Jezebel rant

Someone sent me this video excerpt of Southern Baptist uber-pastor Steve Gaines preaching about Jezebel just a couple weeks ago.

“Jezebel.” It’s a name some Baptist pastors like to fling at women who don’t keep quiet when they’re told. It's been flung at me a few times.

“Jezebel.” She was thrown out a window, trampled by horses, left for dead, and devoured by dogs.

So you know they don’t mean you well when they call you a “Jezebel.”

But even though I knew that being called a “Jezebel” wasn’t a compliment, this video sheds a whole new light. Gee whiz, according to pastor Gaines, you’d think “Jezebel” women are responsible for every bit of e-e-e-e-e-e-e-vil in the world.

It’s no wonder so many Baptist men can get away with so much and are held so unaccountable. They blame everything bad on “Jezebel” women and so they never bother to take a good look at themselves.

In fact, what makes this version of the “Jezebel rant” so ludicrous is that it’s being delivered by a man who knowingly kept quiet about an admitted child molester on his ministerial staff. Furthermore, he even allowed the child-molesting-minister to serve as a counselor for congregants who said they had been molested in childhood. So, a known child-molesting-minister was able to sit in a church office and feed off asking molested individuals for details about exactly what happened.

Sick, huh?

Yet, here’s this man, Steve Gaines, masquerading as a voice of moral authority and ranting about “Jezebel,” when he himself didn’t even have enough moral sense to remove a known child molester from ministry.

To quote the former Southern Baptist pastor Robert G. Lee, who first delivered the “Jezebel rant” years ago . . . “What a ridiculous picture.”

Be sure you don’t miss the part toward the end where pastor Gaines manages to impugn all of Southern California, despite the countless good, decent, hard-working people who live there. Rather than ranting about the “moral quagmire of Southern California,” Gaines would do better to take a good look at the moral quagmire of his own mega-church, Bellevue Baptist in Memphis. It’s a church in which at least 10 other church leaders and staff also knew about the child molesting minister, but they followed the example of their morally-blind pastor and kept quiet.

The creepiest part of Gaines’ “Jezebel rant” is the part at the very end when you hear the sound of people applauding. Why are those people of Bellevue still placing themselves under the claimed pastoral authority of a man so obviously lacking in moral authority?

And why are those people of Bellevue so utterly oblivious to the message their church sends by continuing to retain Steve Gaines as senior pastor?

It’s a message that shouts loud and clear: “Clergy sex abuse cover-up? No big deal.”

Without further ado . . . here is Southern Baptist pastor Steve Gaines performing the “Jezebel rant.” Have a laugh, if you can.