They dedicated their lives and hearts to a gospel that teaches that all human beings are made in God’s image. They lived a creed that commanded them to care for the marginalized and the vulnerable. The last shall be first. The earth shall be inherited by the poor.
The Southern Baptist Convention’s leaders betrayed the allegations of sexual abuse when they were made. Those men — and they seem to have all been men — must have listened to hundreds of hours of pious sermons, read hundreds of high-minded theological books, recited thousands of hours of prayer, and yet all those true teachings and good beliefs had no effect on their actual behavior.
A convention report this week revealed that the leaders of the church covered up widespread abuses and intimidated victims. More than 400 people are accused of committing abuse, including some church leaders.
One woman, Jennifer Lyell, said she’d been sexually abused while a student at a Southern Baptist seminary. In an article, the church’s communications arm made it sound as if she were confessing to a consensual affair. Paige Patterson, then the head of one seminary, told one student not to report a rape, according to the report, and later, at another seminary, “emailed his intention to meet with another student who had reported an assault, with no other officials present, so he could ‘break her down.’”
Those leaders’ stated beliefs and sacred creeds had zero effect on their actual behavior, just as similar creeds and beliefs had zero effect on the Catholic bishops who behaved in much the same way when they learned of abuses years ago.
How can there be such a chasm between what people “believe” and what they do? Don’t our beliefs matter?
The fact is, moral behavior doesn’t start with having the right beliefs. Moral behavior starts with an act — the act of seeing the full humanity of other people. Moral behavior does not require having the right intellectual concepts. It’s about seeing other people with the eyes of the heart, seeing them in their full experience, suffering with their full suffering, walking with them on their path. Morality begins with the attention we pay to another.
If you look at people with a detached, emotionless gaze, it doesn’t really matter what your beliefs are, because you have morally disengaged. You see a person as a thing and not as a human being.
Christa Brown, a female Baptist minister, stood up and testified in 2007 that her youth pastor repeatedly sexually assaulted she when she was 16. She claimed that one official turned his face away, refusing even to look at her and refusing to see her. This is the type of dehumanization that allows abuse and rape to happen.
Character is not measured by a person’s beliefs but by the ability to see the full humanity of others. It takes practice. It’s a skill acquired slowly. It’s about being able to focus on what’s going on in your own mind and simultaneously focus on what’s going on in another mind. It’s about learning how to minutely observe, absorb and resonate with other people’s emotions.
It comes about through years of shared experiences, decades of other-centered attention, engagement with the kind of literature that educates you in what can go on in other people’s heads. It’s spiritual training to get out of your own egotistic self-referential thinking and into the habit of asking what’s this moment like for that other person.
As social scientists have shown in one experiment after another, it’s very easy to get people to dehumanize each other. You divide people into in and out-groups. You propagate a tacit ideology that women are less important then men and Black people are more important than white people. You use euphemistic language to make it easy to abstract horrific acts into sanitized terminology.
You tell a victimization story. We are under attack. They’re out to get us. They’re monsters. They deserve what they get. You tell a righteousness story: We do the Lord’s work. Our mission is essential. Anyone who interferes with the mission is a beast.
You bureaucratize. This creates a system of nonresponsibility where rules and procedures are more important than people. You will see, once more, the horrors that can be caused by docile functionaries who are focused on minimizing legal liability but not honoring human beings when you read the report about the Southern Baptists.
The scholar Simon Baron-Cohen calls this “empathy erosion.” In his book “Moral Disengagement,” Albert Bandura detailed how Catholic leaders put a lot of effort into NotIt was clear what was going on. Southern Baptist leaders responded to this shameful warning by doing something very similar.
We’re living in a period awash in cruelty — not only with abuse scandals, but also with mass shootings, political barbarism and the atrocities in Ukraine. How much will the grueling act of watching the news lead to empathy erosion? Where will the forces to re-humanize come from? It appears not from our religious elites.
Source: NY Times
