Behind the Bastards - Part Two: How The Southern Baptist Convention Was Taken Over By Republicans and Child Molesters

Episode Date: June 30, 2022

Robert is joined again by Katy Stoll and Cody Johnston to continue to discuss The Southern Baptist Convention.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, yeah. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards. I'm just letting you know I would have quit so long ago. So fucking long ago. If what? If this was your real, if this was real. And the morning with you to help you drive time, go by like the moonlight.

We're gonna prank call people whose children are in the NICU and make them think their kids are dead. How all comedy works in 2003. Yeah, and the girl just has some sort of like laugh. Yes, nailed it. Nailed it. We're back. Support our misogyny by laughing at our jokes. Oh, Cody. Thanks, Moonman.

Christ. How's it going? Well, what's up with you? 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-Eleven from. Really? You really? Yeah.

Wait, like learned about 9-Eleven or like learned that 9-Eleven happened from? Learned that it happened. Yeah. It was the Jeff and Anna morning show. I was driving to fucking, I mean, I wasn't driving 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 first that it had been like some prop plane or some shit that some idiot had axed. And so like they were just like joking about how bad,

like probably making jokes about people with that 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. Oh my. That might not have been, that might not have been just a, just a kooky mix up. Yeah, maybe not a. Oh my God. Morning drive time, bitch.

I wanted to be a radio show host when I was a kid. Didn't we all? I was like, that seems perfect. I wanted to be like an oldie radio station project. You don't got to do shit. And look where I am now, baby. Playing the oldies. Hanging out with Moonman.

The classics and the hits. Oh Jesus. So. Yeah. Speaking of Jesus. Christ? Well, yeah. Yeah.

That's one of the Jesuses. I mean, there's a couple of them. G's eye. Yeah. Just we. Us. One of the more famous G's eye. 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 commission or convention. Right. 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. Really? Yeah. Yeah. In 2006, members of the survivors network of those abused by priests held a rally outside of the executive committee's office in Nashville, Tennessee. Augie accused the abuse victims of coming at the committee with a quote, adversarial posture, which he used to justify his opposition to their request

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 try to get a job at a Southern Baptist affiliated church, it'll go like,

no, that guy molested a bunch of kids. Like a database of some kind. Yeah. Like a registry, like literally the bare minimum. Yeah. It's, again, like the least you can do is be like, we should probably know if somebody molest kids tries to get another job where they can molest kids, right? Like that's, again, this should not be like a political issue in any way.

Not radical. 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 Debbie Vasquez when they ask for reform. And 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. No, obviously we do things like demand that they oppose abortion and that they say that women should be submissive to men. Right.

It works one way, but not the other. But not the, but we could not, we couldn't make them keep a list of all the people who rape kids. That's not cool. So that's neat. It's neat that 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 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.

They're preaching. Well, their soul for probably already saved before the pastor molested them. He surely baptized them. So really it's other people we need to worry about. They're taken care of. They're good to go. To heaven. Good to go to heaven.

Even judged by the standards of his faith, but those justifications are fucking 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 pool 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 with other shit 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. Eight. That feels like it's everybody. That feels like it's everybody. I was searching for, 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? There's just not a lot of folks there, of course. So few. It seems comprehensive, you know? It seems like they got them all. One for every corner, plus some in the middle.

One for every town in Texas. I remember growing up. That's why it's eight flags over Texas, a flag for each of the towns. I mean, literally everybody knows everybody in Texas. 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 of that.

He's got stuff to do. He's got stuff to do. He's got stuff to do. It's not because he Reggie LeDoux doesn't like you. That didn't work. Oh, no, no, that was perfect. That was perfect. I might have gone with Reggie LeDoux, but it's all good.

Oh, that's what I meant to do on it. It's all a banger. This is a fun joke for the three of us. That's easier. And whoever else happens to remember True Detective, and mainly the way that you want to say Reggie LeDoux. You guys should really check out True Detective. This little sleeper show that nobody heard about.

