Theology of the Body

Misogynist ideology leads to misogynist abuse.

Photo by Malcolm Lightbody on Unsplash

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The Southern Baptist Convention is in turmoil. A report commissioned by the organization has revealed systemic and covered-up sexual abuse, from small-town preachers to men at the tippy-top of the organization.

The report documents two decades of abuse allegations that went unheeded, covered up, or stifled, including sexual abuse survivors who were treated as opportunists, liars, and tools of Satan. Now, SBC members and leaders are having one of two reactions: Shock or dismissal.

“We knew it was coming,” SBC president Ed Linton said, but “it still is very challenging and surprising — shocking — to have to face these realities.”

Another prominent member of the organization wrote off the work of sexual abuse survivors as part of a “satanic scheme to completely distract us from evangelism.”

The truth is that these abusive acts are neither a surprise nor a distraction. They are predictable and they are central to the Southern Baptist Convention’s theology and message, which preaches male domination of women, instructs women to submit to male authority, and treats women as vessels for other people’s needs.

This is a theology of abuse.

The Southern Baptist Convention does not allow women to be pastors. The organization tells its followers that women cannot and should not lead men because the Apostle Paul said, “I do not allow a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; instead, she is to remain quiet.” According to SBC doctrine, a wife “is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband.” Even allowing women to address mixed congregations, rather than preaching to women alone, has spurred backlash and handwringing from a whole bunch of petty misogynists who believe a woman’s place is sitting in silence, obeying men.

This is justified through the idea of “complementarianism” — basically, women and men are separate but equal. From the official news service of the Southern Baptist Convention:

Danny Akin, president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C., noted that “complementarianism, as a bedrock basic, affirms that men and women equally bear the image of God.”

“There is an essential equality between men and women,” he said, “and yet within that framework God has established distinctive roles and assignments for men and for women, and we rejoice in that good gift of God.”

Akin called attention to men’s particular role as “servant leaders” as assigned by the Lord “particularly in the home and in the church.”

“God calls women in the home to submit to the leadership of their husbands, but there’s no sense in which there is any inferiority, it is simply different assignments within the clear understanding, that we’re equal image bearers before God,” Akin emphasized.

But here’s the thing: If these separate roles were indeed equally as valuable, and if there was really “no sense in which there is an inferiority,” then one half of the equation wouldn’t be told to submit to the other. One half of the equation wouldn’t have fewer rights, fewer opportunities, and less freedom. One half of the equation wouldn’t be told to submit themselves to the other. That is, quite literally, inferiority.

The Southern Baptist Church is also an anti-abortion organization. When Roe v. Wade was decided in1973, the SBC generally supported abortion rights. But as the conservative effort to maintain racially segregated schools declined in popularity and efficacy, the anti-abortion religious right was born, and the SBC was a significant part of it. The SBC came into being when it split from the Baptist church in the North over the issue of slavery: the Northern Baptists opposed it; the Southern Baptists supported it, and formed their church around it. Slavery, some of the SBC founders argued, “a God-ordained institution.”

It took 150 years for the church to apologize.

The Southern Baptist Convention also wasn’t cowed by the civl war. The institution continued to support racial segregation and other racist policies. SBC leaders opposed giving African Americans the right to vote; the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary refused to admit Black students. By the time segregation fell out of broad social favor, the SBC, along with the broader Evangelical right, turned its sights by necessity toward women’s rights, which they had also long opposed. They joined with conservative Catholics, years after the Roe decision, in fighting against the right to abortion. They used a new language of “life,” but the real reason was the same one they used to bar women from speaking from church pulpits: Women cannot be in charge; women must be subservient to men; a woman’s purpose is to have children and to serve others.

It was very clear to the SBC and other Evangelical leaders that abortion and contraception gave women a dangerous amount of power — that these tools could enable women to support themselves, which would undercut the necessity of submission, and by extension, undermine the broad male monopoly on power.

And here is the thing with laws that restrict abortion: These laws mandate abuse; they mandate the violation of the body. There is a direct link between anti-abortion laws and sexual violence, and it’s not only that a lot of women who are raped and forcibly impregnated end up choosing to have abortions. It’s that the violence, dehumanization, and entitlement of anti-abortion laws mirrors that of rape: the forcible invasion of another person’s most intimate insides; the intentional degradation of a physical function that can in chosen circumstances be nothing short of holy; the treatment of a woman as something not quite human, as a vessel for someone else’s desires. Both of these impulses — to force someone to have sex against their will, to force someone to carry a pregnancy and give birth against their will — are sadistic, misogynist, the work of people who delight in keeping women subservient and submissive and small.

Of course these motivations that animate staunch opposition to abortion also result in sexual abuse.

Of course a church that preaches that women are to be subservient and submissive and small treats them that they are subservient and submissive and small. Of course a church that preaches that women are to submit to men, and that men are entitled to exert power and control over women, has a problem with men exerting power and control over women by sexually abusing them. There is no other possible outcome. There is no other way this could have gone.

So please, spare us all the handwringing and the concern and the shock that women are abused by misogynist men within an explicitly misogynist institution that delights in women’s disempowerment and demands their subjugation. Please do not feign surprise when men who were told they have dominion over women’s lives and bodies, including their most private sexual acts and reproductive parts, exercise that dominion over women — and make the locus of their abuse sexual.

This is a church rooted in domination, brutality, abuse. It’s a church that should never have existed. It is a church that should live with shames old and new, that has not yet once been on the right side of history, that was brutal in its founding and remains abusive in its theology and its politics. It is a church that has no justification for being, and many reasons to atone.

It is a church that should cease to exist.

xx Jill