Tag: Captain Cassidy

Here’s the link to this article.

When The Big Problem Here is that people don’t know enough pastors, not that those pastors cause countless scandals, you’ve got a much bigger problem on your hands than a lack of trust.

by CAPTAIN CASSIDY

FEB 07, 2023

Reading Time: 10 MINUTES

Yet again, Gallup surveys show that Americans’ trust in clergy, including pastors, is eroding. In fact, that erosion has hit record levels for the second year in a row. Barely a third of Americans trust pastors any further than they can throw them. And Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) leaders think they know why. Yes, it’s so simple! People just don’t know any pastors personally, and so all they have to go on is the constant news of pastors’ scandals!

But this explanation actually causes them more problems than they think. It’s a signal flare in the sky to all beholding it: This is not a trustworthy organization at all.

Gallup delivers devastating news about pastors and religion in general

The survey itself came out a couple of weeks ago. In it, Gallup asked Americans how much they trust people in various professions. Nurses came out on top, followed by medical doctors, pharmacists, and high school teachers. On the bottom, we find (in declining order) car salespeople, members of Congress, and telemarketers.

Of course, the survey also reflects evangelicals’ beloved culture wars. A distinct political divide exists in respondents’ answers. Republicans rated fact-based professions (nurses, teachers, doctors, pharmacists, journalists) much lower, and authoritarian figures (police officers, clergy, bankers, business executives) higher than their Democratic counterparts did. It’s quite an interesting survey.

Of interest, clergy people hit a historic low in these polls last year. Only 36% of respondents thought they had “high ethical standards.” It was the lowest that the clergy had ever been rated. But this year, respondents beat that figure: 34% thought that.

This drop in confidence goes along with a general drop in Americans’ trust in organized religion as a whole. In 2021, 37% of Gallup’s respondents thought churches were very trustworthy. In 2022, only 31% thought that. Last year, Aaron Earls (the same writer who brings us our OP, or original post, of the day) examined this situation for the SBC’s official website, Baptist Press.

In short, these polls measure a catastrophic drop in trust since about the early 2000s. Clergy and churches have gone from soaring trust levels in the 60% and 70% range in the 1970s to barely squeaking past the 30% mark now.

And Earls is sure that he knows why.

The Big Problem Here isn’t pastors!

When I talk about “The Big Problem Here,” I’m poking fun at dysfunctional authoritarians’ longstanding habit of deciding that all of their problems hinge on one particular thing that has nothing to do with anything. They can’t even tackle that chosen scapegoat problem with any meaningful strategies, because—again—it doesn’t impact anything about their situation. So they tilt at this one windmill for a while, then abandon the entire project once their followers move on to new concerns.

(Related: Who’s Your One; Bless Every Home; Come meet the SBC’s EVANGELISM TASK FORCE.)

In this case, Earls has decided that The Big Problem Here is simple:

Thanks to declining church membership and attendance rates, fewer Americans personally know any pastors. Thus, when they hear about pastoral scandals on the news, they don’t have that mitigating knowledge to offset the shock of the scandals. As he puts it:

Downward trends in church attendance accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic. With more Americans staying home each Sunday, fewer personally know a local church pastor. The lack of individual knowledge means more people associate pastors as a whole with the scandals surrounding individual church leaders.Aaron Earls, Baptist Press

Gosh, it’s just so simple!

Oh wait.

In reality, this assessment makes the SBC look much worse.

How Christians’ trust in pastors helps scandals fester in dark places

Long, long ago I ran across an interesting article from Christianity Today. Posted in 2000, it concerned the leaders of Willow Creek Community Church. Specifically, it covered “the man behind the megachurch,” Gilbert Bilezikian.

As I read the article, I was absolutely shocked by the way that the writer completely missed a number of creepy red flags about this guy. She wrote this paragraph without perceiving anything weird going on at all:

Walking the halls of Willow Creek with Bilezikian is like walking through a shopping mall with a movie star. People stare, and he can’t complete a sentence without someone waving and calling, “Hey, Dr. B.!” Women of 83 and girls of 6 rush up to him, knowing he will kiss their hand and compliment their ravishing beauty.Lauren Winner, Christianity Today, November 2000

One of Willow Creek’s teaching pastors at the time, John Ortberg, had the following to say of Bilezikian:

“Women at Willow Creek fall in love with him all the time,” Ortberg says. “He has legions of female followers. He manages to be thoroughly egalitarian and thoroughly French at the same time.”Lauren Winner, Christianity Today, November 2000

Ortberg said that. The writer put that quote into her article. Neither she nor Ortberg detected anything weird going on there at all.

