Patriarchal leaders enabled sexual abusers and silenced their victims for decades

Evidence

Before the dust had settled on the Hybels case, a new scandal reached the bastion of conservative evangelicalism, the SBC. Allegations centered on Paige Patterson, revered patriarch and president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and one of the leaders of the conservative takeover of the SBC four decades earlier. Patterson exerted enormous power within the evangelical world. A stalwart defender of Christian patriarchy, Patterson liked to don a cowboy hat and display big-game trophies in his office. It turns out he also had a history of commenting on young women’s appearances and advising abused women to stay with their abusers, and he had once told a student not to report her rape to the police and to forgive her rapist. … Although Patterson oversaw Gilyard’s resignation from Victory Baptist Church in 1991, this was four years after allegations first surfaced, and even then, Patterson characterized many of the accusations as untrue, called attention to the “sins” of alleged victims, and praised Gilyard as a “spokesman of God.” Emboldened by the support of men like Patterson and Vines, Gilyard had threatened to “go after [the] jugular” of one of his accusers. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 651

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s existing interest in how institutional hierarchies shield abusers — parallels SNAP/priest abuse patterns and the SBC’s recent Guidepost investigation. — connects to: Elite sexual abuse proved far more widespread than previously supposed — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1939