Saturday, December 03, 2022

IF ATHEISTS HAD A RELIGION...

‘After School Satan Club’ at California elementary school stirs controversy

After School Satan Clubs are sponsored by The Satanic Temple, a nontheistic religious organization based in Salem, Massachusetts, that pushes for the separation of church and state.

The Satanic Temple After School Satan Club logo. Image courtesy of TST

November 22, 2022

(RNS) — An “After School Satan Club” aiming to teach students about inquiry and rationalism is set to begin in early December at a California elementary school, triggering controversy among parents and guardians who say the club shouldn’t be allowed, according to local news reports.

After School Satan Clubs are sponsored by The Satanic Temple, a nontheistic religious organization based in Salem, Massachusetts, that pushes for the separation of church and state. They meet at select public schools where other religious clubs meet, such as the Good News Club — an after-school program hosted by the Child Evangelism Fellowship to “bring the Gospel of Christ to children.”

The Satanic Temple, which is separate from the Church of Satan, was founded in 2013. It does not worship Satan and its tenets declare that the freedoms of others should be respected, that people should have control over their own bodies and that scientific facts shouldn’t be distorted to fit one’s beliefs.

The After School Satan Club is to launch Dec. 5 at Golden Hills Elementary School in Tehachapi, a city in Kern County about 115 miles north of Los Angeles, said June Everett, an After School Satan Club campaign director. After School Satan Clubs are set up at the request of local parents, educators or other community members, according to the Satanic Temple website. Everett said a parent reached out a few months ago requesting the club, which will gather once a month through May 2023.

“The fact that others find our club controversial when they have absolutely no issues with the other religious clubs operating in their public school is puzzling to us,” said Everett, an ordained minister with The Satanic Temple.

Tehachapi Unified School District Superintendent Stacey Larson-Everson, in a Nov. 15 letter obtained by The Bakersfield Californian, announced the district had approved the After School Satan Club to host gatherings after school hours in the elementary school’s cafeteria.

By law, Larson-Everson said, the district can’t discriminate among groups wishing to use its facilities or distribute flyers “based on viewpoint.” The superintendent noted that religious groups are among those the district has allowed to rent its facilities over the years.

The 2001 Supreme Court ruling Good News Club v. Milford Central School paved the way for After School Satan Clubs to exist in public schools. The High Court ruled that schools cannot discriminate against religious organizations offering a club on its facilities.

Sheila Knight, grandparent to a fifth grader at Golden Hills, told Bakersfield CBS affiliate KBAK that the After School Satan Club is “disgusting.”

“I understand the school by law has to allow them because they allow other after school programs such as the Good News … but I can’t imagine why anyone would want their child to attend,” she told KBAK.

“Just the name alone, ’Satanic Temple,’ is negative and these elementary kids don’t need that,” another woman told the news agency.

Additionally, Tehachapi News reported that news of the club had generated so much controversy on social media that administrators of the Tehachapi Raves and Rants Facebook group shut down comments at least once “so they could sleep.” The administrator of the Tehachapi Ask Facebook group decided to remove comments about the topic, the news site reported.

Paul Hicks, identified as a volunteer with the After School Satan Club, told KBAK that Christian-based clubs such as the Good News Club are a main reason the After School Satan Club is necessary. “We want to give an alternative point of view,” he said.

“I’m not teaching these kids that they need to hail Satan or identify as Satanists. What we’re doing is we’re thinking critical thinking, we’re teaching science, we’re teaching empathy,” Hicks said.

According to Everett, there are two active After School Satan Clubs in the country, one in Moline, Illinois, and another in Lebanon, Ohio. One such club is launching Nov. 28 in Wilmington, Ohio. Three clubs are pending approval in Eaton, Ohio; Chesapeake, Virginia; and and Endwell, New York.

The Satanic Temple said it uses the word “Satan” in the name of the club because “Satan, to us, is not a supernatural being.

“Instead, Satan is a literary figure that represents a metaphorical construct of rejecting tyranny over the human mind and spirit,” it states on its website.

