no, and they forced her to resign alongside her imprisoned husband in a letter she sent to her employer, Diana wrote. Quote I am deeply hurt. I find it difficult to accept that because of what Tom Malone did, my calling and commitment. Ministry are of no account and are to be thrown away along with his. She's still saving souls. She's still good for your ******* math. I mean, this all sounds very illegal ****. Sound illegal, Katie says. Yeah, I you. It does sound like concealing a serial child molester might have. There might be some things that you could get in trouble for if you do this. Firing someone for wanting to divorce their husband. Well, actually, I think that probably is because it's a church. You know, maybe they may have, they may be unsafe ground there. I don't know. Yeah. Again, not a lawyer, but I am going to quote next from the chronicles reporting. Diana Wade filed a lawsuit alleging that the mission. Court had broken contractual promises to protect her family and increased harm to her children by concealing her husband's criminal behavior. A jury decision favoured the family, but the Wades lost in 1991 after the board appealed to the Virginia Supreme Court mission. Board leaders were a forced forced to address the allegations publicly only because of the lawsuit. Board officials never said whether they had later investigated if other children were abused by Wade. In all 5 cases, the corona or sorry Michigan officials that they they never said whether they've investigated if other kids had been abused by Wade. While he was a missionary in Kenya and Botswana from 1976 to 1984, right, they never investigated. Did he, like, molest any local kids? This like guy with power and effectively a lot of legal immunity, being a white missionary in like Kenya and Botswana? Did anyone, like, look into whether or not he did anything there? You got to think where this started, shot in the dark? They didn't. Yeah. And in fact the Chronicle looked into 5 cases of missionaries who were definitely abusing kids and. Yeah. And no, at no point in none of these cases was there evidence that they had been investigated to see if they abused local children, right? So in five cases of people who abused missionary kids, there were no investigations to see like they they do anything else. Yeah, nothing else looks. Nobody. They look into that, they're not with it. The reason they look into this is because they get caught. They're not opening any lids and they certainly don't care. Pretty vile non white kids? Absolutely not. They care about them not going to hell, but you can get molested and go to heaven. Actually care about that, do they? Yeah, I mean, they say they do. I mean, what? Yeah, like, but don't they make it's about money and power? Yeah, like. If you're willing to **** a kid, you're actually not concerned whether you might make that case, right? That that's a strong argument, Katie. Thank you. Now, in 2018, the board sent more than 3600 missionaries overseas and managed a budget of $158 million, which was provided by tithes from church members. That is a big bag to protect, right? And over the years, the chronicles investigation shows at least five salaried employees of the Mission board were accused of or convicted of abusing two dozen victims, most of whom were children. The problem was bad enough that in 2004, the IMB established an abuse hotline. The inciting incident for putting this together was a scandal over a missionary named William Mcelrath, one of the Mission Board's most dedicated evangelists. He had been stationed in Indonesia for decades, where Hess it turns out he repeatedly molested his colleagues. Children's letters the man sent to his own coworkers showed that he privately admitted to abusing colleagues children 30 years before the story became public. He's like right in his fellow missioners. Molested some kids the other day. I feel a little bad about it. Wait, yeah, like, like, this is like a casual correspondence, just like, I did this and I feel bad. Or I did this and, like, everything's cool. Yeah, I think it's. I think it's. I did this. And, like, I'm feeling kind of, kind of funky about it. Maybe it's bad to molest children. Look, Cody, nobody's perfect. Or, as I say, nobody's perfect. I was gonna, I was gonna splay blat. One of his victims was Linda de Varth. She had moved to Indonesia at age 8 with her brother and missionary parents. Miguel Rath was the elder missionary there, and at first she thought he was an admirable figure. He was a good writer. He played the banjo. He was a very friendly, charismatic guy, right. He's kind of like the head missionary, more or less because he's been there since forever, and he's just this, this very charismatic person. One of the things she recalls about him is that he always had a kid on his lap in 1972 when she was nine. The wrath became that kid and Michael Rath fondled her. She said nothing for five years, but when she did tell her parents, her father to his credit, reported Mcelrath 2 mission board officials in Indonesia. No action was taken, the Chronicle continues. By the time Devart reported Michael Rath in 1977, Mission board leaders had already heard similar accusations, letters and other records show. In 1973 he confessed to molesting another child and a note was placed in his file, but mission leaders let him continue to serve in 1978, another