Southern Baptist Bart Barber 60 Minutes

Prominent Christian Leader Grilled on 60 Minutes: Abortion, LGBTQ & Sexual Abuse

13 October 2022

3.3 MINS

Bart Barber, the US Southern Baptist Convention president, has been grilled in a recent interview by 60 Minutes host Anderson Cooper. The conversation highlights the increasing dissonance between the Christian worldview and the culture around us.

Bart Barber, the recently elected president of the influential Southern Baptist Convention, is a small-town Texas church pastor. According to the Washington Post, he is the first SBC president in nearly twenty years who does not come from an urban or suburban megachurch.

As with all evangelical Christians — particularly Southern Baptists — Barber is a “staunch conservative” (to quote NBCDFW’s coverage). He questions and opposes the supposed “right” to kill one’s children when it is not convenient to raise them, supports the Biblical understanding of marriage, and even holds to an unpopular complementarian view of distinct gender roles in the church (a position not unusual for Southern Baptists, whose Faith & Message states: “While both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.”).

But recently, Barber has been thrust into the national spotlight as the leader of a Christian denomination trying to grapple with serious (and, in many cases, confirmed) accusations of child sexual abuse. In a typical term, running the 13-million-member SBC would be a high-pressure job; however, in light of the sexual abuse scandals currently engulfing it and the increasingly polarised American cultural climate, Barber’s job is all the more difficult.

During a recent 60 Minutes interview with Anderson Cooper, Barber did not seek to minimise the significance of the denomination’s historic mishandling of child sexual abuse accusations.

When Cooper asked him about claims that the Convention Executive Committee had “ignored” accusations, Barber doubled down:

“We didn’t just ignore them. Sometimes we impugned in their motives, sometimes we attacked them. The reason why I’m president of the Southern Baptist Convention is because our churches do not agree with that and have taken action to correct those things.”

 

The conversation ranged far beyond issues of historic sexual abuse, with Cooper asking Barber about issues from politics and his voting history to abortion and the LGBTQ movement.

When asked about his position on life and abortion, Barber responded clearly:

“Our interest with abortion is not to police everybody’s sex life. Our interest with abortion is that we believe that’s a human person who deserves to live.”

He even said that the pro-life issue was a significant part of the reason he voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 election.

Cooper pushed Barber on the abortion point, asking how about he would handle the recent case of a ten-year-old rape victim falling pregnant. Barber responded:

“I don’t want that to sound like I don’t have tremendous compassion for her and her circumstance. I wish we could put an end to 10-year-olds being raped. I’m trying to work against child sexual abuse because I think that’s atrocious.”

When Cooper pressed him, saying, “But you don’t see forcing a 10-year-old child to go to term with a baby from rape as abuse of a child?”, Barber responded, “I see it as horrible. I see it as preferable to killing someone else.”

When asked for his stance on homosexual marriage and whether he believed that gay people “should be converted out of being gay,” Barber’s response was similarly clear, compassionate and Biblical.

“We’re committed to the idea of gender as a gift from God. We’re committed to the idea that men and women ought to be united with one another in marriage… I believe sinners should be converted out of being sinners, and that applies to all of us.”

He also affirmed that a lifestyle of sinful practices, such as homosexuality, was inconsistent with Christian behaviour.

Senior SBC leaders voiced their support for Barber after the interview was released.

“Not only did Dr Barber display his heart to serve our churches and his commitment to Baptist principles, he gave millions the opportunity to hear about the heart of Jesus,” said Brent Leatherwood, the president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission.

Intermin president and CEO of the SBC Executive Committee, Willie McLaurin agreed:

“I was thankful that President Barber had the opportunity to represent Southern Baptist on this global platform. His passion, conviction and authenticity were on display for the world to see.”

The questions that Anderson Cooper asked Barber — and the manner in which he asked them — illustrate just how far mainstream (or, perhaps, elite) American culture has drifted from its historical Judeo-Christian cultural consensus.

As this interview highlights, today, Christians who hold to orthodox tenets of Biblical morality are treated as something of a novelty — at best, out of step with cultural orthodoxy and, at worst, outright harmful. Holding to ideals of biologically-grounded marriage and gender, and the dignity of human life is now a culturally rebellious exercise.

Thankfully, Barber was prepared to lovingly, but uncompromisingly, stand on his Biblical convictions. And he did so with both clarity and charity.

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4 Comments

  1. Edith May Hodge 14 October 2022 at 8:29 am - Reply

    At least this man faced the hard questions and stood firm on his convictions unlike the Pastor in Australia interviewed on Sunrise, who could not stand up for the issues but skirted apologetically around them trying to be accepted. The interviewer wiped the floor with him .Compromise does not work

    • Kaylene Emery 14 October 2022 at 12:02 pm - Reply

      Such an important point you have made Edith . May God bless you and those you love for making it.

  2. David Wade Chambers 22 October 2022 at 10:28 am - Reply

    Reading this report closely made me sick to my stomach. The position maintained both by the author and the
    sbc president *and the 2 commentors) seems to me reprehensible in the extreme. They make it clear that in their view it is better that a sexually abused ten year old rape victim be subjected to further torture including physical and emotional abuse (of at least nine months if not LIFE) as preferable to the abortion of a tiny, not yet human, creature who has never taken a breath!, never spoken a word!, never opened its eyes!, never had hopes and dreams and plans!. May God forgive the lot of you who believe and practice this sort of unChristian, unkind and heartless cruelty. .

    • Rob 25 October 2022 at 8:51 pm - Reply

      Hi David. As evil as the circumstances are that surround the conception of this new life, it doesn’t take away from the fact that new life is still a miracle of God’s creation. Unfortunately, people everywhere must live with the scars and consequences of other people’s actions, but the murder of a new life that God loves, does not fix the problem, it just creates another one. Two wrongs do not make a right! There are many women who are living in agony over guilt because of abortion, a decision they cannot reverse.

      As far as that dear 10-year-old girl goes, she needs love and support to be able to bring her child up and to love and care for him or her as best as she can, or to offer the child up to adoption so that another loving family can do what maybe she couldn’t.

      Finally, what would you say if given the opportunity to speak to the person who you say should have been aborted, once they had grown up, got married, had their own family, (even if that life may have had some difficulties) would you be able to look that person in the eye and say, “Your mother should have killed you because that was the ‘morally’ correct thing to do.”?

      I pray God will change your heart.

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