Still Baptized in Baptists: If It Quacks Like Misogyny…

By LONNIE KING

I joke that I’m a “former Baptist,” but like glitter and Vacation Bible School songs, Baptists have a way of sticking to you long after you think you’ve washed them off.

I haven’t been part of a Baptist church for a while now, and yet I still find myself weirdly obsessed with what the Southern Baptist Convention is up to.

It’s like watching your ex on Facebook: you don’t want to care, but somehow you’re still doom‑scrolling their bad life choices.

Why a Rebuttal Hooked Me

So when the SBC recently voted (again) to double‑down on their insistence that women cannot, biblically, be pastors, I wasn’t surprised.

Mildly annoyed? Yes. Surprised? Not even a little.

What did surprise me, though, was how satisfying it felt to watch Dan McClellan’s recent Instagram rebuttal making the rounds.

In his short video, McClellan points out something most pew‑sitters never hear: the word “pastors” shows up exactly once in the New Testament as an office title and the verse in question says nothing about gender.

He also notes that the loudest “women be silent” passages are heavily disputed and that Paul himself mentions women doing all kinds of things the SBC now insists they must never do.

In other words, the Bible isn’t forcing the SBC to sideline women; the SBC is choosing that reading of the Bible.

“We Just Believe the Bible” (Sure, Jan)

That, for me, is the interesting part. I grew up being told, “We just believe what the Bible says.” But what the SBC is doing here isn’t just “believing what the Bible says.” It’s deciding which verses get to be universal, timeless doctrine and which ones get shoved into the “that was cultural” drawer.

It’s interpretation. It’s negotiation. It’s spin. And their spin, over and over again, conveniently keeps men in charge and women in support roles.

At some point, you have to stop pretending this is just about “faithfulness to Scripture” and admit you’re looking at a pattern.

If a denomination consistently promotes men to the pulpit and sidelines women with teaching gifts; expels churches that let women preach but finds endless ways to “work with” abusive men; and wraps male authority in soft words like “complementarianism” while hard‑coding it into policy, then we’re not talking about a random theological quirk.

We’re talking about a system.

Call It What It Is: Patriarchy and Misogyny

That system has a name. We usually call it patriarchy. When that system persistently punishes women for stepping outside their assigned roles and rewards men for staying on top, another word fits pretty well: misogyny.

And yes, I know, if you use that word out loud someone will immediately clutch their pearls and say, “But we love women! We’re just being biblical!” I believed that for a long time. I sincerely thought that limiting women’s roles was an unfortunate side effect of a noble commitment to Scripture.

But eventually you have to pay more attention to the outcomes than the press releases. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s not a misunderstood eagle with “different but equal” wings. It’s a duck.

The Quiet Part Out Loud

The SBC can insist, as often and as loudly as it wants, that this is about doctrinal purity and biblical fidelity.

But when you zoom out, the pattern is painfully clear: when there’s a conflict between protecting women and protecting male authority, male authority wins. Every. Single. Time.

You don’t have to be a scholar to recognize what that is. You just have to be honest.

So yes, I’m still weirdly fascinated by Baptists. I watch these debates with the morbid curiosity of someone who’s escaped a maze and then sits on the hilltop watching others argue about whether the walls are God‑ordained.

Dan McClellan’s video was refreshing not because he said something totally new, but because he said the quiet part out loud: the Bible is not making the SBC do this. They are choosing it.

And once we admit it’s a choice, we have to admit something else: they could choose differently. They could recognize the women already doing the work of pastoring and call it what it is.

They could stop using “biblical” as a fig leaf for a system that structurally distrusts women’s authority. They could finally decide that maybe, just maybe, the Holy Spirit is not limited by a Y chromosome.

Until then, I’ll be here, watching from the sidelines like the world’s most exasperated ex, shaking my head and saying, “You know, if it walks like misogyny and talks like misogyny…”

Grace and grit to you! —LK