Eventually, Bilezikian would fall to scandal. In fact, it’d turn out that he’d been sexually preying upon female Willow Creek members since at least the 1980s. Eventually, the lead pastor of Willow Creek, Bill Hybels, would also fall due to his own long history of preying upon women.

As for Ortberg, he eventually became the lead pastor of Menlo Park Presbyterian Church. And he lost his job in 2020 due to scandal as well: He allowed one of his sons to work around children even though that son had confessed to having compulsive thoughts about committing pedophilia.

(In retrospect, it sounds like the son may have suffered from a recognized form of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Thankfully, an investigation has turned up no actual child abuse, though those investigators did criticize Menlo Park’s child-protection policies. Of course, allowing someone like that to work around children is a shockingly bad judgment call.)

Americans’ trust in pastors was egregiously misplaced with all of these guys. And they all took full advantage of that trust.

Trust only allows predators all to operate unfettered and without fear through churches’ fields full of prey. Those predators know they will always have evangelicals defending them from any and all consequences of their actions.

Misplaced trust shields predatory pastors

Even when pastors finally get caught preying upon others, misplaced trust shields them from any consequences. In 2015, Geronimo Aguilar, or “Pastor G,” went to trial for sexually abusing two young girls in his youth group in the 1990s. (He’d been staying with their family temporarily, and her parents interrupted him in mid-rape.)

(Related: Rape culture and Pastor G.)

It turned out that these weren’t his only two victims. Four women in total accused him of abusing them. His wife even testified about his extramarital affairs with church staff, a board member’s wife, and even family members. And one woman testified that he’d paid for her abortion after he impregnated her.

If you’re wondering how his church took these shocking accusations, you shouldn’t.

They closed ranks around him. His uncle wondered aloud if one of his victims was a “hartlet” (I think he means harlot) who had led him on.

At the time, I saw numerous members of Pastor G’s church loudly protesting his innocence. But thankfully, the court system did its job and sentenced him to 40 years in prison.

Jesus did nothing to help this guy’s victims. He didn’t stop the predator in that church. And all the trust the congregation gave their pastor only allowed him to operate freely.

Misplaced trust makes Christians say “Oh no, my pastor would never do that!” It grants pastors a shield they do not deserve.

Aaron Earls, in his OP about eroded trust in pastors, laments the dropping of that shield. He’s sad that this undeserved cover is being removed, allowing light to shine at last in those dark places.

The biggest accountability cheerleaders in the world completely lack it in their own leadership ranks

It’d be ironic, if I didn’t know them like I do, to know that evangelicals are possibly the biggest cheerleaders in the world for accountability—and yet entirely lack it in their leadership ranks.

That’s why the public is well-served by not giving them their trust.

In many of the other professions that Gallup measures, like the medical field and even to a much lesser extent journalism, nobody enjoys much undeserved trust. Accountability is baked into the system at all levels. Often, laws address infractions of a profession’s code of ethics. Though violations of the profession’s rules do occur, the rulebreakers get caught.

If medical staff blab about patients’ treatment and diagnoses, they stand in violation of HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996). And our government strongly punishes these infractions. Journalists who invent or embellish stories can lose their jobs and their standing in the profession. All kinds of laws govern bankers and military people at all levels.

Various laws also govern police officers’ conduct, though they are often poorly-enforced. Scandals abound within this entire profession. In some areas, distrust of law enforcement is so profound that the law has to allow for drivers not wanting to stop in isolated areas when pulled over.

Spotty, often-ineffective enforcement is what leads to lax accountability.

Lax accountability, in turn, is what makes an authoritarian group become dysfunctional.

However, evangelicals don’t just have spotty, often-ineffective enforcement.

They often have none at all.

Nobody watches the churches’ watchers

All too often, church leaders operate with almost complete impunity. Though church boards often try to rein in the worst overreaches from pastors, all too often pastors game that system by packing their church boards with yes-men (as Mark Driscoll did—and when his board finally found its voice, he quit rather than submit to them). Church members fear exposing a pastor’s misdeeds because they know they might be blamed for provoking their own victimization—and they fear tarnishing their church’s (and their religion’s) reputation and credibility.

