And you thought the Catholic priest sexual abuse scandal was bad. Southern Baptist are competing to be worse.

[lees1975]

4. It's doctrine.

Conservative Christians in particular tend toward a literal interpretation of the Bible, and that leads to blending doctrine with the culture that existed at the time the Bible was written. And that includes the subjugation of women as property, which is completely discredited by the gospel Jesus preached, which conservatives ignore or now call "woke."

There is no standard of morality when the Old Testament is equated in inspiration and interpreted as a verse by verse rule book. In the Old Testament, male sexual gratification is a goal. The first hint that there might be something wrong with that is when David sleeps with Bathsheeba, but the emphasis in that story isn't on the adultery he commits, its on murdering her husband.

A denominational organization is simply a power structure for a small group of individuals who use it to channel wealth and power into their own interests. The Southern Baptists are particularly vulnerable because their structure was designed along the lines of the old Confederate States of America, to create and then preserve an inside aristocracy to use the structure for other than religious purposes. The Southern Baptists are now much more of a right wing extremist political organization than they are a Christian group of churches.