I live at the intersection of Hagar and Dinah, trying to follow Jesus. You understand?
Especially on days like today. The SBC Report came out recently and reiterated what every abuse survivor had already told us: the convention is rotten by intention. I am giving myself time and gentleness to get through the whole report, because it’s a lot to stomach.
It’s hard to stomach because an organization that purports to follow Christ neglected, slandered, and further victimized men, women, and children while faithfully protecting abusers, as a matter of policy. Hard to stomach because they are the veritable wolves in sheep’s clothing.
It’s also hard to stomach because before this report, before this year, this decade, this century, the organization was already rotten to the core. Black enslaved bodies testified to this. Black and white Christian abolitionists bore witness to this. The good news of the gospel stood in opposition to the Southern Baptist Convention from its diabolical beginning. These witnesses should have been believed.
Some survivors are deemed more valuable. Others bear not only the scars of abuse, but the wounds of a world that profits from their pain and silence. Neither can hope to see justice in a society that finds it more convenient to keep them silent and desolate.
Dinah. Hagar.
Both were robbed of agency, of consent. Both were violated. Both never experienced apology, repair, restitution.
However, Dinah, the daughter of a patriarch, was deemed important enough to be labeled as someone who had been harmed. Simeon and Levi acknowledged her violation with their rage (though I think they were just as concerned with vengeful gain). Her father Jacob knew that his daughter was a victim but wanted to exploit her violation to acquire more land and influence.
Hagar, an Egyptian slave, was not dignified with the status of victim. If it weren’t for God breaking through, talking to and being named by Hagar, one might think that God cared as little for her as His chosen people had. One could think that some bodies are naturally more valuable than others, because there it is implied in God’s Word. Even now, so many of us make more of Hagar’s disrespect of Sarai than Sarai’s abuse and usury of Hagar. We put God’s name on the abuse because, after all, God sent Hagar back. Hagar is casually considered disposable because Isaac was the son of the promise.
Frankly, I cannot get over the fact that the Lord sent Hagar back to her abusers. I won’t ever be okay with that. My only solace (and it’s not really solace as much as the fellowship of suffering) is that Jesus was also innocent and endured abuse and humiliation at the hands of God’s people.
I despise Jacob’s silence after Dinah’s rape, because it is violence; he valued his own regard and standing and power over the flourishing of his daughter. Silence became his trickster’s tool, devouring the hope of his victimized daughter just to keep up appearances.
I despise the intentional abusiveness of Sarai and Abraham’s assaulting of Hagar. Sarai knew what it was to be thrust upon a man against her will—Abraham gave her over to kings twice—and yet she could not conjure an ounce of compassion on Hagar (who, for all we know, was given as restitution by pharaoh once he discovered that Sarai was Abraham’s wife and he had been deceived). Abraham was willing to violate Hagar to appease his wife, and they both somehow thought that God would bless it.
These passages in Genesis are not a prescription for righteousness but flaming beacons of warning—watch and pray, because God’s people—yes, God’s people—can be silent, even abusive, in the face of self-interest.
When a person ignores the violations of others in order to rest in the comfort of white supremacy, know that that person is sacrificing their children to Molech even as they utter Jesus’ name, succumbing to the devil’s lure of unearned and godless kingdoms. We’ve read about the devil parading palaces and promises of power to a fasting Jesus in the wilderness. Jesus held fast onto the scriptures, but still, he was tempted. The SBC was led to a high place a long time ago, with promises of authority and splendor. The day they defended slavery, they chose what they would worship. Unfortunately, too many followers of Jesus have, over generations, decided that this devilish deal was a choice they were willing to overlook.
From the very beginning, the SBC was founded in the explicit harm, abuse, and subjugation of Black people. They have been abusive. But because the bodies that were abused were not grievable in the landscape of white supremacist Christianity in the U.S., people continued to flow through the doors, offering their money, time, and their children. There are so many Sarais in the SBC; white women who, to gain a modicum of power and privilege, will benefit from racism, denigrate the witness of survivors, and put other white women and girls in harm’s way. There are so many Abrams who mistake the material fortune of the SBC with God’s blessing, who contort the shepherding of people into the exploitation and violation of bodies; who cling to a whites-only gospel that’s bad news for the unassimilated.
I firmly believe that if, over 100 years ago, the Black bodies of this country were believed by people who confess Jesus as Lord, there would be no SBC report to read today. So many more men, women, and children would be safe. Let the reader understand: an abused Hagar in one era, unchecked, leads to an abused Dinah generations later.