Two words from one line of one season of a show from like six years ago. It's not two lines. That's a name that gets said a bunch. He does. Sure. And to be clear, he never says it like a verb or whatever. It's just a name. No, it's a person's name.

Nearly all of this is just us because it's funny. Why would Russ 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 is 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. Fucking knew it. That was my guess. Did they show anyone this list?

Of course not. Right? Like why would I? To say specifically that it's against our faith or whatever the justification basically is, we can't do it too hard against our faith, not what we do publicly. But we do it. Of course we do it. Obviously.

Obviously. Come on. And I'm going to quote now from an interview with Russell Moore. He's a former spokesman for the denomination. He 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 from being sexually violated by a minister. 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. 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 at threat and other people who are at risk. And you instead ignore them to protect yourself. Sure.

Okay. That might be the kind of thing that were I God, 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 school with it.

It's been a while since I was in Sunday school, but that does strike me as a sin. I think that might be a sin. It could be sinful. But 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. That's true. That's true. All.

I don't know. I don't know. I've never met God. We have to remember Mark 1624 in which Jesus Christ said, and I quote, fuck them kids. Yeah. Mm hmm. Famous. Famous Jesus say.

Oh yeah. One of the only things that really sticks. Yeah. That's like, because it's also because it's on a tattoo to cross my back. Yeah. Yeah. Fuck them kids. Yeah.

Most courthouses have it. Yeah. Yeah. It's honestly like a little over commercialized. Don't you think? I do. I do. It's printed so much.

I don't know. It's like. Yeah. Anyway. It loses its power a little bit. You're right. Yeah. These are fun bits.

Topic. So. They'd 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. Clearly. Because the same pedophiles and molesters kept getting hired again and again as this devastating segment from the Chronicle investigation makes clear, quote, Doug Myers 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 Redden was convicted of possessing child pornography, yet 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. Yeah. I don't know. I'm not a PR person, but it sounds like it could be. Nobody there would be no realistic reason, even given all like the right wing shit, there

would 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, we just be like, yeah, man, 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 removed when they pop up and 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. Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. The other thing, the opposite of the thing.

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 Edwards' 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. Oh, it seems bad, Robert, it seems bad.

It is bad, Katie, but what's interesting about it here to me, it's kind of an intellectual level, is that obviously this is all like Catholic church shit, right? You can find, switch the names up and these are all stories that you can find within abuse by Catholic priests. But on paper, at least, the Southern Baptist Convention 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 expert's words, kind of the Wild West. There's no regulation. There's no central authority. Abusers make their own policies for deciding who can be a pastor there.

In many smaller congregations, all it takes is being a good speaker and getting enough congregants to say, yeah, this guy. 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. 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 fucked-up din of molestation immediately realized the SBC had the same problems.

Have you guys heard of the Reverend Thomas Doyle? I don't think so, though. Fucking 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 movie. It's a good thing you had so few printed. Yeah, I did. Well, I mean, I'm going to be honest, Katie, I got 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 them out, but I'm underwater here. I can't get my head above it.

Life is long. Maybe you'll be surprised. Yeah. Anyway, 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 Page 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. Yeah. There's nothing to be done. How would we even?

Yeah. In March of 2019, Page resigned as president and CEO of the SBC Executive Committee for what we currently know only as, quote, a morally inappropriate relationship in the recent past. Oh, what? Pardon me? Yeah, baby. Can you say the use of more words? What's surprising?

Well, this guy who fucking this good, this Catholic Church whistleblower reaches out to Frank Page, who's the head of the SBC, right? He's their president, which is like an elected kind of position, reaches out to him in 2007 and says, hey, there is a sex abuse problem in a systemic, you guys need to deal with it. Page is 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.

Twelve 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 define 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 nine-year-old, right? Like all of that. It's a wide 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, in fact, a lot of them call themselves 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 recruit all the people that you can. 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 young missionaries to go and get killed or spread disease, trying to share Jesus' stuff with people who are perfectly happy, living wherever the fuck 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 to take on terrible risks and live in privation to share their faiths. On a big scale, it means that true believers in this might do anything to avoid fucking 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.

