The goddess of our age is beckoning us to open the door for all manner of vices. In the name of affirmation, empathy, and toleration of churches with female pastors, we are being manipulated to believe decisive, clear, courageous, and mature reaffirmation of the Baptist Faith & Message is “dismissive” of women. Adopting the Amendment in June 2024 allows Southern Baptists to address the theological, anthropological, and ecclesiological problem of female pastors decisively, for the good of all in our denomination.
Joe Rigney has written a most timely and needed book: Leadership and Emotional Sabotage: Resisting the Anxiety That Will Wreck Your Family, Destroy Your Church, and Ruin the World. In this short, precise, and punchy offering, Rigney provides a sort of prescription regarding his diagnosis of “untethered empathy”(see here and here) and its awful effects on broader culture and evangelicalism.
My conclusion upon reading this book? Buy a handful of copies, keep one for yourself, and give the others to those in your immediate circle. We live in a rather unserious and incoherent world, and the sober-minded, glad-hearted, Christ-settled posture Rigney calls us to is just what the Good Doctor ordered for the fever of anxiety gripping our age.
In this article, I will take Rigney’s insights and apply them directly to the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). Rigney is self-admittedly building off the work of Edwin Friedman,[1] and highlights his five features of cultural breakdown. I will demonstrate how there is evidence of each of these features present in current SBC debates (particularly as it relates to our response to abuse and female pastors), and then offer a path forward for a sober-minded, stable, and ready response (and not reaction!) in Indianapolis at the SBC annual meeting this June. The value of Rigney’s work is that it helps readers like me, who may be mystified as to why professing conservative and complementarian influences in the SBC take a “complementarianism for me but not for thee” approach to adopting the Law Amendment. In other words, Rigney diagnoses the cultural pathologies which undergird a resistance to a robust confessionalism, namely, the effeminacy of untethered empathy.
The last couple of years, conservatives within the SBC have (rightly) warned of a “liberal drift.” But the big takeaway from Rigney’s book as I think about my denomination is that it is more accurate to say we in the SBC are being emotionally steered. Drift is a passive term that removes culpability or at least blames the leftward movement on passivity at the helm. It is more accurate to say that the SBC has allowed those who hate her to take the helm indirectly by emotional blackmail through God’s people tasked with leading the denomination. For more on this, see Mark Coppenger’s offering to this month’s Christ Over All theme.
How to Respond to Empathetic Drunkards
Rigney puts his finger on one of the more troubling trends within evangelicalism today. And that is how the world relies on professing Christians to get drunk on worldiness’s disordered passions and as a result, pressure fellow believers to pursue worldly ends (41–43). The world, the flesh, and the Devil are counting on Christians to forsake sober-mindedness, and this unholy trinity can then use these Christians to manipulate other believers. (On this point, Rigney’s exposition of Galatians 2 and Paul’s confrontation of Peter is brilliant, 81–84.)
What is true of groups can also play out on the individual level. Someone who is a conduit of emotions often becomes even more self-righteous than the original emoter. To give an example: Pastor Billy kindly exhorts one of his church members, Sally, to not lead a women’s Bible study using a prosperity preacher’s curriculum. Sally weeps profusely to another member, Larry, about pastor Billy’s “heavy-handedness” and “doctrinal hair-splitting.” Larry gets angry and resolves to publicly confront his pastor—all the while not realizing that he has been emotionally steered into the role of a lackey for worldliness. Rigney explains the dynamics at play in the parable, “Sometimes one person’s sadness elicits sadness in others. But other times, sadness in one person may draw out anger in another (either at them or at the third party who is responsible for their pain) . . . Untethered empathy puts other people’s passions in the driver’s seat” (43).
Rigney unpacks the two ways in which the world will attempt to steer believers through name-calling: “ugly labels for true things, and ugly labels for false things” (40). The former tactic is whenever the world labels Christians “bigoted” for something along the lines of affirming there are two genders, believing 2+2=4, or daring to suggest God calls men to be the head of the church and home.
The latter tactic is when the world calls believers an ugly term, “Misrepresenting our beliefs and then slap[ping] an ugly label on their misrepresentation” (41). This latter category is particularly significant, because by it the world exploits the (good) Christian desire to shine bright for the gospel. After all, it may seem kind of hard to shine bright when your reputation is tarnished. However, here we must remember that “the Pharisees called Jesus a drunkard and a glutton (which he wasn’t)” (41). The world (and worldly “Christians”) rely heavily on the notion that “where there’s smoke, there’s fire”—believing that controversy surrounding an individual always points to that individual’s sin. But Christians can take heart, there was a lot of smoke around Christ, and He has overcome the world. The source of the smoke around His ministry was from the pit of hell, not Him, and so Rigney calls us to ensure that (like Jesus) we live above reproach, rendering such slander baseless (1 Pet. 3:16; 4:4). I think this concept is worth the price of Rigney’s book, because this is precisely how the SBC has been steered in dangerous doctrinal and cultural directions over the last decade or so. Rigney rightly calls for Christians to not be moved by ugly labels, but stabilized by God’s word.