The presence of evangelical after-school clubs “not only established a precedent for which school districts must now accept Satanic groups, but the evangelical after school clubs have created the need for Satanic after school clubs to offer a contrasting balance to student’s extracurricular activities,” according to the Satanic Temple.

How the Museum of the Bible produces a white evangelical Bible

The book, 'Does Scripture Speak for Itself?' argues that the Washington, D.C., institution produces a benevolent white evangelical Bible that resists critique.

“Does Scripture Speak for Itself: The Museum of the Bible and the Politics of Interpretation" by Jill Hicks-Keeton, left, and Cavan Concannon. Courtesy images

November 21, 2022

Yonat Shimro

(RNS) — The Museum of the Bible marked its fifth anniversary last week. By all accounts, it has been a rocky ride.

Co-founded by Hobby Lobby President Steve Green using $500 million of his own fortune, the 430,000-square-foot building overlooking the U.S. Capitol has weathered a series of storms. Five Dead Sea Scroll fragments on display were found to be forgeries. A New Testament manuscript was determined to have been stolen. Federal authorities confiscated a rare Iraqi cuneiform tablet bearing a fragment of the “Epic of Gilgamesh.”

That’s just the artifacts. Early on, the museum conscripted respected biblical scholars to offer advice on the design of its exhibits. But many of them soured on the project, saying its messaging favored evangelical Christianity.

Now two scholars, Jill Hicks-Keeton, a professor at the University of Oklahoma, and Cavan Concannon, a professor at the University of Southern California, have teamed up for a second time to examine and explore the museum’s exhibits, theatrical experiences, publications, funding and partnerships. The book, “Does Scripture Speak for Itself?:The Museum of the Bible and the Politics of Interpretation,” argues that the museum is part of a larger 100-year-old project of white evangelical institution-building.

The museum, they say, attempts to bolster a white evangelical identity by producing a Bible that is benevolent, reliable and divinely inspired; a Bible that resists critique and has universal appeal.

The authors spent hours scrutinizing each floor of the museum, as well as numerous books written by Steve and Jackie Green, their daughter, Lauren, and son-in-law, Michael McAfee.

Museum of the Bible entrance in Washington, D.C., on November 1, 2017. RNS photo by Adelle M. Banks

The Museum of the Bible entrance in 2017 in Washington. RNS photo by Adelle M. Banks

They conclude that the Greens — the latest in a long line of monied evangelical capitalists — have not just created a museum, but a kind of parachurch organization intended to hold up the Bible as central to American public life.

In a statement responding to questions from RNS, the museum said it disagreed with the book’s premise and claims. “We recognize that the Bible’s story is global and that its impact on different communities is historically varied and complex. As such, the museum strives to ensure our exhibitions are accurate and have historical nuance, which has been consistently confirmed by positive visitor feedback.”

RNS spoke to Hicks-Keeton and Concannon about their new book and how they believe it furthers the mission of white evangelicalism. The interview was edited for length and clarity.

You’ve written about the Museum of the Bible before. Why this book?

HICKS-KEETON: The book represents a departure from our previous work. We’ve transitioned from seeing the museum as a conversation partner to an object of analysis. This book is the culmination of that thinking about what the museum is producing and how it influences politics in the U.S.

You argue that monied white evangelicals have built institutions to shape their theological identity. What are those?

Cavan Concannon. Courtesy photo

CONCANNON: We look at a number of different institution builders in the early part of the 20th century that played a role in forming the foundation of white evangelicalism today. Some of the people we mark are people like Lyman Stewart, a Western oil baron who paid for a number of different projects including Biola University as well as the publication “The Fundamentals,” which shaped a national identity for conservative Protestants. We also write about J. Howard Pew, a rabid opponent of the New Deal who began to fuse together a mix of libertarian economics and small-government conservatism with conservative Protestantism. We also pay attention to the building of radio networks, television networks and now things like podcasts. We pay attention to the building of Christian schools, Christian think tanks and Christian business networks. They’re all working together to amplify the same sets of themes. This museum is one of those institutions that has quickly integrated itself in the network.