In really authoritarian churches, pastors institute church discipline, featuring membership covenants. These are BDSM-style contracts that Christians must sign in order to be considered full members of their churches. They spell out penalties for various infractions of the church leaders’ rules. But they almost never include provisions for appeals, much less any tangible, meaningful rules that church leaders themselves must follow, much less penalties for infractions of those rules. Instead, it’s the church members who must submit to discipleship.

I wish Christians would stop being completely shocked when yet another discipleship-pushing church turns out to be horrifically abusive. If I operated a list of Evangelical Things No Longer Considered Weird, like we see in Chuck Shepherd’s long-running “News of the Weird” column, this situation would have qualified almost from the beginning of my own writing.

Why evangelicals don’t rein in their pastors

Worse, authoritarian evangelical leaders exist in a system that considers rule-following to be what the powerless must do. The powerful don’t have to follow their group’s rules. A symbol of power in their group is having very few people able to rein someone in. The fewer people who can rein you in, the more power you hold. In turn, the more people you can order around, the more power you hold.

In fact, the powerless in their groups admire the powerful for flaunting often openly-transgressive behavior. That’s a big part of why evangelicals glommed so hard onto Donald Trump in 2016. Every transgression he committed in office only made evangelicals love him more.

The goal of the powerless is, therefore, to become powerful so they don’t have to follow so many rules and answer to fewer superiors about their behavior. To become powerful, they curry favor with those more powerful than themselves—while preventing the upward rise of others seeking the same goal. The results of all this jockeying can be seen in almost every single evangelical church in America.

Evangelicals’ entire social system revolves around power: who holds it, who wields it, who grants it, and who guards it. In such an environment, ethics and morality take a far distant millionth place in priorities.

A former big-name SBC leader, Thom Rainer, perfectly (if unwittingly) described evangelicals’ power obsession in a podcast he did a few years ago. He discussed how church members often begin grooming pastors to be on their side from the moment one begins moving into the neighborhood. In addition, big church donors often use their money to control pastors’ decisions and behavior. If they succeed, the pastor favors them in church squabbles and grants them plum volunteer (and maybe even paid staff) roles.

If this grooming fails to get the groomers what they want, Rainer asserts, the groomers seek to drive the new pastor out so they can get another one who will hopefully be more amenable to their blatant attempts to curry favor.

Look up the ladder of power, and multiply this jockeying with each successive rung to the top.

People are right not to trust leaders in a dysfunctional authoritarian system

And so now, we come full circle back to this OP from Aaron Earls on the SBC’s official website. That means that Earls’ writing is stamped with the SBC’s approval. It represents what the SBC as a whole wants its members to know and think and feel. Though he’s discussing a source that deals only with Christianity and clergy as a whole (meaning all flavors of churches and all kinds of clergy), he specifically zeroes in on pastors, and he clearly means evangelical pastors at that.

In his OP, Earls tells us that The Big Problem Here is that not enough Americans personally know any pastors. He asserts that this lack of mitigating personal knowledge is what makes scandals seem so shocking. He implies that if Americans only personally knew more pastors, we’d know that these scandals are far from indicative of evangelicalism as a whole.

But what would happen if more Americans chose to get acquainted with more pastors?

Would this rise in pastoral acquaintanceship lead to pastors’ scandals becoming less frequent or shocking? Would pastors become somehow truly accountable for their behavior?

No and no. It wouldn’t change evangelicals’ piss-poor accountability structures. It wouldn’t change evangelicals’ obsession with power. All it would do is potentially cloud Americans’ perceptions and lead to them granting all evangelical pastors the regard they hold for one or two pastors. And if those pastoral acquaintances turn out to be predators, that knowledge sure won’t boost their normie acquaintances’ opinions of pastors in general. It’ll just make normies realize anew that pastors can easily hide a lot of wrongdoing very easily from a whole lot of people.

That’s exactly what happened to one person who personally knew a pastor named Paul Dyal, who was charged last year with capital sexual battery of a victim aged 11 or under. The abuse had begun decades earlier. A fellow pastor of his, Jerry Mullaly, had this to say about the charges:

“He was always a polite man. Always outgoing. Always wanted to help someone in need,” Mullaly said. “Never did any kind of red flags come up. But I’ll say this — you never know who’s sitting beside you.”Robert Grant, Action News Jax

And evangelicals in particular really don’t “know who’s sitting beside” them.

