Not content to simply limit women’s role in the home and in marriage as they did during the 1998 meeting, the Southern Baptist Convention has tried to make sure that women do not play an important role in religious matters either. During the 2000 meeting they passed new rules that women should not serve as pastors.
Why did they take this radical step — something relative rare among Protestant denominations today? According to Rev. Adrian Rogers of Memphis, Tennessee, chairman of the drafting committee, “While men and women are gifted ... the office of pastor is limited to men by Scripture.” Thus, in 1998 women were thus denied leadership roles in their own families and in 2000 they were also denied the right to hold leadership roles in their churches.
The Faith and Message change did not address of whether women should be ordained, only whether they could be pastors who lead congregations. The change also did not say what should happen to the 1,600 or so Southern Baptist clergywomen who existed at the time, about 100 of whom were leading congregations.
Because of the traditional Baptist emphasis on the autonomy of individual churches and the fact that the Southern Baptist Convention is more of a congregation union than an hierarchical denomination, the chang was not binding on individual Southern Baptists and the denomination’s 41,000 local congregations remained free to ordain women and hire them as pastors. Still, the fact that a change was made at all sent a powerful message and was designed to influence decisions at the congregational level.
It is true that these changes were based upon statements found in the Bible, so it would be wrong to call these positions “unbiblical.” In both cases, though, they ignored or rejected verses which could lead to opposite conclusions. Although the Southern Baptists claim to be inerrantists, they aren’t really — they are selective inerrantists. They pick some passages to treat as inerrant and literal, but not others.
This is clear in the Southern Baptists’ argument against the ordination of women. The relevant passage is in Timothy 2:11: “I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men; she is to keep silent.” The “inerrantist” holds this verse to be an eternal, universal truth.
In Timothy 2:8 it says: “Women should adorn themselves modestly and sensibly in seemly apparel, not with braided hair or gold or pearls or costly attire.” Do inerrantists confiscate women’s jewelry at the church door and unbraid their hair? Hardly. They are picking and choosing which “inerrant” commands they wish to follow and enforce
They don’t even appear to consistently follow the verses they do claim should be followed, for example the aforementioned I Timothy 2:11. Surely they allow women to teach Sunday School, sing in the choir, and speak at meetings. The fact of the matter is, they are being very selective in how they are trying to apply this “inerrant” verse.
Inerrantists say that the Bible is their “authoritative answer” to questions like that of women’s roles in church and family, but this isn’t entire accurate. Instead, they follow a higher authority: a sexist attitude toward women which masks scripture so as to give their sexism a divine sanction. Is their problem with the ordination of women? No, their problem is more with women themselves.
Former SBC President Bailey Smith made some revealing statements when he told wives to be submissive to their husbands “just as if he were God.” Smith added that when a wife fails to meet the sexual needs of her husband, she is partly to blame if he is unfaithful to her. The goal for these fundamentalists seems to be to rule over women — in the Southern Baptist Convention, in the church, and in the home.
Their desire to dominate does not end with women, something made evident by their political actions and attempts to force others to live by their codes. We see this in proposals to post the Ten Commandments in government buildings, in school prayer laws, and much more.
It is worth noting that with every such decision they make, they are in a sense moving further and further away from what it means to be a Baptist. According to Baptist tradition, each individual has equal ability to interpret scriptures themselves. Thus, there is supposed to be very little that is “official dogma.” This was one of the reasons why some Baptists objected to the addition of the declaration that women must submit to their husbands. Traditionally for Baptists, it should be up to the individuals to decide the role of women, not the SBC leadership.
The SBC keeps adding to the Statement of Faith, the “official dogma” of the denomination; but the more they add, the less they are leaving to individuals to decide on their own. Just how far can they go in adding dogma and taking away the ability of individuals to interpret on their own and still reasonably have claim to the name “Baptist?”
