I name the links between racism and patriarchy—both past and present. If that’s the kind of insight you value, become a paid subscriber.
Here are some facts about me and the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) I bet you didn’t know:
I was baptized in an SBC church at the age of 8-years old.
Al Mohler took me and a group of seminary administrators on a tour of his house in Louisville.
I briefly enrolled in a PhD program at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (where Mohler is president).
All true. And all relevant to this episode of The Justice Briefing.
The Southern Baptist Convention just voted—by 77 percent—to amend its constitution to ban women from preaching to assembled congregations.
Al Mohler, who introduced the amendment, called it a “definitional issue.”
But they already had this rule on the books. So what’s really going on here?
What this amendment actually signals is a further rightward turn of the the SBC and its deeper entrenchment in a social hierarchy that includes not only gender but race.
And they call it all “biblical.
Rooted in Hierarchy
This amendment, and the SBC as a whole was never only about gender. It was never only about women in pulpits.
It was about something older, deeper, and far more revealing: a theology that has always needed a hierarchy, and has always placed someone at the bottom of it.
Racism and patriarchy share the same root. This is not speculation. This is history.
The evidence goes back to 1844 and a man named James Reeve. The Georgia Baptist Convention put Reeve forward as a missionary candidate knowing full well he was an enslaver.
The nomination was a setup—a deliberate provocation designed to force the national body to take declare its official stance on slavery.
When the home mission board refused to approve an enslaver for missionary service, Southern Baptists split off and the Southern Baptist Convention was born.
The SBC did not form to protect slavery in the abstract, but to protect the "right” of a missionary to preach a gospel that sets you free while enslaving other human beings.
“The same biblical interpretation used to justify enslaving people is now being used to ban women from preaching. The SBC is case in point.”
Racism and patriarchy share the same root because leaders of the SBC have consistently insisted that the Bible sanctions hierarchy and that God ordains who is above and who is below.
The same household codes used to argue that enslaved people must submit to masters were used to argue that wives must submit to husbands.
The same biblical architecture that sanctified racial subordination now sanctifies gender subordination.
They go to the same exact Bible passages, and in every hierarchy they construct, white men somehow end up at the top.
“In every hierarchy the SBC has ever constructed—racial, gender, institutional—white men end up on top.”
There is also the matter of the sexual abuse scandal, where credibly accused men were shielded by the institution while survivors were called adulteresses and agents of Satan.
And there is the election of Willy Rice as SBC president, a man who has dismissed the denomination’s sexual abuse crisis as more hot air than reality and who ran explicitly on the fear that the SBC had gone too woke.
Both the amendment and the election are not anomalies. They are the denomination operating exactly as designed.
In This Episode...
The Truth and Unity Amendment, what it says, and why Al Mohler pushed for it even though the restriction on women pastors was already denominational policy
The case of James Reeve—the 1844 missionary nomination that was a deliberate pro-slavery provocation and led directly to the founding of the SBC
How the biblical defense of racial hierarchy and the biblical defense of gender hierarchy draw from the same New Testament household codes
The “purity of white womanhood” trope—how white women were simultaneously subordinated to white men and weaponized against Black people
Saddleback Church, Beth Moore, and the enforcement mechanisms the SBC already had in place before this amendment
The parallel between the SBC’s centralizing of authority and unitary executive theory in the Trump administration
The election of Willie Rice as SBC president and what it signals about the denomination’s further rightward turn
Why you cannot address patriarchy in the SBC without also addressing its racism and why the denomination is case in point
What does it tell us about a theological tradition when its interpretive framework consistently places the same group of people—white men—at the top of every hierarchy it constructs?
I’m teaching during a 3-hour workshop with the Iliff School of Theology Values and Public Voice learning lab.
Part 1 — Understand it deeply. New York Times bestselling author and historian Dr. Jemar Tisby leads an expert session unpacking the roots and rise of White Christian Nationalism — and the counterstrategies that work.
Part 2 — Speak up effectively. Practice persuasive communication in breakout sessions, so you can confidently advance an inclusive, democratic vision in your own community.