For the most part, it looks like a whole bunch of Americans already know all of this. So no, they don’t actually need to get to know any pastors.

When your strategy involves anything but addressing your group’s scandals

But this conclusion that Earls draws is perfectly safe, speaking in terms of the utterly-dysfunctional evangelical system.

He is not suggesting any meaningful changes to their social system. Nor is he suggesting that evangelical leaders create and submit to real accountability practices.

Instead, he’s complaining that The Big Problem Here is that normies just don’t know pastors well enough. That takes the entire onus of resolution off of evangelical leaders and their dysfunctional social system. Then, this non-solution shoves the obligation for fixing this situation onto people who, as we just discovered, do not owe those leaders even one moment of their time.

Until evangelicals decide to recreate their system to bake accountability into it at all levels, they do not deserve even one iota of anyone’s trust.

Alas, that will never happen. Entirely too many evangelicals like things as they are right now. The system as it is now works just fine for entirely too many evangelicals. Meaningful changes would only dilute the power that evangelical pastors hold.

If you ever see that happen, then maybe it’ll be a little safer to trust these folks. But they’re nowhere near that point, as Aaron Earls and the SBC have so generously demonstrated for us this week.

Here’s the link to this article.

Gosh, how could it ever backfire for this pastor to demand his members undergo a culture-war loyalty test? So many ways

by CAPTAIN CASSIDY

FEB 09, 2023

Overview:

Heath Lambert came out of nowhere, relatively speaking, to become the pastor of a huge, historic, influential SBC church.

Recently he’s made news by demanding his congregation sign an agreement with a “biblical sexuality” statement that is extremely bigoted, misogynistic, and transphobic.

We trace Lambert’s rise to power and examine what factors might have made him decide to pull this stunt.

Reading Time: 14 MINUTES

As time goes on, religion researchers are discovering all kinds of things about evangelicals’ culture wars—which is to say, their constant attempts to strong-arm popular culture into line with their demands. We now know that if pastors take any specific side in those culture wars, they can alienate church members with differing opinions. But one evangelical pastor with the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), Heath Lambert, has decided to put the pedal to the evangelical-decline metal by demanding his congregation sign official loyalty tests about the culture wars.

This stunt didn’t come out of nowhere, however. Let’s trace the genealogy of this decision—and see where its genetic line will likely end.

This is the rabbit hole that never ends; it just goes on and on, my friends…

Before beginning deep dives like this one, I like to find out a little background information about the person at its center. I usually present this information in a section titled something like “Everyone, meet This Person.” For me, it’s a way to gain a larger perspective about a story.

Boy oh boy was this background-info gathering sesh ever different, though.

At the end, or at least where I decided I really had to stop now, I felt like Calvin after his dad gave in to his demand for the same bedtime story for the billionth time in a row:

No, I was not expecting in the least to find myself falling down an endless rabbit hole when I began researching this story. It just never ended!

The upshot of these dozens of tabs open on my browser: Heath Lambert is the perfect ur-example of a scheming evangelical culture warrior. Scheming and culture wars are part of his emotional DNA. I want you to know why this decision of his was so incredibly boneheaded—and yet so perfectly in character for the exact type of evangelical he is, as well as the type of evangelicals he wants to impress by making it.

Everyone, meet Heath Lambert: A veteran of the culture wars

According to his church’s bio blurb, Heath Lambert arose from the evangelical muck around 2009 with a PhD in biblical counseling and systematic theology. Biblical counseling is not secular counseling with Jesus frosting. It is completely different, with completely different objectives and methods.

He got this degree from something he calls “Southern Seminary.” While that name can refer to three different schools, it most likely refers to Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (SBTS). SBTS is an SBC-affiliated school. Online, I see numerous other references to “Southern Seminary” that all mean SBTS. Incidentally, our old pal Al Mohler runs it.

The newly-hatched Lambert hit the ground running. According to another bio from the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors (ACBC), around this time he worked as an associate professor at SBTS. He taught biblical counseling.

In 2011, he published the first of many books about this topic, The Biblical Counseling Movement After Adams. (“Adams” refers to the founder of the “biblical counseling” movement, Jay Adams.) In 2012, Lambert explained his take on biblical counseling over at The Gospel Coalition (TGC, a very Calvinist and hardline evangelical group). To anyone with a bit of background in real psychology, it is absolutely alarming stuff.