incident. Caused the organization to restrict mcelrath's interactions with children. Still, he remained in the field, board records and correspondence provided by victims shows. Finally, in 1995, Devart and several others wrote Jerry Rankin, Mission Board president from June 1993 to July 2010, complaining about Mcelrath. That same year, the board fired Mcelrath for immoral lifestyle unbecoming to a missionary he immediately set to work playing. Yeah, so that's good, right? Yeah, this is fun. Just like the phrasing for all this stuff. Is like, so watered down. It's ultimate weasel word. ****. Again, for these people who are all like fire and brimstone in the inerrant word of God, there's a lot of like, a mistake was made and people were impacted. Yeah, yeah. It's like the best way to protect, the best way to respond would be to loudly and boldly say there is no place for this in our community. That's the in fact, it's the only way to respond if you're not responding to. If you're not saying that, then you're allowing it to happen. Because yes, people are like aggressive response. Yeah, like I would like to hear at least once that like, oh, hey, it came out that this, this missionary or this pastor had been molesting kids and one of his coworkers hit him in the ******* face repeatedly like some some example. Like, people are like outraged about this thing, you know? What do we do? Yeah, like, yeah, what do you do? Yeah, you. I mean, obviously that doesn't isn't the only solution that you should do, but be nice to know that, like, some of these people cared that much. He immediately set to work. Miguel Rath, playing contrite because again, he knew that doing so was going to let him get another position with the church and then he could molest more kids. The way he does this is by sending letters to six families he described as having been impacted by his actions. One of these kids was Linda de Varth, he wrote. Please forgive me for having touched you too intimately when you were a child many years ago. I regret having abused a family like situation. What? Kind of got an issue with that. You think that's good? How come in? No, it's not good. He could maybe the second draft? Maybe a second draft, maybe a second draft where I say I am walking into the sea because the weight of my sins is has has so shamed me. I don't know, maybe that'd be better, at least better. So Divarty's brother sent a letter to the President of the Missionary Board, a former missionary named Rankin, who had worked in Indonesia with Miguel Rath. He admitted he'd heard, quote, ugly rumors about the man, but did not support making a big deal about what had happened. Quote I see no constructive purpose by making a general accounting of this matter to all our missionaries and to Southern Baptists and. Funeral. Again, if you let people know they might, like protect themselves better, yeah. Again, then you don't care. You don't ask why, would you? That's not your job. Yeah, gotta get that. Your flock. You gotta get more. Flock out with your **** out anyway, they say after they left. Probably. Well, I mean, they do that. So after they left Indonesia, Mcelrath and his wife moved to North Carolina, where he joined a Southern Baptist church and started teaching piano lessons to children. That's probably fine. You know, kids never sit in your lap when you're playing piano. That's not a thing that could clearly happen. That's also very clearly his ******* MO. In 2002, a group of survivors learned that Michael Wrath was still volunteering with the church, and they caused an uproar, demanding changes to the policy included. Like, no. No, no, no, no, no. His actions caused the uproar. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Well, sorry. That's that's my bad phrase. You're right. Yes. The fact that, like, well, his actions and also the fact that the church was allowing him to still volunteer. Right. Yeah. That is that is definitely cause for uproar. Yes. Yes. And these survivors are like, you need to, like, appoint an independent advisory committee and commit to monitor perpetrators after they're caught so that they don't keep getting positions in different Southern Baptist churches. The board says no to all of this, but they do set up a hotline. They set up a hotline for admission abuse. You know they have a hotline. Katie, what more are they supposed to do? Somebody answering the hotline? Yeah, maybe, yeah. What's the deal with that? I listened to This American Life recently where they put up a tattle phone in a kids kindergarten classroom just to record what the kids say and it just goes to nowhere. It's just laughed at. That's cool. I mean, that's pretty cute. But I'm just saying, yeah. A hotline. Yeah. What the hell? Yeah. So the board sets up this hotline and their attorney sends an e-mail to mcelrath's victims. We want to affirm our commitment to promptly and completely investigate any new charges of sexual abuse made against missionaries and determinate or and publicly expose any missionary found guilty of such abuse. OK, which, if you've done that, that might have been good. Yeah, that five years after they make this statement. So five years later. In Fort Worth, TX, Ann Miller reports a missionary named Mark Aderholt to the I MB. She said that he had sexually assaulted. She said that he had sexually assaulted her when she was a teenage girl. The IMDb