It Wasn't Me.

It was them.

David Roberts - A Country Church - B1977.14.5949 - Yale Center for British Art (public domain)

I have shared bits and pieces of my story here and there (as I did here), but the events at the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention over this past week have compelled me to put down in words in one place, for the record, what happened to me.

I will be brief.

I was recruited by an SBC seminary to leave the academic position I’d had for 20 years to come to teach there. I was recruited not only on the basis of my academic credentials but also on the basis of my voice in the public square and in SBC life, a presence marked for years by fierce opposition to Donald Trump, reforms for women, advocacy for survivors of sexual abuse, promotion of racial justice, and decadeslong commitment to the “social issues” central to contemporary Southern Baptist life and culture: abortion and traditional marriage.

This is who I was. This was who they said they wanted.

I didn’t change.

Before I agreed to disrupt my and my husband’s life and our retirement plans to take this new position, my husband and I together warned the institution’s leaders over and over that because I was constantly being attacked by the fundamentalist right within the SBC that they would be attacked for bringing me on. We told them. We warned them.

They said it would be fine. They said they’d have my back. They even laughed at those factions and insisted that those factions had no real power or weight in the SBC.

But they did. They do.

Less than three years later, out of nowhere, I received an email asking me to seek employment elsewhere. I had been tenured (or “elected” in SBC parlance), and this request was not made by the board that elected me. It was, rather, a request that went around the formal process, which was not something I clearly understood at first.

I say, “out of nowhere,” but I had a few months before been asked to take down a tweet expressing agreement with supporting women and the babies they didn’t abort with tax dollars. I had also been asked some months before to write a public statement explaining how I consider myself pro-life and not vote for Trump. I had been told that some other leaders in the SBC were sensitive about some of my not-so-veiled public criticisms of their flip-flops on certain issues.

I hadn’t changed. Actually, no. I had changed a little. I had silenced myself a bit. I did try to be a team player, and to look more toward the long term than the hot take. I had tried to get along while continuing to be myself and being the same person that they had recruited.

But they changed.

Eventually, after receiving that email, I learned that I had displeased a longtime donor. He simply didn’t like me. I asked what he didn’t like and was told they didn’t know. I asked if the donor would meet with me to tell me and was told he wouldn’t.

Ultimately, I was offered the chance to keep my job—if I got off social media.

In other words, if I would be quiet.

I declined the offer.

I knew I had been wronged, but part of me thought that sometimes, it’s just not a good fit. (Actually, that’s what I was told.) Maybe it was true. Maybe it was me.

But if the decisions made by the SBC leaders and messengers this week showed me anything, it’s this: it wasn’t me.

It was them.

I’m not the only one who will never be a good fit for a place like that. The numbers of us are growing by leaps and bounds.

The SBC has shown who it is—over and over. I finally believe them.