Lambert appears to have joined ACBC fairly early on. That 2012 post doesn’t even say he’s a member yet. But once he joined ACBC, he clearly rose up the ranks quickly. A 2014 blog post calls him the ACBC Executive Director. Not bad for just a few short years of professional life and, at most, two years at ACBC!

Though he doesn’t tend to talk much about it, Lambert is a very strict, hardline Calvinist, as well as a biblical literalist and inerrantist. This crowd also really likes church discipline, which puts church leaders in complete control of congregants’ personal lives.

Heath Lambert: The ACBC years

Once firmly ensconced in the leadership of ACBC, Lambert wrote constantly about what he saw as the future of biblical counseling. Around 2017, he arrogantly offered up what he called “95 Theses for an Authentic Commitment to Counseling.”

Mostly, his “95 theses” consist of endless Bible verses meant to prop up his erroneous assumption that the Bible must be both the end-all be-all resource for counselors and entirely sufficient to solve all psychological problems. Moreover (he tells us in #23), any other kind of counseling besides biblical counseling is doomed to fail through a lack of Jesus Power. Then he completely misunderstands his burden of proof in #40, which is a defiant-sounding CHECKMATE, ATHEISTS if I ever saw one.

(Related: Things the Bible doesn’t talk about, like PTSD.)

But he also made sure to get his organization into the news. In 2015, ACBC ran a conference about homosexuality with all the usual hallmarks of the evangelical culture wars. Protestors picketed the conference, getting ACBC splashed onto news sites everywhere.

(Related: Anatomy of doublespeak: That ACBC conference.)

ACBC made the news again in 2018, when Lambert (then the “outgoing” leader) decided to move its conference from the campus of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary over the Paige Patterson scandal. Hey, even a broken clock tells the correct time twice a day.

Around the same time, Wartburg Watch had a whole lot to say in criticism of ACBC’s brand of counseling (archive). Among many, many other problems, they accused ACBC of inadequate education and certification, poorly-educated leaders, misogyny, and serious issues with confidentiality. The 2014 blog post I mentioned confirms all of these issues and more besides.

Heath Lambert and his bigger ambitions

But Heath Lambert had bigger ambitions than just leading the ACBC, it seems. That’s where First Baptist Church in Jacksonville (FBCJ), a huge SBC church, enters the chat.

From 1982 to 2006, Jerry Vines was FBCJ’s lead pastor. SBC watchers might recognize him as one of the primary movers-and-shakers of the SBC’s Conservative Resurgence. In fact, he was the president of the SBC from 1988-1989, at the very height of that fight.

The Conservative Resurgence was nothing less than an evangelical schism. A small handful of conspirators got angry about what they saw as the SBC’s drift into liberalism (particularly around the lightning-rod topic of women pastors). They decided to bring the SBC back to its ultra-conservative roots.

Vines’ election was part of the conspirators’ scheme. The president of the SBC appoints a whole lot of people to a whole lot of posts. The conspirators knew that if they could get their man in the top spot for a certain number of consecutive years, they would win the schism through simple numbers. By Vines’ second election, his side’s victory was assured.

Vines retired in 2006. Afterward, FBCJ elected Mac Brunson to be their new pastor.

Sometime around 2015, Mac Brunson hired Heath Lambert as an associate pastor. Soon after, Brunson resigned with no explanation whatsoever.

That left Heath Lambert as the new lead pastor of FBCJ in 2017. He quit ACBC the next year, so now FBCJ was his only job.

Alas for him, by then FBCJ’s membership—and income—had been dwindling for years.

FBCJ’s chaotic recent history before Heath Lambert…

Under its first pastors and then Vines, FBCJ enjoyed a bunch of great boom years. But by Brunson’s ascension, those days were long past. Worse, its enrolled members clearly did very little for the church. Even by the SBC’s lackadaisical attendance standards, its membership barely ever bothered to show up for Sunday services.

The percentage and number of butts in pews (BIPs, and no, that’s not an official SBC term) are a direct indicator of a church’s financial health and its cultural power in a community, as well as the church’s status in evangelicalism generally. And the SBC knows it. Every year for their Annual Report, the mother ship asks member churches to do a headcount of actual attendees. Though the pandemic obviously has thrown these counts into chaos, these headcounts generally reveal that about a third of their enrolled members can be found in church on any given Sunday.

In 2014, FBCJ had 28,000 enrolled members and 3k attendance on average. That’s a 10.7% attendance rate. Still, thanks to their leadership and overall size, FBCJ was a powerful force in the denomination.

