Court’s Error Puts SBC’s Culture of Cruelty on Display….and it’s about more than Paige Patterson

The following is reprinted by permission from Christa Brown’s excellent publication, In Solidarity. A victim of abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention, Brown has been a forerunner in the drive for accountability. She is the author of Baptistland: A Memoir of Abuse, Betrayal, and Transformation.

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The Texas Supreme Court erroneously released a massive trove of “highly confidential” documents that were filed in a sexual abuse case against Paige Patterson and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.

The documents—some 10,000 pages that had been filed under seal—were visible on the court’s website for about three days, after which the court took steps to remove them from public view. I have not seen the actual documents, but have reviewed Baptist News Global’s stunning reporting on them.

Included in the documents were the psychiatric records of the alleged sexual assault survivor, a former seminary student who uses the pseudonym of Jane Roe, along with police reports of her alleged assaults, sealed testimony, and confidential communications implicating dozens of individuals with a relationship to the case.

Obviously, this was an egregious mistake on the court’s part. As someone who, decades ago, worked as an attorney to the Texas Supreme Court, I’m just flat-out shocked by it. The court issued a statement saying that “staff resolved the issue” and that “there was no data breach or foul play involved.”

So… “oopsie” was the gist of it. But in my view, the court owes a more extensive explanation.

The release of such highly confidential information would almost certainly cause enormous pain for a survivor of sexual assault. And for survivors everywhere, knowledge of this will lessen confidence in the justice system.

What the documents reveal

The documents include new allegations against former Southwestern Seminary president Paige Patterson. Thanks to Baptist News Global, which guarded the survivor’s privacy while still reporting on the documents, we get some insight into what those allegations are. (Baptist News Global is not affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention.)

When, as a student, Roe first reported a sexual assault, she met with Patterson and a group of “all men.” As described by Baptist News Global:

“Patterson asked Roe a series of ‘unnecessarily invasive questions about the allegations,’ including if the alleged assailant…had ‘ejaculated’ as she was being raped and ‘if she had had her period’ … Patterson told her it was ‘good’ that she was raped because ‘the right man wouldn’t care if she was a virgin or not.’”

Here’s a picture of Patterson’s office at the seminary.

So, imagine that traumatized student sitting in a room like this—a room filled with “all men” and dead animals—being interrogated in such an intrusive way.

In a subsequent meeting, Roe alleges that Patterson asked if she had sent nude photographs of herself to the perpetrator. And when Roe’s mother asked Patterson how the assailant, who had a criminal history, had been allowed into the seminary, “Patterson allegedly lunged across his desk, sternly pointed his finger in her face, and said he would ‘unleash lawyers’ if she ‘questioned’ his ‘leadership’ again.”

All of this is on top of what has been previously reported about Patterson’s email statement that he would “break her down.”

As revealed in these newly disclosed allegations, the brutishness of Patterson’s invasive inquisition of Roe should offend all decent human beings. But of course, this is the SBC, where decency frequently gets derailed by the worship of power.

That’s why it would be a mistake to think this is only about Patterson.

Other SBC men stayed quiet

A group of “all men” sat there while Patterson interrogated Roe.

Keep in mind that, because this is happening at a seminary of the Southern Baptist Convention, those men would almost certainly be the kind of men who teach and preach complementarianism, a doctrine that says men should be the protectors of women and that women should be submissive.

But these complementarian men didn’t even have the gumption to speak up against Patterson’s bullying.

I’m reminded of when I spoke before a panel of the SBC’s Executive Committee, talking about a pastor’s rapes when I was a kid, and one man chortled out loud while another physically rotated in his chair so as to turn his back to me. And not a single other man in that room said one word about their colleagues’ grotesque incivility.

So much for men as protectors, eh? In a system built on hierarchical domination and authoritarianism, men in power protect men in power.

This is how Baptistland works. Male cronies prop each other up. And often they do so no matter how awful the conduct.

The silence of the many fosters SBC culture of cruelty

At this point, there is probably little about Patterson’s conduct that surprises anyone who’s been paying attention. Stories of his brutishness and bullying abound, from how he handled dozens of clergy sex abuse reports involving Darrell Gilyard, to how he dismissed a seminary professorover gender, to how he advised women to stay in abusive relationships, to how he creepily objectified a 16-year-old girl from the pulpit.

And I’ve got my own history with Patterson. In 2008, Patterson called me and other child sex abuse victims “evil-doers,” because we were speaking out about Baptist clergy sex abuse. He added that we were “just as reprehensible as sex criminals.”

The Survivors’ Network of those Abused by Priests said it was the worst incident of name-calling by religious leaders that they had ever encountered—worse than anything that any Catholic official had ever said.

So, the latest news about Patterson isn’t really anything new. It’s more of the same. Many others in Southern Baptist life have long known about Patterson’s cruelties and misogyny.

For decades, countless other Southern Baptist men gave Patterson power and allowed him to act with impunity. They even venerated him. Many still do.

Heck, Southern Baptists even installed a stained glass window of Patterson as a “hero” of the SBC’s “conservative resurgence.”

This is how the SBC’s culture of cruelty was created… and how it persists. It’s a culture that has been normalized by other men who do nothing.

As religion professor David Dark says, “We become what we normalize.” The Southern Baptist Convention has normalized misogyny and cruelty.