Welcome back to the Fourth Wave podcast. The next few episodes are going to take a quick break from our current season on nonviolent action. And the reason that I'm doing this is because after after coming into contact with the story of Benjamin Lay again, as it's been sitting on my shelf for a while, so when I released it and I listened to it again, it really pulled out a lot in my mind that connects some of the other things that we've talked about and things that I think are very important to discuss. And so we're gonna kind of take a little break for two episodes to talk a little bit about, I guess, sort of sexual abuse, consequentialism, like a bunch of different things like that. And then we're also gonna take two episodes to talk a little bit about Quakers and kind of maybe fill in some gaps there that might be helpful to round out the story of Benjamin Lay, or complicate it.

So I'm looking forward to those, and we're gonna start our excursions today. So here we go. So first, if you did not get to listen to the episode on Benjamin Lay, you you really should go do that because some of the things that we're gonna draw out are are influenced by that. And a big part of that story is the recognition at how easily Christians, like all humans, can fall into egregious sins through the stepping stones of smaller sins, or side sins. We also saw how easy it was for people to theologically justify themselves like slaveholders, or to justify living in a way that refuses to benefit from the institution of slavery.

It's too easy to be comfortable and to go with the flow. It's a history that that makes me squirm with disgust. The thing is, this wasn't really just an issue of the past. I know that I could hit on a number of different topics which I think are are very big justice issues for the church, but one in particular comes to mind since I've been reading and thinking about it a lot lately, and that's the issue of sexual abuse and misogyny in the church. And what tipped the scales for me and got me going in this episode was that I was simultaneously reading the book by Rachel Denhollander, which is amazing, such a good book, you really ought to read it, and it helps you to understand abuse so much better, and also the things that people do and that I know that I would have done and probably still could do out of ignorance, questions that you might ask or the things that you might say, and it's so good to be able to have somebody being able to speak the truth openly about that and confront people so that we can change and be held accountable for that kind of stuff.

But the other thing that just came out is that the the Southern Baptist Convention has been largely pushing victims to the the back, and trying to, as one of the leaders was recorded as saying, preserve the base. So I wanna talk a little bit about that article today in light of what we learned from Benjamin Lay. And to set the stage for addressing this article, let me take us all the way back to season two on consequentialism. And it really is a topic that I repeat over and over and over again on this show because it really is at the heart of so many of our issues as Christians. If there is some sort of sin or if there is some sort of capitulation to evil, some compromise, I can almost guarantee you consequentialism is gonna be in there, if not at the heart, at least in the mix.

Now in one of those episodes in that season, I discuss consequentialism in the real world. It's toward toward the end, it's it's kind of like one of the conclusions. And I say, why does consequentialism matter? What impact does it have in our lives? Why don't the ends justify the means?

What like, who cares if we're doing some greater good? And one of my conclusions was that sexual abuse runs rampant and unchallenged in the church as a result of consequentialism. Now this episode came out before Ravi, before this SBC stuff blew up, but those things have only further cemented my conclusion in my mind, and I wanted to address this again and break it down a little bit more. So first of all, many churches and organizations and Christians are consequentialists. If you just read the article that I'll put in the show notes on the about the SBC, you'll clearly see that they're consequentialists, right?

The president or whoever Floyd is, he says that preserving they need to preserve the base, right? And preserving the base simply means that we need to do the most good for the most amount of people, right? Our base is what we're built on, if we lose them, we lose the SBC, so we can't lose the base. And what does that mean? It means we kind of ignore or go against victims.

You want to keep the show running, you want to keep the lights on, you need bodies and funding to do that. And that's a good goal, right? To work in the world for Jesus. But using this good goal as a justification for injustices is unconscionable. As a Christian, at least, it it should be unconscionable.

But I don't wanna rag just on the SBC, and we hear it from all over the place. Living in Atlanta, I've spoken with a number of people from Ravi's organization and heard similar complaints as to why Ravi wasn't found out sooner, or as to how consequentialism is impacting how they move forward with their abuse allegations, and treating things more like damage control than actually fixing things and actually caring about victims. The former president of World Vision, Richard Stearns, talks about a similar experience that he had, which which actually turned out to be a positive one in the end, because he had integrity. He had wanted to help victims of the AIDS crisis, but he was told not to pursue it because it was really unpopular among evangelicals. Like, conservatives wouldn't go for that because, you know, AIDS is associated with homosexuality, and we can't help those people, right?

Yet, Richard Stearns pursued this because he knew that it was the right thing to do, to help the victims who are suffering. And so that that's a positive outcome, but he had to fight back against consequentialism, and it would have been so easy for him to just step in line and do the easy thing. I've even tasted a little consequentialism in my own organization, in my own life. As missionaries who support Raise, we've been encouraged by many not to post contentious things on our Facebook page. And by contentious, it just means calling out the party of the base of your supporters for any evil that they do, or being for racial justice because there might be some groups that people don't like there.

So we've been called out on that, threatened with loss of support, and told by a lot of people, Hey, it's just not smart to post stuff on Facebook, and things like that. So dealing with the truth is discouraged if it's gonna cost you money, because it's really not about contentious things. I could post anti abortion stuff, which everyone in my circles would love. I could post that every day, but I shouldn't post anything about racial injustice or the immoral actions of any conservative candidates, because those moral truths also happen to be inconvenient truths to my community. What ends up happening is that sin is allowed to grow like yeast because while we're not encouraged to lie, we are encouraged to suppress the truth so that we can keep the money pouring into us to do the work of God because telling the truth, I guess, is not the work of God.