(A few weeks after Brunson resigned from FBCJ, he began his new gig as the pastor of the considerably smaller Valleydale Church in Birmingham, AL. As of this writing, he’s still there. It appears to be SBC.)

By the time Heath Lambert took control of FBCJ, the church had an absolutely humongous facility with ten sprawling city blocks of land around it. However, they couldn’t afford its upkeep at all with their 3200-ish members, and they were sliding deeper and deeper into debt.

One of Lambert’s first moves as pastor involved trying to “jolt [FBCJ] back to life with a loan” and sell off about 90% of its property. The pandemic completely destroyed those sales plans, unfortunately. As of 2021, Lambert seems to be slowly gathering money to get some renovations going.

…And its equally troubling history

If you’re wondering if a scandal was involved with Brunson’s resignation from FBCJ, you probably should. This guy was entirely too sanctimonious about adultery.

But I have other—and far more potent—reasons to wonder about just why he left FBCJ without explanation.

As a start, FBCJ shows up in the massive 2022 abuse report that the SBC commissioned to deal with its huge sex abuse crisis. On page 145, we read this testimony:

Tiffany Thigpen grew up in a Christian home, and her family attended First Baptist Church Jacksonville (FBC-Jax). Ms. Thigpen was committed to her church and committed to going into ministry. During Ms. Thigpen’s high school years, Darrell Gilyard, a mentee of Pastor Jerry Vines and Paige Patterson, preached at FBC-Jax. [. . .] Mr. Gilyard groomed Ms. Thigpen with late-night phone calls and promises of a summer job in Texas. In the spring of 1991, after a revival meeting at FBC-JAX, Mr. Gilyard attacked Ms. Thigpen and attempted to rape her. Ms. Thigpen fought to get away from him and was able to escape. She was terrified and traumatized. Ms. Thigpen and her mother went to Dr. Vines to tell him about the attack. Dr. Vines was dismissive of her report and told Ms. Thigpen that it would be embarrassing for her if others knew about it.2022 SBC abuse report, p. 145

I’m sure it wasn’t fun for Heath Lambert to have to respond to this report. But he tried hard to communicate the policy changes that had occurred after Vines’ pastorship. Then, he offered the reporter this exceedingly odd disclaimer:

Lambert did add that Gilyard isn’t affiliated with the First Baptist Church.Action News Jax

Wait, what?

The FBCJ-Gilyard connection

That statement caught my attention in a major way.

Nobody had said anything about Gilyard’s current affiliation. Rather, he was preaching there at the time of the attack in 1991. So why go to such pains to stress a lack of current affiliation?

Well, I sure found out why: Darrell Gilyard and FBCJ go way, way back. Heath Lambert clearly knows how far back, too.

In fact, 44 women in Jacksonville (among others outside the city) have accused Gilyard of what the report euphemistically calls “inappropriate conduct.” And this conduct appears to have been an open secret among FBCJ and SBC leadership at the time.

The super-secret SBC-maintained database of pastoral predators contains quite a few links and leads to Gilyard’s crimes. Two solid gobsmacking pages of the database are devoted to him alone (pp 73-74). At the end of his two-page database entry, we learn that the SBC’s top leaders knew that Jerry Vines stood accused of knowing all about the situation but doing nothing to protect women from Gilyard. (This is the possible blog post the database mentions, but it might also be this one.)

In fact, Vines helped Gilyard escape consequences. For a while beforehand, he’d taken quite an interest in Gilyard’s career. Along with Paige Patterson, Vines gave the young preacher considerable help in getting established in his profession.

In addition, that secret database reveals (on page 56) another criminal lurking at FBCJ, Stephen Edmonds. In 2002, Edmonds was the church’s youth minister and one of its deacons. Numerous victims accused him of child sexual abuse. Eventually, he was sentenced to a year in prison and five years’ probation, then listed on the state’s sex offender registry. This happened under Vines’ leadership.

As well, FBCJ’s leadership, particularly under Brunson, has been credibly accused of all kinds of other misconduct, mostly financial but occasionally touching upon the silencing of critics (archive).

Heath Lambert didn’t choose FBCJ by accident

Goodness gracious, Heath Lambert inherited quite an impressive mess with FBCJ, didn’t he? But I can see why he was willing to shoulder such a burden. His ascension to this church’s pastorship was not some wacky, divinely-orchestrated series of impossible coincidences.