investigates her complaint found substantiates it right. They investigate. They're like, yeah, this definitely happened. And then they say nothing and do not contact the police. Well, you gotta know the guy did it, but then there's nothing else to do, you know? Umm. In their investigation, the Chronicle found a litany of victims like former missionary Dee Ann Miller, who had tried to report abuse and run into a Stonewall of silence meant to protect the Great Commission. Quote, Miller, now 72, was born into the Southern Baptist world. Her father and grandfather were both pastors. By age 10, she knew she wanted to be a missionary, one of the few leadership opportunities open to women. She and her husband, Ron, were thrilled to be appointed to Malawi in 1978. There, she met Gene. Kingsley a missionary since 1960, she visited his house in May 1984 and he hugged her as usual. Then Kingsley quote assaulted me quickly and skillfully, pulling me a foot off the floor, continuing to tighten his arms as I struggled, and he groped me until I yelled, commanding him to put me down, Miller said in an e-mail to the Chronicle. Miller, who had worked with sexual predators as a nurse, reported him to other mission personnel. Nothing happened. Two years later, she decided to make a written complaint after learning that others in her mission family also had reported being inappropriately touched, or worse. Your complaint went up the chain of command to leaders enrichment. Kingsley was permitted to resign rather than be terminated. Miller described in interviews and in her book how two other women, as well as a teenaged girl, also complained, but said those reports were initially ignored and inadequately investigated. Kingsley died in Texas in 2016. And when you read all these? That they were gonna terminate and expose these people. Yeah, but yeah, yeah, the. The thought of somebody that. Prophets makes their career off of being a certain person and positioning themselves within the community in such a way to. Just be so violent. Because it is violent, like it's. Yeah. Anyway, it's it's exactly and then everybody that allows for it, but just the just the act of yeah, I know, it's like you run out of things to say that are new to react to all these horrifying stories. It's, it's ungood. I would say I'm good. Yeah, for sure I'm good. Very good, man. When you when you read all these allegations in tandem, it it's very clear what's going on here. Predators have recognized for close to half a century that missions provide them with a steady carousel of people who are isolated from their families and support networks, and that the structure of the mission board means that allegations will be hushed up to avoid ******* with the money or the sacred calling. So obviously it's a great place to be a predator. And you will also note that these perpetrators tend to be decades long veteran missionaries. Miller describes Kingsley as well practiced, like the way that he abuses her. He says like it is. He knew what he was ******* doing, right? This wasn't like a crime of passion. This was a guy who had perfected a method, you know? Anyway, you know who else is protected? Protected? Their methods? The fine folks at. A company? Sears, Roebuck. That's right, robot. That's why Sears is still the most relevant name in department stores. Buy really? Why a Sears now? Yes, by sears. 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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Better help calm behind this fall on revisionist history. 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? That'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 in 2019, as I've noted a couple of times, the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express News published a massive expose of sexual abuse within the Southern Baptist Convention. One of their articles, and this stuff still coming out, dealt entirely with sex abuse cover ups within the Mission board. In response to this, a series of new proposals were put forward to finally do what survivors had been urging them to do for 20 ******* years. The President of the IMB responded by warning that these proposals would cut four and a half, $1,000,000 out of their budget for the next 15 months, this Baptist news reported. You remember the Baptist news meant that 75 fewer missionaries were going to send to the field, Paul Chitwood, the president of the Mission board, after the last guy had to resign for sexual misconduct, told the faithful. We are praying that through the growing generosity of Southern Baptists giving through the lottery offering, 100% of which goes to fund our missionaries in their work overseas. We can continue to fund not only our existing missionary work, but the goal of growing that force by 500 new missionaries. That's concern one not to always. You should like stop **** for a minute until we figure out why all these kids are getting molested. It's not like, let's get rid of 75 W missionaries. Shoot. How can we make up for this loss of income? Let's yeah, let's expand. Plug the followers, some of whom were molested by our missionaries. Love it when people don't get it. You love to see it now while all of this ******* is going on. Decades of abuses and cover ups and repeated. Fails to deal with entirely foreseeable problems, the Southern Baptist Convention continued to hail the conservative