Speaking of evangelism, you know what I'm a missionary for, Katie, Cody. Products and services that support this podcast, you're spreading the real good news. Let me quote the 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.

Okay. I need 30 seconds. I need Shopify, sure. Yeah. That's okay. Yes. Before we come back. Sorry.

Sorry. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, you get it. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right.

I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark.

And not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

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And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back! 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. All right, I guess. I've got more to say about it, but there's another time, Cody.

People can listen to the Some More News episode, they can find it, it's easy. We talked about this, we have all talked about it. Of course we have, constantly. 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 fucking 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 pornography and sent to prison for more than two years. Now, I might say that one thing that being caught with child pornography means is that you should not be the head of sending people to missions or maybe ever close to children.

So he did promise, if this makes you feel better, during a 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, huh? No, no. I tried, I was prepared for it. 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 fucking

known about the child porn arrest. Shouldn't ex-convicts have a chance? To do some things, yes, perhaps not teach children if the arrest is for child pornography. Perhaps not go back to, yeah. If he wanted to be, I don't know, putting in drywall or something, right? And again, that's nothing he gets 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. Installing, we can agree on that at locations that are a certain distance from schools. From schools, sure, yes, a number of things he could do that don't put him near children. Instead, he becomes a pastor. 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 if 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 work 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 in. Basically, by the way, there's a huge ethical question about, like, colonialism and mission work, and we're not really going to get into that today because that's much too big of a subject 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, Jr. 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 7,500 miles away at the Richmond, Virginia headquarters of what's now called the International Mission Board. Wade promised to stop, the supervisor said. His daughter said she was told to forgive Wade and was sworn to secrecy.

Here's the fucking kicker. Are you guys ready for this shit? 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 fucking wife.

That's horrifying. That's a fucking nightmare. It's not our business to tell her, you know. That is a fucking nightmare. Yeah. It's outrageous. When you do learn and to know that everybody, everybody in your community, you're cut. Oh God.

And you've like, this is, again, as problematic as mission work is, this is, you've dedicated your whole life to mission work. And like this, like, my God, what a fucking, 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 give out every year. Okay. So yeah, that warehouse is definitely, that was very empty.

Yeah. Yeah. I may move some of the best priest awards over there just to split it out. So it seems like you're doing it right. Maximize your space, you know. Yeah, exactly. That seems smart. So his daughter was never again asked about the abuse, which by the way, 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. Okay. I just like to know when we are in time. So his daughter, you know, he keeps being molested by him. She attempts suicide.

She 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. Yeah. That's how the math works. Just so baked in this misogyny, this idea that the man, the ruler is the ruler of the household. And he specifically is the ruler of this congregation. Well, and look, I'm not a believer in the divinity of Jesus Christ, but there's a historical

case. There was certainly a guy and individuals that some of those stories were written about. And I have to think that any one of those people who was like 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, this is like fuck, right? Like this is fuck them up behavior, you know, like by anyone, right?

Any moderately, again, that's the thing. Like you talk about like, like I don't know a goddamn fucking atheist or degenerate weirdo hippie in the world who wouldn't like fucking burn down a building if this was done like to their family, you know. But these people, these men of God love this shit. They're totally down. So 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 day, Katie. In June of 1985, she learned her husband had abused three additional girls as well as her other daughter. 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 dance anyway, but she's preparing to get married to like 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 cause he's been fucking molesting me for years. And that's when Diana Wade finds out what fucking happened. 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 fucking prison. Next, Diana does the natural thing and files for divorce, right? Pretty like, I don't think that needs explaining to reasonable people.

One of the first steps. Yeah. Unpardonable reaction. Yeah. 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 if this shit happens or happened. It's fucking outrageous. Yeah, it is. 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 fucking minimum. The SBC 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 alone did, my calling and commitment in 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 fucking math. I mean, this all sounds very illegal shit. It does sound illegal, Katie says, you know, I you I 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 that 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 on safe ground there. I don't know.

