Paige Patterson and the “black girl”

In a recently leaked letter to the leadership of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, Russell Moore letter he wrote:

Another SBC leader used constant pressure against me in protest of our hiring of Dan Darling and Trillia Newbell, in 2013. At the time, this was, he said, because they did not have adequate Southern Baptist backgrounds. When I answered his concerns to his face, he said, “I was really just concerned about that black girl, whether she’s an egalitarian.” When I asked what possibly could lead him to think that a woman who has written complementarian articles for complementarian websites was an “egalitarian,” he responded: “A lot of those black girls are.” This same leader also let me have it when I said that white Christians should join our black Christian brothers and sisters in lamenting when young black men are shot, and that the moments of Ferguson and Eric Garner and the Emmanuel AME Church murders should motivate the church to address these questions with the gospel embodied in reconciled churches bearing one another’s burdens, that only those with guns would prevent black people from burning down all of our cities.

Get up to speed on this story here and here.

Here is Trillia Newbell yesterday:

Bob Smietana of Religion News Service is reporting that the unnamed “SBC leader” is Paige Patterson. Why doesn’t this news surprise me?

Here is a taste of Smietana’s piece:

Two Southern Baptist sources have confirmed with RNS the SBC leader who made the comment about Newbell.

“It was Paige Patterson,” Phillip Bethancourt, the pastor of Central Church in College Station, Texas, and former vice president of the ERLC, told RNS. Bethancourt said he and other staffers heard about the comments critical of Newbell and Dan Darling, another former ERLC staffer, right after Moore spoke with Patterson. Patterson, a longtime Baptist leader, and former SBC president, was fired as president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in 2018 for mishandling allegations of sexual abuse.

Patterson denied making the comments in a phone interview with RNS and said he had never heard of Newbell. 

“I don’t know who the girl is,” he said.  

He also said that Moore’s was “obviously wrong.” 

Read the rest here. It also doesn’t surprise me that Patterson has no idea who Newbell is.

Here is what people are saying:

Albert Mohler is still campaigning. Not only is this tweet a “personal” word, it is a “VERY personal word.” This reminds me of those sitcom teasers that used to go something like this: “Tune in Tuesday night on NBC for very special episode of Blossom….”

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