Though FBCJ was struggling mightily hard for a number of reasons, it was still quite a plum for the picking. It’s a historic church with an impressive pedigree of leadership, an undeniably powerful role in SBC politics for decades, and loads of potential for rebounding despite its past debilitating debt and downturned attendance and fortunes. I’m sure Lambert didn’t see any way he could lose with those conditions.

Wartburg Watch thinks that hardline Calvinists have been looking for struggling churches that fit this general description for a long time. Their goal, apparently, is steeplejacking. The term means a local, single-church version of the Conservative Resurgence itself. Once these Calvinists achieve leadership roles within a struggling-but-paid-for nice church, they set about making it a new hub of hardline Calvinism. Anyone who doesn’t like the new shift gets driven away. I’ll let them explain the process:

The SBC has been involved in the revitalization of older churches. Let me translate that for you. One of the most difficult things about starting a new church plant is trying to find and rent facilities. There are many within the leadership which urge SBC Baptist preacher types to find a church facility that is already bought and paid for.

Last year I received a call from church in the Boston area. Twenty Calvinist young folks arrived at their church and began to join committees, etc. They were attempting to get themselves elected to position of leadership in the church. Why might that be? This church was an historical church with paid for facilities. I explained to the pastor what was likely happening. Those 20 young church revitalizers were given the boot.Wartburg Watch (archive)

That does seem to fit exactly how Heath Lambert came to power.

Well, he’s found a new way to court the attention of his fellow Calvinists:

He’s set forth a loyalty test for his congregation.

Heath Lambert and his new loyalty test

Last year around October, according to his church’s FAQ, Heath Lambert decided to force his remaining church members to sign a statement about “biblical sexuality.” The church apparently “overwhelmingly approved” the idea. They appear to have rolled it out in January.

Anyone in the membership who chooses not to sign the document by March 19, 2023 will be stripped of membership. If they wish to become members again of the church, they will need to follow its procedures for any prospective new member. These include “attending the membership class, meeting with a pastor, and being voted on by the congregation.” I’m guessing that signing the statement will be a mandatory part of that onboarding process.

So what does this statement say about “biblical sexuality”?

Biblical, when used by evangelicals as an adjective for anything, just means a culture-war-enabling interpretation of the noun being modified. So biblical marriage means marriage reserved for straight cisgender couples seeking opposite-sex-only marriage, and then idealized-1950s-style strict gender roles and constant childbearing afterward. Biblical parenting means beating children and raising them in a very authoritarian manner. Biblical counseling means extremely Jesus-y fake counseling that seeks to eradicate sin in a client’s life, while laying no particular care upon confidentiality.

Thus, biblical sexuality means the only kind of sexuality that evangelical culture warriors approve of humans having. No LGBT orientations or identities are allowed. Sex may occur only within a straights-and-cisgender-only, opposite-sex marriage. And constant, unending disapproval must be expressed at anyone who goes off-script.

How Heath Lambert’s loyalty test came about

In part, the statement reads:

As a member of First Baptist Church, I believe that God creates people in his image as either male or female, and that this creation is a fixed matter of human biology, not individual choice. I believe marriage is instituted by God, not government, is between one man and one woman, and is the only context for sexual desire and expression.Baptist Press

It’s not anything new for SBC leaders, particularly hardline Calvinist ones. But Heath Lambert feels that this statement is absolutely necessary now. As he explained recently:

We believe [that] in a sexually confused culture, it is important for our church to be united and to be clear about a matter like this which is a closely held religious conviction held by every member in our congregation.Heath Lambert for Baptist Press

Of course, the decision to run this loyalty test was not solely made out of a desire to be super-Jesus-y, nor to make absolutely sure that the church’s culture-war enemies and victims know exactly how much its members hate them.

It’s actually way more pragmatic than that. You see, the Jacksonville City Council recently passed an ordinance that includes better protections for LGBT people.

They gave religious organizations an exemption from those rules. However, it appears that Lambert is desperately worried that unless his church makes adamantly clear that they’re bigoted and transphobic as a core part of their religious identity, the exemptions might not apply to them. Lambert even told his church so in a YouTube video from September:

Protecting our church legally means that we must do everything possible to communicate that our biblical beliefs about gender are a core conviction, absolutely central to who we are as a church of Jesus Christ.Heath Lambert, YouTube video quoted in Baptist Press

My suspicion here is that Heath Lambert has become aware that some of his congregants have and love LGBT people in their families, and he wants to head off lawsuits from those congregants.