You point out that the museum presents a white evangelical Bible. Why is the racial component important?

CONCANNON: Not all evangelicals are white. We’re talking about a sect shaped by whiteness. It’s less a demographic descriptor and more as a description of the institutional makeup. It’s a culture of whiteness. Some people in that orbit are not demographically white.

HICKS-KEETON: People think of white evangelicalism as an accusation. But we mean it as a description. We are not saying, ‘Hey look. They get the Bible wrong.’ Instead we’re pointing to the museum as an institution founded and funded within white evangelicalism and then asking, ‘What is the Bible they are producing?’

CONCANNON: If someone is offended by the idea that we say this is a white evangelical Bible or a white evangelical institution, that means they’re associating the phrase with being racist. That says more about their anxiety than the term itself.

You write that the 2019 exhibit on the Slave Bible, which shows how Americans carved up the Bible to justify slavery, ends up absolving the Bible. Explain why you don’t think that’s so.

Jill Hicks-Keeton. Photo by Travis Caperton

HICKS-KEETON: Everyone looks back and decries slavery as an ethical wrong. And yet historically, we can’t get around the fact that many white Christians were using their Bibles to endorse slavery and justify the enslavement of people. The PR campaign (around the exhibit) presented this as a reckoning with the idea that the Bible has been misused by people who did bad things. It rhetorically works to disentangle the Good Book from the bad deeds. It was less an exhibit that enabled people to interrogate how Bibles in the 19th century were used and deployed in thinking about enslavement and more about exculpating the Bible from complicity in that harm. One can imagine an exhibit that centered how enslaved and formerly enslaved Africans in the U.S. engaged with the Bible. That’s different from how white people were thinking and using the Bible. That’s something that the Slave Bible exhibit can’t get to because it’s centering an artifact produced by white people.

Many biblical scholars have been at war with the Museum of the Bible. You’re saying that fight is unproductive. Why?

CONCANNON: One of the things we came to understand was that we were gatekeeping access to who gets to say what about the history of the Bible — the museum and its monied interests or biblical scholars. Our own field of biblical studies has its own problematic history of being shaped by whiteness and European colonial interests. We felt less interested in fighting for that project than analyzing how both groups — biblical studies and the Museum of the Bible — function and work. There is no one Bible out there that we can all figure out the meanings of. There are only various iterations of biblical literature. We wanted to analyze how people produce and make meaning out of those, rather than fighting for one or the other.

Would you want the museum to be renamed the White Evangelical Museum of the Bible?

CONCANNON: It’s not up to us to tell them what to do. We can and do want to interrogate what they mean when they say Museum of the Bible. What does that mean? It’s a claim to a universal definition of the Bible that we want to particularize.

HICKS-KEETON: While it’s not up to us, if they did change the name to the Museum of the White Evangelical Bible, I wouldn’t mind.

You say the museum’s history floor valorizes colonialism. How does it do that?

HICKS-KEETON: It wants to trace the path to universal access for the Bible. There’s a series of developing technologies that are highlighted, one of which is the Gutenberg Bible. We argue one of the technologies needed to get the Bible worldwide is European colonialism. It is celebrated in this narrative because it was the means by which the Bible spread across the world, according to the museum.

Do you think the museum promotes a Christian nationalist ideology?

CONCANNON: The museum is concerned with showing that the Bible is good for society. When people use it to do bad things, they’re misinterpreting it or abusing the Bible. What’s being promulgated is a Christian nationalist argument for putting a Bible at the center of public life.

HICKS-KEETON: The Museum of the Bible is normalizing a Bible that authorizes white evangelical dominion. If the Bible that the museum is producing were to become the Bible people see as authoritative, it would protect and increase their power in the country.

Why Americans are leaving their churches

For sociologist Stephen Bullivant, the question is why it took so long for the religious exodus to happen.

"Nonverts: The Making of Ex-Christian America" and author Stephen Bullivant. Courtesy images

December 1, 2022

Jana Riess

(RNS) — As many as a third of Americans now claim no religious affiliation, and British sociologist Stephen Bullivant has some ideas about why.

