The SBC obviously should have spent less time striving to make life hell for gays and subordinating women and cleaned its own house.
Almost always, congregations react to news that Pastor Bubba is raping the children’s choir by rallying to the pastor and re-victimizing his victims. The overwhelming majority of Southern Baptists will dismiss this series as “fake news,” just Satan’s li’l helpers in “the world” attempting to undermine Jesus’ work, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Most pastors, if they deign to notice the furor created by this series at all, will merely insist that there’s no problem here at Godly Folk Church, and attendance will be the same next week as it was yesterday.
This reporting will have little direct effect on the Southern Baptist Convention at all, because its congregants are not affected by facts and reason. What reporting like this achieves is that …
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It hardens the distance between the SBC and the decent, educated world, and …
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It warns off people who were thinking of trying out a Southern Baptist Church.
At the next annual meeting the Convention will pass a stern resolution condemning the rape of children and the sexual exploitation of troubled women — and that will be that. It is attrition, the slowly declining ability to recruit new members, that will finally kill off the SBC — not scandal.