That the statement also serves as a loyalty test is probably just an added bonus to Lambert. By mid-March, he’ll know exactly which congregants are loyal to him—and which ones he must drive away.

The rumblings of dissent grow louder for Heath Lambert

Though Heath Lambert claims that the only opposition he’s received to his loyalty test have come from outside FBCJ, it’s very easy to find church members expressing profound disagreement with the statement. Someone even posted the letter that one household, possibly theirs, received:

As well, FBCJ hosted some kind of open-mic forum at the end of January for people to discuss their opinions about the loyalty test. During that forum, a woman who identified herself as “queer” described an FBCJ member family in her acquaintance that had told her they’d decided to stop attending the church because of this new requirement. I doubt they’re the only ones.

To me, it sounds like very few dissenters dare to openly discuss their opinions. Instead, they take to sites online or go through intermediaries who have nothing to lose. Considering how authoritarians tend to respond to dissent, such decisions are completely understandable.

How Heath Lambert’s church likely shakes out in the culture wars

FBCJ is already seriously dwindling in membership. Before the pandemic, they reported about 3200 members. If the pandemic did to them what it’s done to other evangelical churches, they’ve likely lost a good third of their members in the past couple of years. (That’s only a general estimate, of course. I’ve heard of some churches facing considerably greater losses, some up in the 75%-80% nosebleed ranges.) And if the average applies to FBCJ, that means they’re hovering around 2000 members now.

According to a 2023 Pew Research report, a good 15% or so of white evangelicals in America don’t buy into biblical sexuality regarding gender identity. About a third of them think the United States is either accepting enough or needs to become more accepting of trans people. Almost a third don’t consider their religion much or at all when coming to their opinions about LGBT people. So that’s potentially 400-1000 pre-pandemic FBCJ members who aren’t in lockstep there.

When it comes to equal marriage, Pew Research found even more dissent in the flocks. Almost a third of evangelicals “strongly favor/favor” same-sex marriage. This finding might mean that almost a thousand congregants at FBCJ’s previous membership level are fine with equal marriage.

If I’m right and they’re sitting at around 2000 members, Heath Lambert might potentially be facing about 600 culture-war traitors hiding in his hallowed pews.

What those dissenters are likely to do

Authoritarian leaders love to demand loyalty tests of their followers. It sets their followers off-base and makes them feel ill at ease. It makes followers try extra-hard to please their leaders, too.

But these tests can backfire for pastors. When they take a stand about any political matter, anyone on the other side becomes alienated. Without a way for pastors to force their followers to stick around, this alienation can quickly lead to dissenters leaving the church for a better political fit. It doesn’t even seem to matter which side the pastor takes. All that matters is that some congregants don’t agree with it.

Heath Lambert thinks that by demanding this loyalty test from his congregation, he will end with a smaller congregation that is intensely loyal to him. That’s unlikely. Whoever remains will be extra-aware that their pastor feels very comfortable with making extremely personal demands of them.

I expect at least some of those dissenters to sign the agreement anyway. After all, how is their disloyalty to be exposed? If they’re careful, it’s unlikely that King Heath or his lickspittle informants and lackeys will ever find out about it.

For those who have a crisis of conscience about dishonestly signing it, they may well drift away. Many may contrive the usual excuses for doing so: They’re just so busy lately, or they’re moving, or whatever else. Or they’ll just leave and not talk to anyone about it.

The possible real target of this stunt

Whatever happens, though, this demand is perfectly within Heath Lambert’s character. It bears the hallmarks of both his ambition and his overarching control-lust.

Also whatever happens, hardliner Calvinists will be very impressed by his demand for a loyalty test. And their esteem might well be the key to understanding Heath Lambert’s thought processes.

This entire situation might be a signal flare meant to catch the eye of those outranking him in the tribe. In the past, I’ve seen hardline Calvinists do very similar things to get attention from their thought leaders.

In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if this stunt is part of a plan to get elected to the SBC’s presidency—if not this summer, then next. If I’m right, then it doesn’t matter at all how many people Heath Lambert loses over his demand. What matters is that his side’s leaders are impressed enough by it to push him higher up the ladder of power.

And thus, this story perfectly illustrates exactly why evangelicals, and the SBC in particular, are in a freefall decline with no end in sight.