No, of course that's not true. Truth is God's work, and to let our cultural sins run rampant and unchallenged is just terrible. And we've seen that all throughout this season on non violent action, how Sultanizen and Havel recognize that truth, even little tiny truths like the green grocer not putting out the sign that the communists give them, that truth is subversive, and and it's vital to to shining light into darkness. There is no truth that is is too small. If you're like most, you probably see a big difference between silence and sexual abuse, and silence about calling out the sins of political leaders.

Those are two really different items on a sliding scale, right? The silence on sexual abuse is way worse than the silence about political leaders for for your base's pet party. I I grant that one seems to be worse than the other, but they are connected. And I think the reason that it seems worse is in part because we view sins as individual and separate rather than as a network of sins. But where do you think this idea of preserving the base in the SBC came from?

Where do you think this idea of preserving the base came from from various individuals in my organization? It didn't just spring up in one person, right? It's not just one person told us this or one member of the SBC said this. No, it's it's it's been cultivated and encouraged over time. Let me give you a prime example.

When Russell Moore came out with his speech entitled Can the Religious Right Be Saved? Which is amazing, you should go listen to it, or read the transcript. Listen to how Mike Huckabee, a member of the SBC, responded to Moore, who to remind you, right, Moore at this time was the SBC ethicist, and it was his job to hold the SBC accountable and to warn them about moral pitfalls. Though Huckabee said, I am utterly stunned that Russell Moore is being paid by Southern Baptists to insult them. He's stunned that they're paying an ethicist to hold them accountable.

He doesn't want to be held accountable. He has itching ears, he wants to preserve the base. He doesn't care about morality, he cares about greater good. Now compare Huckabee's response to politics to what Floyd recognized as the SBC undercurrent to the denomination trying to bring abuse into the light. You know, Floyd was was recognizing that, oh, we we really gotta support the base, and our base is not liking all of these sexual allegations coming our way because we wanna feel good about ourselves.

We don't we don't want allegations, we don't wanna have to deal with this stuff. Floyd said, How are we supposed to respond in your minds to people who say, why in the world would we have to, at a conference, to let people degrade the Southern Baptist Convention, attack its leadership, our churches, and all of those things? How are we supposed to do that and say what they want to say, and yet, the whole entire sexual abuse study was funded by the executive committee? Floyd said, essentially, the exact same thing that Mike Huckabee said. Huckabee said, Hey, why are we paying this guy to tell us things we don't wanna hear?

And Floyd is essentially saying, Hey, we've got a lot of people who are upset that we are we are paying for these events where people get to tell us things that we don't want to hear. This is hands down consequentialism. Politics and sexual abuse are linked in this theme. The majority thinks one way, and to push back against what we determine is the greatest good, even if you're an ethicist or even if you're addressing verified abuse, then you must be silenced. Is it any wonder then that abuse victims themselves are victimized even further and silenced by people who supposedly want to do good?

I've mentioned this a number of times before, but when Piper came out with his article on how pride in Donald Trump was a big issue that we should be concerned with, almost everyone in my circles balked at that. How can Piper compare pride to abortion? Isn't that a stretch? It seems clear to me that these Christians who are pushing back against Piper don't know the human heart. They don't understand how sin works, and they don't recognize that fruit comes from roots.

We got some glimpses of where pride could have taken us. Nuclear war with Korea, insurrection in the capital, war with Iran. But because those things didn't actually come to fruition, or any of the other terrible things that could have happened, my conservative friends minimize. Trump's pride is just they're just mean tweets. And hey, I understand why they minimize the sins that they do.

Their political party gives them comfort and power, and you can't show weakness because then you might lose votes. But perhaps even deeper than that, they recognize that if they held their political leaders accountable, they'd also have to hold their spiritual ones accountable, and even worse, themselves. When I read this most recent article on the SBC's handling of sexual assault, I was right in the middle of reaching Rachel Denhollander's story. If you want to read a powerful book, or if you want to feel anger, frustration, sadness, and a million other emotions at the same time, read her book and listen to some of the interviews she gives. The story of how sexual abuse runs rampant and how victims are blamed is so common.

And to think that while Rachel was fighting for her and over 150 other girls who were sexually assaulted by one man and ignored by very powerful institutions, her Christian community is also trying to brush victims under the rug, and are by and large propping up a sexual predator as president and dismissing his locker romantics. At the very time she's in court, all that stuff's going on. She sees it minimized by her own community, both in the church and in politics at the at the highest level of authority in the nation and in the church. No wonder sexual abuse runs rampant and nobody speaks up. That's why I love the title of Rachel's book, What is a Girl Worth?

She recognizes that little girls are not worth as much as what her communities identified as greater goods, at least to her communities. Her communities told her that through their actions, little girls aren't worth much because they kinda get in the way of the base. What are a few little girls for top notch doctors? What are a few women sacrificed to preserve the base and prevent Christ's name from being dragged through the mud? What's a woman worth in comparison to winning the presidency?

Rachel identifies consequentialism at a number of places in her book, and I I highly, highly recommend it to you. And she also gets at the this idea of truth, which which we talk about a lot. So good. Now, I don't know how many millstones consequentialism has caused us to tie around the necks of victims, but I'd wager that it's been quite a lot. To continue propping up what is so clearly opposed to Christ is a fearful thing, and judgment begins in the house of the Lord.

It is much easier to fool yourself into thinking that you're doing God's work by accomplishing great and fantastic things for Him, by being effective, and in so doing, you can't do any wrong, or any wrongs big enough to outweigh the good that you're doing, or the good that you're seeking. The consequences of consequentialism, like all sin, are death and destruction, And as an evangelical Christian, I've got a front row seat to that. I pray that God can bring us a few more Benjamin Lays to wake the church up to be light and salt in the world, as opposed to the blinding lights and salt in the wounds that we currently are. That's all for now. So peace and because I'm a pacifist, when I say it, I mean it.

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