In his new book, “Nonverts: The Making of Ex-Christian America,” due this week from Oxford University Press, Bullivant reflects in often highly entertaining fashion about the trend lines. Although it’s full of statistics, “Nonverts” remains a lively read for ordinary people — a rare feat in a sea of dry data-driven books.

As a researcher, Bullivant wanted to know why Americans, once considered the exception to the secularization that has happened in Europe and elsewhere, are suddenly losing their religion.

And it is sudden, he notes. “This kind of religious change in a society doesn’t normally happen in the space of 20 or 30 years,” he told Religion News Service in a Zoom interview. “It’s been within the space of one or perhaps two generations that we’ve seen a sudden surge.”

In the 1990s, nonreligion began climbing from its baseline of around 7% of the population to what is between three and five times that figure now, depending on the survey. (All national surveys show the same rising trendline, but they differ as to the degree.)

From “Nonverts: The Making of Ex-Christian America” by Stephen Bullivant

Bullivant says the majority of this shift is caused by people actively leaving the religion of their childhood (the “nonverts” of the title), not because they were born into nonreligious families (though that trend is coming).

“So there is a story about why there is this rise of the nones. But to me, the more interesting story is why it didn’t happen earlier.” Why did this change start not in the 1960s, when American culture was in a state of upheaval, but in the ’90s?

Politics, say other scholars, who see nonreligion as a backlash against the GOP’s “Contract with America” and the rise of the religious right. That’s likely part of it, Bullivant said, pointing to how quickly the American public changed its mind on gay marriage. But he looks to three other developments to help us understand why people are leaving the fold.

“Nonverts: The Making of Ex-Christian America” by Stephen Bullivant. Courtesy image

First, there was the end of the Cold War. For decades, “there was a big threat of ‘godless communism,’” making it hard for anyone with religious doubts to admit to them publicly. The social cost of being considered un-American was just too high, keeping the numbers of religious nones artificially low.

“Then suddenly the Cold War ends, and you have people able to admit to being nonreligious. In fact, by the time the New Atheists rise up in the mid-2000s, it’s no longer people with no religion who are the existential threat, but people with too much religion, especially extremist religion. The New Atheism is really interesting in how it positions itself as patriotic.”

A second factor is the sudden appearance of the internet, which made it possible for like-minded people to meet each other. “If you were brought up in small-town Kansas, you probably weren’t going to find other people who were having religious doubts. The internet opened up those spaces for people to play around with ideas, hang out with other people, and get really deep into various subcultures.”

The internet has been particularly important for people leaving conservative religions such as evangelical Protestantism or Mormonism. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is actually the first main example Bullivant uses in the book, which is surprising because it’s such a tiny percentage of the population, around 1.5%.

Bullivant chose it because it’s a “canary in the coal mine” story — if even the Mormons are starting to bleed members, “that shows what a big issue this is for everyone else.” The erosion of Mormon attachment, he said, indicates “the breakdown of religious subcultures,” which has been especially profound in places such as Utah and southern Idaho where, in decades past, a person’s entire social and religious life could be spent around members of the LDS church.

The internet chips away at that enclave. “This was important for many of the Mormons I interviewed, who were encountering new things about Mormon history online. But even more than this, they’re starting to hang out with non-Mormons and ex-Mormons, people who are very much in your boat, and that becomes this other world you can inhabit.”

Around two-thirds of all nones in the US are nonverts (dark gray), meaning that they left a religion, rather than "cradle nones" (light grey), who were raised without religion. Over time, Bullivant expects cradle nones to become a larger share of the none population, as more Americans are born without a religion and don't switch into one.

Around two-thirds of all nones in the U.S. are “nonverts” (dark gray), meaning that they left a religion, rather than “cradle nones” (light gray), who were raised without religion. Over time, Bullivant expects cradle nones to become a larger share of the none population, as more Americans are born without a religion and don’t switch into one.

