#SBCToo and Purity Culture

Why it's not just a policy failure, it's a theology failure

By now both Christian Twitter and Nashville Twitter are abuzz with the news that the Department of Justice, in between retrieving nuclear codes and presidential picture books from Mar-a-Lago, is investigating multiple entities of the Southern Baptist Convention in response to the recent report from Guidepost Solutions, which provided proof that SBC leaders had for decades ignored, silenced, bullied, denigrated and in some cases even punished survivors of sexual violence who had attempted to come forward about their experiences. Turns out that’s not just a morally wrong and shitty thing to do, it’s also a crime and the government is weirdly on a kick right now about prosecuting powerful trash men for their crimes.

As far as I’m concerned, every “entity” and leader in the Southern Baptist Convention deserves exactly what’s coming to them, certainly no less and likely much more. I mentioned this on Twitter but I do not believe for a moment that the government is or can be the conduit or arbiter of “justice” for survivors. I’m an abolitionist at heart and I dream of a world where the prison industrial complex doesn’t exist, and even though everyone always brings up sexual abuse as some kind of abolitionist “gotcha” the unfortunate truth is that the current carceral system does not give a shit about survivors of sexual violence. Have YOU ever tried to report a rape to the police? If you haven’t ask someone who has and then come back to me with your whataboutisms when people talk about prison abolition. The current system is not working. Nonetheless, getting investigated by the DOJ for covering up sex crimes is like, not a good look, and I’m hoping this investigation at the very least disgraces the SBC in the eyes of the public to the point that people think twice about ever darkening the doors of one of their cursed establishments ever again. I’m not holding my breath for a fund to compensate survivors for the cost of their mental and physical health needs but that’d be nice too.

Anyway, here’s what’s about to happen and what’s already happening: news media outlets are going to cover the investigation, the Guidepost report, the truly excellent reporting by the Houston Chronicle, that self-indulgent blame-obfuscating pathetic excuse of a statement by the Executive Committee, all of it—and they’re going to cover it without mentioning purity culture one single time. They’re going to cover the policy failures that led to the current crisis, the fact that a lot of churches and schools didn’t have clearly written and consistently enforced policies around how to report abuse, who to report it to, whether and when to involve law enforcement, and how to inform congregations, student bodies, and the general public. They’re going to talk about the ways that powerful men cover for each other, the culture of dismissiveness and secrecy that permeated the SBC and its various entities, the way power and celebrity function in communities defined by hierarchy, and more.

But what they’re going to completely ignore is the fact that the official teaching of the Southern Baptist Convention is that sexual activity should be reserved for the context of a legal, monogamous and lifelong marriage between a cisgender heterosexual man and a cisgender heterosexual women—that any sexual orientation or gender identity outside of cisgender heterosexuality is not only an aberration but a sin against God—that sexual sin is something that can be “caused” in another person by immodest dress or tempting behavior—that victims of sexual assault and incest, including children, should have their bodily autonomy further stripped from them and not be allowed to have an abortion—that women should live in submission to their husbands by virtue of being born women, and that those same women can never hold positions of true authority in the church, the home, the school, and sometimes even in broader society.

This is what is known as purity culture, which I define as the culture created by Christian theologies that teach that the only acceptable and biblical outlet for sexual activity is a legal monogamous marriage between one cisgender heterosexual man and one cisgender heterosexual woman, for life, or else—and there’s always an “or else,” what it is usually just depends on what kind of church you grew up in. Sometimes the threat is that you’ll have a terrible marriage, sometimes the threat is that you’ll be dirty and no one will want you, sometimes the threat is that you’ll burn in hell forever—but there’s always a threat used to scare and bully people into submission. I define purity culture this way specifically because now that people have caught on that purity culture is bad, it’s been subject to a little bit of what sociologists call “concept creep” such that folks will straight up claim that they are fighting against and “talking back” to purity culture when they are really just repackaging the same old same old sex-negative anti-LGBTQ+ True Love Waits bullshit for millennial and gen z audiences. TLDR; if you’re teaching that sex is best saved for legal marriage between a one dude and and one woman because of [your interpretation of] the Bible, you’re teaching purity culture, no matter how cool your Instagram memes about it are.

All of this is to say that an analysis of the current crisis surrounding sexual abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention is absolutely void of true understanding and actionable prescriptions without taking purity culture into account. This is because purity culture (and its ugly theological twin, complementarianism) plays a key role in forming the cultures of shame and power that allow a decades long sex abuse coverup to occur in the first place. Purity culture is a sexual “ethic” of shame, scarcity, patriarchy and control. It both attracts abusers from the outside because sexual shame combined with other warped Christian theologies around forgiveness and male supremacy is appealing to those who want to prey on others—AND it grows abusers organically from within by discipling men to believe that they should be catered to sexually and morally, and by discipling people in general to view sex as something that is shameful, sinful, and a source of temptation. Purity culture emphasizes control and pathologizes pleasure. It encourages silence about any sexual experiences that do not fit the narrowly defined mold of acceptability, and it places women, children, LGBTQ+ persons and survivors in positions of inferiority at best and moral suspicion at worst.

So when I see coverage of the Department of Justice investigation that does not even mention the SBC’s theology of sexuality as a primary contributing factor to the crisis, I want to pull my hair out. Yes their reporting policies suck and yes they are bad men but they are bad men discipled and informed by purity culture creating and enforcing policies through the lens of their theology. In fact they explicitly said that in that goddamn Baptist Press article—that the Abuse Reform Implementation Task Force (ARITF) would “Study best practices in keeping with Southern Baptist church polity for feasibility.” I.E. they’re not going to do jack shit if it goes against their theology. And that’s why this whole entire scandal is not just a policy failure, it’s a theological failure and any attempt at resolution worth its salt needs to include theological analyses and theological changes.

I was talking to a good friend about this a couple of days ago and she said, “It’s almost like everyone is reporting on the fact that they have all these ants in their kitchen, and all the traps they’re setting to try and get rid of the ants, but they never stopped to ask themselves why there were so many ants attracted to the kitchen in the first place.” And that’s exactly it—tell me why the hell you have to have an “Abuse Reform Implementation Task Force” in the first place. Don’t get me wrong, all other things being equal I’m glad it exists and I hope it brings some measure of emotional peace and ideally financial compensation for SBC survivors. But why the hell were there so many abusers preying freely and in many cases knowingly in your midst that you had to create something like that to begin with? This is so much bigger than just a missing or misapplied policy.

Unfortunately, the Southern Baptist Convention would rather die than change—and to be honest, they just might. They wear their opposition to theological change proudly on their chest like a blue ribbon they won at the state fair—even if they have to fudge the truth about it. For the SBC to change theologically to the point that they would divest from and disavow their former commitment to purity culture would mean for the SBC to cease being the SBC—to undergo a transformation so whole and radical that what you would see on the other end would bear no resemblance to the original. And that, my friends, will not happen. So for now, we’ll have to watch while the SBC pats itself on the back for doing the absolute bar-on-the-floor bare minimum to address the crimes and moral atrocities it so glibly refers to as “mistakes” while the survivors of its violence, who deserve so much better, carry the weight of its inability to reflect on their own backs.