It is significant to note how those who get drunk on other’s passions claim the moral high ground as they revile others. Oftentimes, those emotionally steering the SBC are fully convinced they are playing the role of hero, when in reality they are recklessly pressuring or endangering the entire denomination by projecting the guilt of one or some onto the whole body. Unsurprisingly, this tactic also carries with it the added benefit of raising their own stock as an “ally” in the eyes of the world’s disordered notion of justice. After all, “the world is watching” (if you ask empathetic drunkards in our midst). Instead, I would encourage myself and fellow SBC messengers to live coram deo—before the face of God. God is watching, and we ought prostrate ourselves before Him rather than preen before the world (Isa. 8:12–13).
So, what are Christians to do when emotional drunkards weaponize empathy to steer us? Rigney answers with the following strategy: (1) Take responsibility for your emotions. (2) Grow in self-awareness, and pay attention to what particular passions manipulate you. (3) Calibrate your standards by the word of God. (4) Increase your own tolerance for emotional pain and distress. (5) Be willing to be called ugly names. (6) Ensure the slanders are actually false. (7) Do not repay slander for slander. (8) Root all resistance to emotional sabotage in a sincere desire to please God (46–50).
Emotional Sabotage and the SBC
With the basic thesis of Rigney’s book in place, I will now turn to specific ways the SBC is being emotionally steered, and how we ought to respond in keeping with Rigney’s strategy above. As I mentioned earlier, I will do this in conjunction with Friedman’s five features of cultural breakdown Rigney cites. Features one and two (Reactivity and Herding) will be used to analyze how the SBC has reacted to sexual abuse, while three through five (Blame-Displacement, Quick-fix mentality, and Failure of nerve) provide moral clarity for dealing with the issue of female pastors and the proposed Law Amendment.
The SBC and Abuse
Friedman’s first two features of cultural breakdown (highlighted by Rigney) are as follows:
(1) Reactivity: “An unending cycle of intense reactions of each member to events and to one another . . . Whether over-reactive and hysterical or passive-aggressive and checked-out, the common thread is that passions of the members govern and dictate both the mood of the body and its direction” (19).
(2) Herding: “A process where togetherness triumphs over individuality and everyone adapts to the least mature members of the community…The goal becomes ‘peace’ at all costs, otherwise known as appeasement . . . leaders . . . are expected to take responsibility not only for their own actions, but for the (re)actions of others. Disruptions by the immature will be accommodated; anyone who seeks to take a stand will be characterized as cruel, heartless, insensitive, unfeeling, uncooperative, selfish, and cold” (19–20).
These features of chronic anxiety are best seen in the SBC reaction to abuse. Regarding Reactivity, Mark Coppenger says the hard but necessary truth regarding the unfounded inflation of abuse cases in the SBC being wielded to move the convention to overreaction against our own polity. He writes, “We’ve been assured that the list [of sexual abusers] ‘only scratches the surface’ or is ‘just the tip of the iceberg’ . . . What we ‘extremists’ [an ugly label for false things] are saying is that the problem is not so great as to [emotionally] sabotage our polity, expose ourselves gratuitously to litigation, and divert untold millions of missions/ministry dollars in search of a cure for our dubious affliction.” We are being manipulated to believe there is a full-blown systemic abuse crisis in SBC churches, and this trojan horse has and is being used to emotionally steer some to act against SBC polity without warrant.
As Josh Abbotoy and Jon Whitehead point out, “[P]olitical operatives and demagogues are trying to steer the Convention away from Baptist solutions.” This is a prime example of what Rigney exposes when he says, “The world frequently counts on this (good) Christian impulse in order to steer Christians by means of other Christians . . . Such pressure is frequently harder to resist, since it comes, not from the unbelieving world directly, but from the world through God’s people” (41). Whitehead shows receipts for how this is currently happening in the SBC, citing a noted advocate and SBC critic who says, “If the SBC winds up needing to sell nearly all its assets for the sake of providing reparations and restitution to those it has so grievously harmed, then this would be for the good.”
Southern Baptist pastor Heath Lambert has written a tremendously insightful series of essays entitled “Four Facts about Sexual Abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention.” Each essay is worth reading (which is why I share each of them below). As one reads through them, it becomes apparent that the kind of sobriety Lambert displays is precisely what Rigney calls us to. Lambert is clear-headed, stable, and ready to act, able to separate friend from foe and to respond to this difficult topic with the kind of joy that flows from someone who is approved before the Lord.
Seriously, take a few minutes to look through each of his essays.
- Abuse Is a Real Problem, but Is Not What We Were Told
- Not Everyone Offering Help Is Our Friend
- The Southern Baptist Convention Is a Powerful Force for Good
- We Must Have Solutions That Understand the Way Our Convention Works.
The responses to Lambert’s essays on X only illustrate the type of baseless charges that will be thrown at those who take a stand against appeasement. Just as Rigney reminds us when he speaks of Herding above: “anyone who seeks to take a stand will be characterized as cruel, heartless, insensitive, unfeeling, uncooperative, selfish, and cold.”
In the last essay, Lambert provides a clarion call to messengers heading into Indy:
It is important to know that the difference between the acceptance or rejection of any proposal has nothing to do with anyone’s commitment to ending abuse. The only people who like abuse are abusers. The difference between a proposal’s acceptance or rejection is how faithfully the proposal honors our cooperative partnership in the convention.