The third factor sounds like circular logic: The nones are rising because the nones are rising. But human beings are herd creatures, Bullivant explains in the book; we tend to do what our neighbors are doing. With every headline (like the one above) that heralds the seismic shift the nation is experiencing, more people become comfortable being nonreligious.

Bullivant himself bucks the trend. The 38-year-old researcher came from a family with no religion — “I wasn’t baptized, and that’s normal in Britain” — but deviated from that path by slowly coming to Catholicism as a student. He was doing the first of his two doctoral degrees (one in theology, the other in sociology) when he became friends with some Dominicans who would regularly invite him for dinner.

“In order to come to this guest dinner with loads of wine on a Sunday evening, you had to have gone to the Mass beforehand,” he said.

So he began attending Mass. He was impressed by the people he met, who were bright and kind. It was obvious that they lived what they believed and had made great sacrifices in order to become priests. Eventually, one of those friends offered to baptize him. So after a three-week research trip to Rome for his dissertation, Bullivant officially joined the Catholic Church. His wife is now also a member, and they are raising their four children as Catholics.

“So it’s strange: I do a lot of work on people leaving Catholicism. For every person in Britain who is raised nonreligious who becomes Christian, there’s something like 26 people who go the other way.”

It’s a helpful reminder that while social science charts trends that are sweeping and very real, each individual story is complex.

For US Mormons, religiosity has declined over time

14 Northern California clergy, religious linked for first time to Catholic sex abuse scandal

A window for filing new lawsuits under a 2019 California law for decades-old abuse will close Dec. 31.

In this Oct. 23, 2018, file photo, attorney Jeff Anderson speaks about clergy sex abuse at a news conference in San Francisco. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, File)

December 1, 2022
By Alejandra Molina

(RNS) — As a deadline nears for new lawsuits in sexual abuse cases, 66 Catholic clergy and religious accused of sexual abuse have been identified in 116 lawsuits filed in Northern California. Of those, 14 have been publicly identified for the first time.

These new accusations have come to light under under a 2019 California law that extended the statute of limitations for abuse cases. Assembly Bill 218 provided for a three-year window that began on Jan. 1 in 2020. The deadline to file new lawsuits is Dec. 31.

“This public data collected is believed to be a small percentage of what attorneys (and) advocates anticipate the final number of lawsuits filed under this historic legislation to be,” according to a statement from Jeff Anderson and Associates, which is handling many of the cases under the bill.

Attorney Mike Finnegan, in a statement, urged the public to come forward with information about the clergy’s current status and whereabouts. Without knowledge of their current location, or “if they are dead or alive, and whether they have access to children, there is a great public risk,” Finnegan said.

RELATED: California Catholic bishops ask Supreme Court to review case challenging statute of limitations

According to the lawsuits, those publicly identified for the first time, listed with locales where alleged abuse took place, are John A. Lynch, Christian Sandholdt, Robert Gemmet and Joseph Watt, all in San Francisco; John Francis Scanlon and Domingos S. Jacque in Oakland; James Corley in Santa Rosa; Sidney Hall in Sacramento; Benedict Reams in Moraga; Sister M. Rosella McConnell in Berkeley; Elwood Geary in San Jose; Henry Hall in Monterey County; William Dodson in Fresno; and Robert H. Lewis in Dinuba.

Jacque died in 2016, according to the Bay Area News Group. And, according to The Sacramento Bee, Sidney Hall also died in 2016.

The Catholic Church has instituted reforms to address cases of sexual abuse by clergy, including issuing guidelines for dioceses for reporting abuse. Dioceses across the country, including the dioceses of San Jose, Oakland and Sacramento, have released lists of priests credibly accused of abusing kids.

RELATED: Vatican’s revamped Center for Child Protection will attack ‘systemic’ abuse in the church

The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests has criticized the Archdiocese of San Francisco for not releasing its names. The organization has also called on the Diocese of Sacramento to expand its list. Hall’s name is not on the list, the Sacramento Bee reported.

