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Baptists have always drank alcohol, even if they said they don’t. Remember the jokes- ‘Baptists? So rude, they won’t even say hi to you in the liquor store’ and ‘How do you keep a Baptist from drinking all your beer? Bring a second Baptist.’ Or even ‘Baptist church? Check the deacon’s office for beer.’
Sexual misconduct allegations of that sort aren't terribly unusual among baptists(or low church Protestantism generally), so it doesn’t surprise me, but even fairly liberal ones near me at least theoretically ban cohabitation. On the other hand it does seem like preacher’s wives have gone from Mrs pastor to copastor. Definitely have the impression that, liberalizing(slowly) though they might be, baptists are holding out dramatically better than nondenominationals.
I'm not familiar with those jokes. But my ultimate familial background is also in the holiness movement where not just the teaching but the strict expectation of avoiding alcohol was a point of repeated emphasis and "serious" sin results in loss of salvation -- often with the expectation of a public confession of sin as part of an altar call (the preferred term is "backsliding"). I reckon this background made me especially predisposed to the concepts of infused righteousness and sacramental confession, even if Wesleyan holiness tradition has a very different model of what "synergistic justification" looks like (and therefore finds no place for the veneration of saints as heroic). A famous quote from the Holiness movement is this, "The minimum of salvation is salvation from sinning. The maximum is salvation from pollution—the inclination to sin"; which is eerily Tridentine. So I suppose there's a little projection of my own that I'm doing, where I assume the historically strict behavior of my holiness family members is true of abstentionist Protestant movements more generally.
The sexual misconduct allegations had nothing to do with abuse of power or his work in the Baptist church, but were more informal, and are probably what I'd put in the bucket of "overreaction to a misunderstanding." If the exact terms of the accusations were discussed on the motte, they'd probably be laughed at. My larger point is simply to illustrate that this friend is... kind of a player, someone who seems very sociosexual, to the point where excessive sexuality seems to surround him. And to be fair, he does have bedroom eyes.
Maybe they’re Catholic jokes.
We also tell the joke ‘baptists only fornicate lying down so peeping toms don’t mistake them for dancing’. Applied holiness standards have been selective for a while.
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