resurgence that had saved them from liberalism. The SBC leadership said it was helpless to stop sex abuse, but resolutely attacked any sign of liberalism from within the faith. In public. They continued their long standing tradition of claiming to want only the best for the people they condemned. A good example of this came in 2014 when the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution on transgender people declaring that God had created 2 distinct and. Complementary sexes and that distinctions and masculine and feminine roles is ordained by God, are not or are part of the created order, and should find expression in every human heart. And I'm going to quote from the Baptist standard here for that reason. The resolution says cultural currents, including medical treatments of gender dysphoria, attempts by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender activists to normalize the transgender experience, and public schools allowing access to restrooms and locker rooms according to children's self perception of gender and not according to their biological sex. All run contrary to biblical teaching. To summarize in the Baptist. Within message, the SBC's official doctrinal statement, the SBC resolution, invites all transgender persons to trust in Christ and to experience renewal in the gospel. It affirms that we love our transgender neighbors, seek their good, always welcome them to our churches, and as they repent and believe in Christ, receive them into church membership. We love you, repent, however we love our community. Resolution does mention offhandedly that it opposes bullying trans people. So that's got all the bases covered that they did all the bases covered. Just like they didn't like lynching. That'll work. That'll work. Having that little passage, that'll do. Bullying. That'll nailed it. None of the unpleasant unpleasantness. Thank you. Keep your bigotry a little bit contained. A little bit. Let the cops do much, you know, because they structure of laws do it, you know? Yeah, yeah. Contained enough so that we do not bring us dishonor. By like doing it in an uncontrolled manner, yeah. So, as a rule, the Southern Baptist Convention has stood to the right of progress in every meaningful issue for the last like 40 years. There are just enough moderates that they tend to count or have been just enough moderates. They tend to couch their language in such a way as to excuse the worst natural conclusions of their logic. And Umm, you know, it's probably not surprising to note that since 2008 the conventions membership has pointed has shifted 20 points for the Republican Party like it is gotten far right. All of this is thanks to the architects of the conservative resurgence. All Pressler and Paige Patterson. They did this to stop what they saw as the Satanic, immoral influence of liberalism. And in this case that also that means, like, politically do mean political liberalism in the way we're talking about. But they also more directly mean, like, liberalism and interpretation of the Bible. Right. The idea that, like, yeah. Anyway, both men spent decades couching what they did is the only proper actions of godly men trying to protect their flocks. You know, we're we are acting morally. That's why we're doing this in 2018. Age Patterson was the former president of the Southern Baptist Convention and preparing to retire as President emeritus of the South of the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Dallas. A special house had been built for him on campus to live in. In his retirement, it seemed as if he was going to be one of those ******** who retires ancient, wealthy, and proud. But then his life fell apart. A student came forward to report her rape three times at gunpoint by a fellow student. She went to the seminary, and Patterson wound up having a one-on-one talk about her. He told staffers that he wanted to. Break her down, talked about how hot she was, and then in the victim's words, he demanded in graphic detail to hear about the rape, right? Other employees report that he made comments about her body. She is suing him for inflicted emotional distress and for interfering with the police investigation of her case because he also interfered with the police investigation of what was an armed rape. This sparked a broader investigation into the man and a **** load of stuff that was barely hidden beneath the surface came up. And I'm going to quote from a write up in the advocate here. Patterson came under fire for his years of advice to women who had been abused or raped. He would tell the woman to pray for their abusers. In one instance, a woman approached him with two black eyes after going back to her husband. On Patterson's advice, she asked Patterson if he was happy. He said he told her yes, and part of his reason was because the husband had attended church that Sunday for the first time. Yeah. I don't like this is a real bummer episode, man. The good news is, when all this comes out, he gets fired. Yeah, and he loses his ******* house too. He doesn't get to live in that house. The seminary he gave his life life to his distanced itself from him, and the lawsuit against him is ongoing. News stories break on a weekly basis about known sex offenders that he sheltered or outright helped into the seminary. The current President of the Southwestern Theological Seminary or whatever, refers to him just as a previous administration when he regularly makes apologies about stuff that happened. And then, of course, there's our other founder of the conservative resurgence, Judge Paul Pressler. He is a former judge now, he's also a former SBC vice president, and he has been accused by three members of a youth group he used to run for groping or pressuring them into sex. 3 male members of a youth group. Yeah. And I'm not going to say this to. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, God. I mean, for all of these guys. Right? And it is. It is it is continuing to come out, right, like there are. There's a good chance there will be a new article in the Chronicle about all this **** by the time you hear the episode. So I'm not going to say this story has a happy ending. As of the day, this air is more than 700 people have reported being victimized by clergy employees or volunteers of SBC churches. But there is some good news at the end of all this horror and frustration, the poison that Pressler and Patterson spilled into the. SBCC may in fact be waning in potency now. I mentioned earlier that the denomination has shifted 20% Republican by almost the last two over the class like 2 decades. That is true, but in the same time frame, the size of the faith has also shrunk by more than two million members. And I'm going to quote from the Atlantic here. For more than a decade, the denomination has been experiencing a precipitous decline. By almost every metric, baptisms are at a 70 year low and Sunday attendance is at a 20 year low. Southern Baptist churches lost almost 80 million or Southern Baptist churches. Lost almost 80,000 members from 2016 to 2017, and they've hemorrhaged a whopping 1,000,000 members since 2003. Four years Southern Baptists have criticized more liberal denominations for their declines, but their own trends are now running parallel. The next crop of leaders knows something must be done. So as I said, and every year they have this convention, right? That's why they're called the SBC. They do a convention every year and they vote on **** right in 2000. And there's a conservative faction. These are guys who today are constantly on one America news and embrace Trump. And then there is they're also conservatives, but the more liberal faction. And in 2018 they defeated the Conservatives in the elections that year and a 45 year old pastor named JD Greer was elected. He won 70% of the vote against a fundamentalist and stated that the denomination had to repent for its quote. Failure to listen to and honor women and racial minorities and to include them proportionally in leadership roles. Good. I mean also. This stuff is like, yeah. Yeah, what you like. They defeated the Conservatives in the elections that year and a 45 year old pastor named JD Greer was elected. He won 70% of the vote against a fundamentalist and stated that the denomination had to repent for its quote, failure to listen to and honor women and racial minorities and to include them proportionally in leadership roles. Good. I mean, also also stuff is like, yeah. Yeah. What you like, yeah. It's just like, that's good. It's it's depressing that this is in reaction to their numbers dropping it, like the math. But that issue that we've been discussing this whole time is like, oh, so they've noticed that, like, people are leaving, so they need to, like, do something about it. It like it is. And that said, I'm not going to say that that's all Greer is concerned with. He is the guy I quoted earlier from a document by the Theological Seminary that was like, going into detail about their history with slavery and stuff. That all happens under Greer because he he or he's like says, like, look, we have to reckon with the ******* racism in our back. And like, they do a certainly a much better job under him of that kind of, oh, for sure. And like, I'm not saying like that and this is. One of the things that should be noted, the SBC is where a lot of conservative, bellwether cultural issues get tested out right where they start to work on the wording. You may note that like in 2014, they issue a resolution condemning the idea that trans people should be able to use bathrooms. That's 2014, right? That's a couple of years before it becomes the, you know, the big national like issue that it becomes, right. So it happens here earlier in 2019, Republicans within the. Southern Baptist Convention forced a vote on a resolution condemning critical race theory. Right? Again, like a year or two early, right? Like, little bit, little bit. And here's the ******* thing. The Convention refuses to condemn it. Instead, they issue, admittedly, a somewhat compromised statement, but in which they say that the concept may be useful and valuable, whereas the resolution the Conservatives had wanted to pass described it as Neo Marxist and post like, we got a yeah, no, it's. It's all Jordan B Peterson **** being a little bit or there's. That seems to be what's happened. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And also 2019 is the year that the story drops for the story starts dropping about all these stations. So that's something to 2020, the SBC's new leadership issued a number of statements condemning past racism and the racism of the founders of the denomination. More than that, they commissioned a large report on racism in the founding of the SBC, which I have quoted from earlier in these episodes. There's probably nothing I can quote that will do a better job of showing the positive trend than by noting quoting right wing ghoul Tom Askell writing for Founders ministries about the 2021 convention in Nashville. Several things happened at SBC 21 and many, if not most of them are deeply concerning to grassroots Southern Baptists who love Christ, fear God, tremble at his word, and want to cooperate for the cause of missions and evangelism with others who are like minded. And obviously he's complaining that another person who is not a ******* fascist won the election. And and the week that we are doing this reading, they have just had another election at the SBC 2022. And the the guy who? One SEC. OK, that's right. At. Yeah, so the guy who runs for the right wing side is Florida Pastor Tom Askell, who we just heard from. Right? And ask Cole, like, runs specifically ran specifically by attacking the leftward drift of the Southern Baptist Convention on issues of gender, sexuality, abortion, and critical race theory. Right, Tom? ******* right? Yeah, yeah, he loses to a small town Texas preacher named Barber. Who is a one second I read you a quote from this cause this all just came out. I like I just read this today. So Ascol run like calling for Baptist to be culturally uncompromising. He's in like he's he does interviews for one America news, real America's voice and the daily wire. You know he's he's going hard into all of this culture worship, right. And this is like the the guy he runs against is this guy Barber who's a pastor in rural Texas and despite what that might make you think is like. He his he runs on, among other things, fundamentally changing the way things are done at the SPC because of the sex abuse scandal. He wants to expand the role of women and, like, stop the kind of war on women pastors and stuff. He wants to continue the discussions they're having about race, and he doesn't want the Southern Baptist Convention to just keep plunging into the culture wars on behalf of the Republican Party. Sounds like a pretty good guy. That's reasonable. And he within, at least within the context of the Southern Baptist Convention, a better guy, for sure than ask. Who's a real *******? He Barbara wins 61% to 39%. That's what happened today very recently in the last like day or two this week. That's great. That's wonderful. Yeah, that's broadly speaking, better than how the news could be. Yeah, good for them. I love this. Register this this daily wire headline about this earlier. Yeah, which I think is very telling. It's Southern Baptist nominate Tom Askell to leadership to combat woke drift in largest Protestants nomination. It's very funny. He lost pretty pretty badly. Not a close election, 61 to 39 or whatever. Yeah, not not super close. Another nail biter down, like took combat woke drift is what it said. Yeah, no, it sounds like they want to listen. Cody, Katie, there's like a wokey O drift joke somewhere. We should put a pen in there and figure that out later. I wanted to end by quoting that Atlantic article that I quoted from earlier cited a pastor named Adrian Rogers who said, quote, as the West goes, so goes the world. As America goes, so goes the West. As Christianity goes, so goes America. As evangelicals go, so goes Christianity. And as Southern Baptists goes, so do evangelicals, and obviously that's a very western chauvinist way of looking at things. But within the context of, as Southern Baptists go, Sogo evangelicals and perhaps even Christianity. There's some truth in that, and it's not a bad sign that the Southern Baptist, for like 4 years now as America's culture wars have gotten worse, have like pretty consistently been rejecting the idea that their faith should lean into that ****. Yeah, like tempering that sort of impulse. It's not a. Add sign right now. There are worse things happening. That's a really insightful and lovely way to wrap this horror horrible story, because pretty bad story. Yeah. Something hopeful a little bit, but a little bit, you know, something hopeful. I'll yeah. So I don't know. You know, who knows what's going to happen in the future if you're a Southern Baptist who's plugging to turn your faith back to its roots as the faith where they were going to abolish gender and destroy male supremacy. Good luck. Yeah, there's some some power to you, right? I don't know. You guys got any plegables? That's nice. Yeah, they know. Check out the plug. This daily wire piece? Yeah, the daily wire. You gotta check it out. Yeah. Matt Walsh is documentary. What, is a woman real? Yeah. Gina carano. Uncancelled we have a podcast called Acting More news and a YouTube channel called some more news. The Patreon and all sorts of fun stuff that goes along with it stuff and and also tweet all kinds of starting in July, you can listen to our new podcast, cancel Gasm, where every week we'll talk to a new victim of cancel culture, the unwoke rise up. Yeah, like zombies. Like zombies because they're they're kind of all the same. Terraforming. Might I might I recommend you actually just like order after the revolution from AK Press Robert Robert Evans book before I get cancelled for it, for telling the truth about fiction. Ohca. Alright, nailed it. Lovely. 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. 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