In a statement to Religion News Service, the Archdiocese of San Francisco said it “publishes on its website names of priests and deacons in good standing who have faculties to minister here in the Archdiocese. Those with questions about a priest or deacon can refer to this list.”

“The Archdiocese addresses allegations related to lawsuits through appropriate legal channels. Other than allegations that are facially not possible, investigations are initiated for any claims received. Any priest under investigation is prohibited from exercising public ministry in accordance with canon law as well as Archdiocesan and USCCB policies,” according to the statement.

SBC President Bart Barber says predecessor Johnny Hunt is unfit to return to ministry

‘They don’t care,’ said abuse survivor and longtime advocate Tiffany Thigpen after hearing that a group of pastors announced that a former SBC president accused of sexual assault was restored to ministry. Johnny Hunt’s return reveals the challenges the nation’s largest Protestant denomination has in addressing sexual abuse.

Pastor Bart Barber, left, in 2022. Pastor Johny Hunt, right, in 2020. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, left. Video screen grab, right)

November 30, 2022

Bob Smietana

(RNS) — Bart Barber, a country pastor who also happens to be the sitting president of the Southern Baptist Convention, began his Tuesday (Nov. 29) as he does most days, with prayer and feeding his cows.

Before the day was out he would take the rare step of denouncing one of his predecessors.

“I would permanently ‘defrock’ Johnny Hunt if I had the authority to do so,” Barber, who leads a church in Farmersville, Texas, said in a statement released Tuesday.

Hunt, who served as president of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination from 2008 to 2010, stepped aside from public ministry in May after allegations that he had sexually assaulted another pastor’s wife were made public. Then, last week, a group of pastors announced that Hunt has been restored to ministry, less than six months after Southern Baptists passed a series of reforms designed to address a sex abuse crisis.

In addition to his statement, Barber went on social media to call Hunt’s return “a repugnant act.”

Barber was elected at the SBC’s 2022 annual meeting, where the delegates charged him with implementing abuse reforms passed in the same session. But Barber’s defrocking comment points up the challenges he and the SBC face in trying to address abuse.

Because the denomination’s churches are autonomous, no SBC official, including its president, has the authority to discipline Hunt.

But Barber also said the pastors who claim to have restored Hunt do not have that authority either.

Newly elected SBC president Bart Barber speaks during a press conference at the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting, held at the Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim, California, on Wednesday, June 15, 2022. Photo by Justin L. Stewart/Religion News Service

Newly elected SBC President Bart Barber speaks during a news conference at the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting in Anaheim, California, on June 15, 2022. RNS photo by Justin L. Stewart

“The idea that a council of pastors, assembled with the consent of the abusive pastor, possesses some authority to declare a pastor fit for resumed ministry is a conceit that is altogether absent from Baptist polity and from the witness of the New Testament. Indeed, it is repugnant to all that those sources extol and represent,” he said.

The fact is that the denomination’s institutions have long been run by powerful pastors and their friends, who have used their positions to protect their reputations and the reputation of the convention.

Celebrity pastors like Hunt, because they fill seats and offering plates, often act as what University of North Carolina historian Molly Worthen has called “pastor-warlords,” with little oversight or accountability.

Tiffany Thigpen, an abuse survivor and longtime advocate of abuse victims, said Hunt’s return to ministry is a sign that the legislated reforms have yet to change Southern Baptist culture.

“We are always going to have this network of powerful men who can do whatever they want and think they can get away with it,” she said. “And they are right.”

Thigpen said Hunt, like anyone, can be forgiven by God. But that does not mean he should be given power and a platform in the church. She said pastors like the ones who endorsed Hunt dole out cheap grace in order to protect their friends.

“They don’t care,” she said.

Pastors Mark Hoover, from left, Mike Whitson, Steven Kyle and Benny Tate in a video about their restoration work with Johnny Hunt. Video screen grab

The allegations about Hunt came as a shock to his many admirers. The first Native American president of the SBC, he spent three decades as a popular speaker and pastor of First Baptist Church in Woodstock, Georgia, a prominent megachurch.