Yeah. Again, not a lawyer. Next from the Chronicles reporting, Diana Wade filed a lawsuit alleging that the mission board had broken contractual promises to protect her family and increased harm to her children by concealing her husband's criminal behavior. A jury decision favored the family. But the wades lost in 1991 after the board appealed to the Virginia Supreme Court. Mission board leaders were a force 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 five cases, the crime or sorry, mission I guess is no that they they they never said whether they'd 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. And he did. And in fact, the Chronicle looked into five cases of missionaries who were definitely abusing kids.

And yeah, at no at no point in none of these cases was their 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 do anything else? Oh, yeah. What else? Who else? Yeah.

Nothing else looks nobody. The only reason they look into this is because they get caught. They're not opening any lids and they certainly don't care about non-white kids. Absolutely not. They care about them not going to hell, but you can get molested and go to heaven, right? They don't actually care about that, do they? Yeah. I mean, they say they do, but don't they make, it's about money and power, like if you're

willing to fuck a kid, you're actually not concerned whether you might make that case, right? I am. That's a strong argument, Katie. Thank you. Now, in 2018, the board sent more than 3,600 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, yes, it turns out, he repeatedly molested his colleagues' children.

Letters the man sent to his own co-workers show that he privately admitted to abusing colleagues' children 30 years before the story became public. He's, like, writing his fellow missionaries, like, most of some kids the other day, feel a little bad about it. Yeah, 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. Um, look, Cody, nobody's perfect. Or as I say, nobody's perfect. I was gonna, I was gonna splay, blad. One of his victims was Linda DeVarth. She had moved to Indonesia at age eight 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 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, DeVarth became that kid, and Miguel Rath fondled her. She said nothing for five years.

But when she did tell her parents, her father, to his credit, reported Miguel Rath to mission board officials in Indonesia. No action was taken. The chronicle continues. By the time DeVarth reported Miguel 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 Miguel Rath's interactions with children. Still, he remained in the field, board records and correspondence provided by victims' shows. Finally, in 1995, DeVarth and several others wrote Jerry Rankin, mission board president from June 1993 to July 2010, complaining about Miguel Rath. That same year, the board fired Miguel Rath for an immoral lifestyle unbecoming to a missionary. He immediately set to work playing.

So that's good, right? This is fun. Just like the phrasing for all this stuff is so watered down. It's ultimate weasel word shit. 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. Again, it's like the best way to protect, the best way to respond would be too 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, if you're not saying that, then you're allowing it to happen because people are like. Yes. Yes. 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 fucking face repeatedly. Yeah. Yeah. Like some, some examples like people are like outraged about this thing. Not just like, oh, what do we do? Yeah. Like, yeah.

What do you do? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, obviously that doesn't, isn't the, the only solution that you should do. But it would be nice to know that like some of these people cared that much. He immediately set to work with 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 DeVarth. 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 don't think that's good? Fucking no. It's not good. He could. Hmm. Maybe a 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

has, has, has so shamed me. I don't know. Maybe. That'd be better at least. Better. Better. So DeVarth'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 in general. Again, if you let people know, they might like protect themselves better. Yeah. Again, then you don't care. You don't actually care. Well, why would you?

That's not your job. Yeah. You've got to get that, your flock. You've got to get more. You've got to get that flock. Flock out with your cock out, anyway. They say that. Don't they?

After they left. Probably. Well, I mean, they do that. So after they left Indonesia, Miguel Rath 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, no 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 fucking MO. In 2002, a group of survivors learned that Miguel Rath was still volunteering with the church and they caused an uproar demanding changes to the policy. Sorry. And that caused an uproar, like no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, his actions caused the uproar. Yeah. Yeah.

Right. Well, sorry. That's, that's my bad phrase. Okay. I apologize. You're right. Yes. The fact that, 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 mission 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 answer with that hotline?

I listened to this, this American life recently where they put up a tattle phone in a kid's kindergarten classroom just to record what the kids say and it just goes to nowhere. It's just laughed at. Oh, 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 email 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 to terminate or publicly expose any missionary found guilty of such abuse. Okay. Which if you'd done that, that might have been good. Yeah. Five years after they make this statement.

So five years later in Fort Worth, Texas, Ann Miller reports a missionary named Mark Aderholt to the IMB. She said that he had sexually assaulted her when she was a teenage girl. The IMB investigates her complaint, substantiates it, right? They investigate it and they're like, yeah, this definitely happened. And then they say nothing and do not contact the police. Well, you got to know the guy did it, but then there's nothing else to do, you know? In their investigation, the Chronicle found a litany of victims like former missionary

D. Ann Miller, who had tried to report abuse and run into a stone wall 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 Jean 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 email 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. Her complaint went up the chain of command to leaders in Richmond. 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. It's pure evil. And when you read all these...

It's pure evil. Yeah. It's like hearing that. It's that they were going to terminate and expose these people. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like the thought of somebody that profits, 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 ghastly. Yeah. It's a system.

Yeah. Everybody that allows for it. But just the act of... Yeah. Yeah. I know. It's like you run out of things to say that are new to react to all these horrifying stories. Yeah.

It's... It's un-good, I would say. Un-good. Yeah. For sure. Un-good. Very un-good, man. Very un-good, man.

When you read all these allegations in tandem, 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 fucking 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.

She says, like, he knew what he was fucking 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 has perfected their methods? To find folks at a company? Sears Robot. That's right. Sears Robot.

That's why Sears is still the most relevant name in department stores. That's where you're going to really want to go. Buy a Sears now. Yes, buy Sears. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right.

I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you've got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark.

And not in the good and bad ass way. And nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. And Alphabet Boys on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful

lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all

bogus. It's all made up. Welcome to CSI On Trial on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories.

But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your

podcasts. 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 fucking years.

The president of the IMB responded by warning that these proposals would cut four and a half million dollars 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 get sent into 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 Lottie 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 the concern one. Maybe we should like stop shit for a minute until we figure out why all these kids are getting molested. It's not like, let's get out of here. Oh, we might have 75 less missionaries. It's, shoot, how can we make up for this loss of income? Let's, 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 fuckery is going on, decades of abuses and coverups 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 longstanding 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 two distinct and complementary sexes and that distinctions in masculine and feminine roles as 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 as summarized in the Baptist faith and 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 transgender community. The resolution does mention off-handedly that it opposes bullying trans people. So that's all the bases covered. All the bases covered. Just like they didn't like lynching. That'll work.

That'll work. Having that little passage about bullying. That'll do. Nailed it. None of the unpleasantness, thank you. Keep your bigotry a little bit contained. A little bit. Let the cops do it.

Too much. You know? What the structure of laws do it, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Contained enough so that we can do it. Do not bring us dishonor. By like doing it.

By actively doing it. In an uncontrolled manner. Yeah. 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 you know, it's probably not surprising to note that since 2008, the convention's membership has shifted 20 points for the Republican Party. Like it has gotten far right. All of this is thanks to the architects of the conservative resurgence, Paul 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 political, they 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 the, 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, Paige 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 bastards 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? What the fuck? 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 shitload 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 that. This is a real bummer episode, man. The good news is, when all this comes out, he gets fired and he loses his fucking house too. He doesn't get to live in that house.

The seminary he gave his life to, his distance itself from him and the lawsuit against him is ongoing. New 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, 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, three male members of a youth group. Yeah. And I bet there's more. I'm not going to say this to... There's more.

Yeah. Oh, God. I mean, for all of these guys, right? For everybody. And it is continuing to come out, right? Yeah. There's good chance there'll be a new article in the Chronicle about all this shit 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 airs, 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 SBC 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 two decades. That is true.

But in the same timeframe, 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 80,000 members from 2016 to 2017. And they've hemorrhaged a whopping one million members since 2003.

For 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. That is something positive. 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 shit, right? And there's a conservative faction.

These are guys who today are constantly on one American 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. When a 45-year-old pastor named J. D. 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 stuff is like, yeah, yeah, what year are you like, yeah. It's just like, that's good. It's depressing that this is in reaction to their numbers dropping. Yeah. It is. The math issue that we've been discussing this whole time is like, oh, so they've noticed that people are leaving, so they need to do something about it. It is.

It's still good. It is. 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 going into detail about their history with slavery and stuff. That all happens under Greer, because he's like says, look, we have to reckon with the fucking racism in our back. They do certainly a much better job under him of that kind of thing.

Oh, for sure. I'm not saying that's the only thing. 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 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 big national 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 ago, right? Yeah. A little bit. A little bit. And here's the fucking thing.

The convention refuses to condemn it. Yeah. 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-mortem, like, yeah, no, it's all Jordan B. Peterson shit. Maybe they're learning a little bit. Or there's that seems to be what's happening.

Yeah. Yeah. And also 2019 is the year that the story starts dropping about all these violations. So after 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 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 fucking fascist won the election. So in the week that we are doing this reading, they have just had another election at the

SBC 2022. And the guy who, one sec, yeah. So the guy who runs for the right-wing side is Florida pastor Tom Askell, who we just heard from, right, and Askell run 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 Askell, right? Yeah, yeah.

He loses to a small town Texas preacher named Barber, who is a, one second, I want to read you a quote from this, because this all just came out, I just read this today. So Askell run like, calling for Baptist to be culturally uncompromising. He's in like, he does interviews for one American news, real America's voice and the daily wire. You know, he's going hard into all of this culture worship, right? And this is like, 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 runs on, among other things, fundamentally

changing the way things are done at the SBC 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 Askell, who's a real asshole. He, Barber wins 61% to 39%. That's what happened today. Very recently, in the last like day or two, wow, that's great. 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. So I just thought this, this daily wire headline about this earlier, which I think is very telling it, Southern Baptist nominate Tom Askell to leadership to combat woke drift in largest Protestant denomination. It's very funny.

Yeah. Well, he lost pretty, pretty badly, not a close election, 61 to 39 or whatever. Yeah. Not, not super close. Not a nail biter. Not a nail biter. Also, they sound like took combat woke drift is what it said. Yeah.

No, it sounds like they want to listen. Cody, Katie, there's like a wokeo drift joke somewhere. We should put a pen in that 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 go, 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, so go evangelicals and perhaps even Christianity, there's some truth in that and it's not a bad sign that the Southern Baptists for like four years now, as America's culture worse have gotten worse, have like pretty consistently been rejecting the idea that their faith should lean into that shit. Yeah. Like tempering that sort of impulse.

It's not a bad sign, right? No. There are worse things happening. That's a really insightful and lovely way to wrap this a horror, horrible way. A horrible story. Because. Pretty bad story. Pretty bad story.

Yeah. Something hopeful a little bit. But a little bit. Something hopeful. Yeah. So I don't 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. There's some power to you. Some power to you. All right. I don't know. You guys got any plugables? That's nice. Yeah.

They know. Check this out. We'll have to plug this daily wire piece. Yeah. The daily wire. You got to check it out. Yeah. Matt Walsh's documentary.

What is a woman? Real. Yeah. Gina Carano has been uncancelled. We have a podcast. We have a podcast. With her acting. Even more news.

And a YouTube channel called Some More News and a Patreon. And all sorts of fun stuff that goes along with it. All sorts of fun stuff. And Twitter. And tweet. All kinds of tweets. Starting in July, you can listen to our new podcast, Cancel Gazzam. Where every week we'll talk to a new victim of cancel culture.

Oh, boy. The Unwoke Rise Up. Yeah. Like zombies. Like zombies. It's going to be awful. Because they're kind of all the same. Fucking terrible.

It is. Now we got to do it. And I recommend you actually just like order after the revolution from A.K. Press, Robert Evans book. Before I get canceled for it. For telling the truth about fiction. Awooka. All right.

Nailed it. Lovely. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns.

But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.