If you read my openDemocracy column last week, you’ll know that US celebrity pastor Rick Warren, who is no political moderate, has a history of anti-LGBTQ zealotry. But he has also long seemed invested in his image as a popular Christian author and one of the ‘cool’ evangelical leaders of his generation. At least that’s how I read him and not only because of things like his willingness to pray at President Obama’s 2009 inauguration, for which he was criticised by fellow conservative evangelicals (while the Democratic base was upset with the Obama administration and Democratic establishment for inviting a vicious homophobe). Warren has also sometimes backtracked on things he’s said that might dent his “cool”, “moderate” image or his popularity.

For example, when his insistence that Christians should vote to ban same-sex marriage in California (under the 2008 ballot initiative known as Proposition 8) attracted public scrutiny, he denied that he had ever made statements to this effect – despite video footage of him stating emphatically: “If you believe what the Bible says about marriage, you need to support Proposition 8.”

Even the name of the southern California megachurch that Warren founded back in 1980 hides its less-than-cool affiliation with the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) – the largest Protestant denomination in the US with about 13 million members. Warren’s Saddleback Church, which has tens of thousands of members spread across 15 campuses and was the SBC’s single largest church, omits the word ‘Baptist’, which carries uncool cultural baggage, from its name. Many other supposedly ‘hip’ American evangelical churches behave in a similar way, striving to obscure some of their less inclusive positions from the public.

In light of all this, it was a bit odd to see Warren passionately appealing Saddleback’s expulsion from the SBC at the denomination’s annual convention, held last week in New Orleans. (“I’ve never seen so many grumpy and uncomfy looking people in the [French] quarter,” a contact who lives in New Orleans quipped to me in a Twitter DM while the convention was underway.) Clearly, SBC affiliation means something to Warren, even though he has downplayed this while crafting his public image.

Saddleback was expelled because Warren ordained three women as pastors in 2021 (the year before he retired), even as the SBC leadership has increasingly emphasised its stance against women in leadership since its so-called “conservative resurgence”. The convention’s delegates, known as ‘messengers’, emphatically confirmed the executive committee’s decision to ‘disfellowship’ Saddleback, with 9,427 votes easily beating the 1,212 votes to keep the church in the SBC.

In his appeal against the ban, Warren stressed that Southern Baptists had a long history of agreeing to disagree on many issues in order to work together. As The New York Times reported, he claimed to be “99.99999999% in agreement” with the SBC’s theological prescriptions and asked, “Isn’t that close enough?” At that point, “The crowd shouted back at him, ‘No!’”

Warren’s decision to challenge the SBC on women’s leadership just before he retired certainly suggests he has concerns about his legacy. His candid apology to women, three days before the convention, for “misinterpreting” the Bible on their roles for most of his career strongly suggests the shift is sincere (though, as a good conservative evangelical, he still believes the Bible is “inerrant”).

In the aftermath of last week’s vote, Warren had some choice words for the SBC. “I wanted to speak up for millions of Southern Baptist women, […] I believe their spiritual gifts and their leadership gifts and talents are being wasted,” he said.

He accused the SBC delegates of voting “for conformity and uniformity rather than unity”, adding: “It’s not really smart, when you’re losing half a million members a year, to intentionally kick out people who want to fellowship with you.”

Warren also claimed to be aware of 2,000 SBC churches (out of more than 47,000 in the denomination) with women in some sort of pastoral role, and predicted that the SBC would pursue an “inquisition” in this area – a prediction that seems likely to play out.

After all, the SBC’s ‘messengers’ went on to overwhelmingly pass a constitutional amendment explicitly barring women from being pastors or elders in SBC churches. Such amendments must win a vote by a two-thirds majority, two years in a row, to be finalised, but it is highly implausible that the SBC will do an U-turn on this issue by next summer.

Male leadership, misogynistic doctrine

Many commentators have contrasted the zeal with which the radical right-wing denominational leadership has mobilised to defend exclusively male church leadership with the same leadership’s decades of cover-up and reluctance to address the pervasive problem of sexual abuse in the SBC.

These include Beth Allison Barr, a history professor at Baylor University in Texas (a Baptist institution) and an advocate for women’s equality in evangelicalism. Barr – the author of ‘The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth’ – was rightly offended by the fact that it took a male Southern Baptist pastor fighting for women’s ordination in the SBC to get a female Southern Baptist pastor’s voice heard at all.

This is because it wasn’t only Saddleback whose expulsion from the SBC was confirmed last Tuesday. Pastor Linda Barnes Popham also showed up to appeal the executive committee’s decision to disfellowship the church she heads, Fern Creek Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky.

The vote against Popham’s church – 9,700 to 806 – was even more lopsided than the vote against Saddleback, in yet another striking illustration of the theologically ‘justified’ misogyny that pervades the SBC.

For years, I have been among those calling attention to the incongruity between adhering to such misogynistic, hierarchical doctrine as the literal word of God and thinking that it will be possible to effectively address sexual abuse and misconduct by powerful SBC men.

Barr phrases things a little more carefully: “The rejection of women as leaders and the collective indifference to women who’ve been harmed is consistent with research that suggests a correlation exists between conservative theology, such as espoused by many Southern Baptists, and beliefs that rationalise and enable abuse against women.” The theological doctrine in question here used to be frequently referred to as “biblical patriarchy” but is now more often called “complementarianism”, which is a ‘nicer’ sounding way of saying the same thing: God created men and women to occupy distinct roles, men for leadership and women for submission.

Personally, I don’t see any daylight at all between the theology as such and the harmful beliefs. The SBC will not change its mind on women’s leadership for the foreseeable future – to say nothing of queer inclusion – and because of its inherently abusive fundamentalist theology, it will almost certainly continue to have a serious abuse problem.

I also think the SBC is irredeemable. I can only agree with my friend Scott Okamoto, an author and the creator of the ‘Chapel Probation’ podcast, who tweeted on 14 June, midway through the convention: “As an apostate egalitarian, I don’t think anyone should be a pastor at a SBC church.” That said, as long as the SBC continues to exist, it should allow women in leadership. Instead, the denomination just doubled down on misogyny, making its potential reform into a healthy organisation less likely than ever.