In 2010, after his term as president ended, Hunt took an extended leave of absence, citing health reasons. But a 2022 report commissioned by SBC leaders from Guidepost Solutions, an investigative firm, revealed that Hunt had been accused of sexually assaulting another pastor’s wife and had undergone a secret counseling process. The survivor of the alleged attack and her husband were pressured to forgive Hunt, according to Guidepost.

“We include this sexual assault allegation in the report because our investigators found the pastor and his wife to be credible; their report was corroborated in part by a counseling minister and three other credible witnesses; and our investigators did not find Dr. Hunt’s statements related to the sexual assault allegation to be credible,” wrote investigators.

Hunt did not inform his church of the incident in 2010, nor did he tell convention leaders, including leaders at the North American Mission Board, where he became a vice president after leaving First Baptist.

“Johnny Hunt is a serial liar and he lied to every ministry he worked with for years,” said Griffin Gulledge, a Georgia pastor who has been outspoken about the need to address abuse in the SBC. “He told everyone he was morally qualified to be a pastor and he was not.”

Pastor Johnny Hunt speaks in October 2021 at Fairview Knox Church in Corryton, Tennessee. Video screen grab

Gulledge said Hunt’s recent restoration was not credible, in part because the process was led by friends of Hunt — rather than First Baptist in Woodstock.

“It’s infuriating,” Gulledge said.

Christa Brown, an abuse survivor and another longtime advocate for reform in the SBC, said she appreciated Barber’s comments.

“But so what?” she said. “Nothing has changed.”

Brown said that Hunt’s return, and a lack of action to hold former SBC leaders accountable for mistreatment of abuse survivors, shows “a gross inability to deal with the issue.”

Brown wants printed copies of the Guidepost report available to every church and wants the denomination’s standing body, the Executive Committee, to be as vocal and diligent as she and other survivors have been in educating church members and the public about the threat of abusive pastors.

“Until I see that,” she said, “I won’t believe they are serious.”

Christa Brown talks about her abuse at a rally outside the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention at the Birmingham-Jefferson Convention Complex, June 11, 2019, in Birmingham, Alabama. RNS photo by Butch Dill

Hunt is scheduled to appear in February at a “Great Commission Weekend” hosted by a Florida church. An advertisement for the event, posted on social media by the Rev. Timothy Pigg of Fellowship Church in Immokalee, Florida, features photos of Hunt, along with former SBC Presidents Ronnie Floyd and Jerry Vines and SBC presidential candidate Mike Stone.

Floyd stepped down as president of the SBC’s Executive Committee when his efforts to control the scope and public release of the Guidepost report failed.

Pigg did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did Hunt or Stone.

North Carolina pastor Bruce Frank, who chaired the task force that commissioned and released the Guidepost report, called the video about Hunt’s return “disappointing but not terribly surprising.”

That video, he said, showed no “fruits of repentance” and did not mention the hurt Hunt caused. Frank characterized the process as “just four friends spending a few months with him and now using platitudes saying he’s fit to proceed.”

He also called the decision to give Hunt a platform at a church conference “beyond unwise” and said it sent a terrible message to abuse survivors. Frank said that efforts to address the issue of abuse and to care for survivors will continue, despite challenges.

Particularly disturbing, according to Frank and other critics, was the restoration group’s likening of the situation to the Gospel parable of the good Samaritan, in which a man is beset by robbers, beaten and left by the side of the road. Religious leaders pass him by but a Samaritan rescues him.

“The wounded person on the side of the road is (Hunt’s) abuse survivor, not Johnny Hunt,” said Barber, “and she received no mention at all by this panel — she was passed by, in a way, by this quintet,” he said in his statement. “I do not know her, but I don’t want to be guilty of leaving her on the side of the road. I am praying for her, I have heard her, and I believe her.”

Hunt is the second Baptist leader mentioned in the Guidepost report to make headlines recently. Former Southern Baptist seminary professor and missionary David Sills, who lost his job in 2018 as a professor and as a missionary leader after being accused of abusing a former seminarian, recently sued a number of convention leaders and agencies, including seminary president Albert “Al” Mohler, former SBC President Ed Litton and the SBC’s Executive Committee, alleging they conspired with an abuse survivor to ruin his reputation.

Barber said on social media that he expected his prayer meeting on Tuesday evening to be interrupted so that he could be served with the lawsuit.

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Abe Foxman: If Smotrich and Ben-Gvir get their way, Israel will lose me and American Jews

Foxman said he was ‘optimistic” Netanyahu would resist the demands of extremist coalition partners.

Abe Foxman at an Anti-Defamation League event at The Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, Calif., May 8, 2014. (Michael Kovac/WireImage/Getty Images)

By Ron KampeasDecember 2, 2022

(JTA) — Abe Foxman, the past Anti-Defamation League leader who long has said that nothing could separate him from support for Israel, now says the leaders of an extreme party could do the trick if they get their way in coalition talks with incoming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“I never thought that I would reach that point where I would say that my support of Israel is conditional,” Foxman said in an interview published Friday by The Jerusalem Post. “I’ve always said that [my support of Israel] is unconditional, but it’s conditional. I don’t think that it’s a horrific condition to say: ‘I love Israel and I want to love Israel as a Jewish and democratic state that respects pluralism.’”

“If Israel ceases to be an open democracy, I won’t be able to support it,” he said.

Foxman said his outlook reflected that of the larger Jewish community — but added that he was optimistic Netanyahu would not let the leaders of Otzma Yehudit, the extremist party assuming a role in the incoming government, make drastic changes.

“I think he’s sensitive and smart enough to listen, to see the very serious concerns that [American Jews] have,” said Foxman, who retired from the ADL in 2015, 50 years after first joining the organization.

He pointed to an interview Netanyahu had recently with Bari Weiss, the opinion journalist, in which the incoming prime minister said he would not allow the excesses counseled by extremist party leaders including Bezalel Smotrich, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Avi Maoz.

But Netanyahu has struck a deal with Ben-Gvir to give him authority over the country’s police and has made Maoz, the leader of the homophobic party Noam, a new role overseeing “National-Jewish identity,” while he is reportedly nearing an agreement to make Smotrich finance minister. The men have said they want to expel disloyal Arabs from Israel, ban LGBTQ pride parades and roll back rights for non-Orthodox Jews.

Already, Netanyahu has reportedly agreed to back legislation that would stop recognizing non-Orthodox conversions. The men also agree on a vision to limit the power of Israel’s judiciary.

Netanyahu told Weiss that people alarmed but such demands should not be so worried.

“This Israel is not going to be governed by Talmudic law,” Netanyahu said. “We’re not going to ban LGBT forums. As you know, my view on that is sharply different, to put it mildly. We’re going to remain a country of laws.”

Foxman’s concerns, he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in a separate interview, are with proposals by the extremists to politicize the judiciary, to loosen open-fire regulations, to end recognition of non-Orthodox conversions to Judaism and to ban open LGBTQ events.

“It’s not one thing. It’s a whole package of things, which is bringing us back to the Middle Ages,” Foxman told JTA. “So it’s undermining democracy in terms of the legal system. It’s cutting back on on human or equal rights for all whether it’s LGBT or whether it’s a it’s the Conservative movement, or the Reform movement that have strides in Israel.

Foxman, 82, is still called on to pronounce on Jewish matters. A Holocaust survivor, he is on the board of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. His remarks are notable in part because he was of a generation, together with Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive vice president of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, and David Harris, who just retired as American JUewish Committee CEO, who said their top priority was keeping private differences between Israel and the U.S. Jewish community, and between Israel and the United States. Open criticism was the taboo.

That won’t hold if Netanyahu gives in to the demands of Otzma Yehudit, Foxman told the Jerusalem Post.

“If Bibi changes the nature of democracy in Israel, he will change the nature of Israel’s support in the U.S., certainly the American Jewish community, probably the general community and the U.S. government if it continues to be center-left,” he said.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment