Sheri Klouda says she was fired from a Southern Baptist seminary because she’s not a man
The numbers tell a success story.
Over the last three decades, the percentage of female faculty members at seminaries has more than tripled. In 1977 only 6 percent of professors were women, according to the Association of Theological Schools. Last year it was 22 percent. What was once unusual has become increasingly commonplace.
But that’s not true everywhere. At Southern Baptist seminaries, according to a number of sources, women have been pushed out of tenured and tenure-track positions. This is part of what some Southern Baptists term a “redirection” of the denomination. Critics call it a purge.
With that in mind, it is perhaps surprising that Sheri Klouda got a job in the first place. In 2002, after finishing her Ph.D. at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, in Fort Worth, Tex., she was hired there as an assistant professor of Old Testament languages. She was an accomplished scholar of Biblical Hebrew and exegesis and her teaching evaluations were excellent. Plus, as a graduate of the seminary, she was already part of the family. Or so she thought.
Then, last year, she was fired. News of her dismissal rippled through the Southern Baptist world and beyond, making her a symbol to some observers of what is wrong with the denomination.
Of course, Ms. Klouda is not a symbol. She is a person. What’s more, she is a person whose life was upended. And not because of anything she said or did, not because she didn’t work hard or perform well. Sheri Klouda was fired, according to a lawsuit she has filed against the seminary, for one reason and one reason only: She is not a man.
Fear and Relief
In June 2003, soon after his election as the eighth president of Southwestern Baptist, Paige Patterson was interviewed by the Baptist Standard, a Texas newspaper. In the interview, he was asked whether women would be allowed to teach in the seminary’s School of Theology. The issue of whether women should teach men remains controversial among Southern Baptists, some of whom contend that the Bible forbids it. “I believe there are ample numbers of men out there,” he replied. “I will build the theology faculty around them.”
Those words frightened Sheri Klouda. She was just settling in as a professor at the seminary when Mr. Patterson took the helm. In fact, at the time the interview was published, she was closing on a house she had bought to be closer to work.
When she met with the new president a couple of months later, she asked about his remarks.
Mr. Patterson is a celebrity of sorts among Southern Baptists, a third-generation preacher who has pushed the denomination in a more conservative direction. A plump, ruddy-cheeked man, he is known for his hardline views and his love of hunting. His spacious office is lined with the stuffed-and-mounted trophies from his African safaris. Photographs on Southwestern’s Web site show Mr. Patterson posing next to the bodies of a lion, a leopard, and a zebra.
Smiling, the president reassured her. “He told me I didn’t have anything to worry about,” Ms. Klouda says. “He told me that gender wasn’t an issue unless I made it an issue. He said that. Word for word.”
She was not entirely sure what he meant — How would she make gender an issue? — but she left his office feeling relieved. (Mr. Patterson declined to be interviewed for this story.) The rest of the academic year went “exceptionally well,” she says. Her classes were popular, and she was writing a lot. Plus, she had a regular paycheck and medical benefits. That was especially important because her husband, a truck driver, suffers from severe heart problems and can work only sporadically.
Bottom line, Ms. Klouda was no longer concerned about her job. “He told me everything was fine,” she says. “And I believed him.”
A Reversal
Then, in the summer of 2004, she was called into an administrator’s office and told that the president would not recommend her for tenure. That meant she would not even come up for review by her colleagues. No warning. No discussion. Just like that.
The administrator, whom Ms. Klouda declines to name, told her there had been a change in philosophy. Mr. Patterson believed that only men should teach in the School of Theology.
Ms. Klouda did not try to argue theologically. She did not point out that this directly contradicted what the president had told her less than a year before. Nor did she ask why an underling, rather than the president, had delivered the news.
Instead she searched for a compromise. She was given vague assurances that other options — ones outside the School of Theology — would be explored. In the meantime, she held her tongue. A few of her colleagues found out about the decision, she says, but it was far from common knowledge. She hoped a quiet solution could be reached.
She continued teaching. Not just for a few weeks or months, but for two years. Which raises several questions, including: If there really had been a change in policy — and if the Bible truly forbids women from teaching men theology — then why was Ms. Klouda still in the classroom? If women should not prepare pastors for the ministry, what about those pastors Ms. Klouda helped prepare? Were they ill served by her teaching? Or could it be that good Hebrew scholars, male or female, are hard to find?
Then, last spring, she was told that her contract would be over at the end of 2006. The talk of other positions had evaporated, as had her hopes for remaining at Southwestern.
Ms. Klouda made an appointment to speak with President Patterson. Previously his wishes had been passed down through subordinates. This time she went straight to the top.
The president sat behind his desk, she recalls, surrounded by the animals he had killed, as Ms. Klouda pled her case. She talked about the house she had bought, how her daughter was finishing high school. She told him about her husband’s worsening health (he had recently had heart-bypass surgery). If they lost their insurance, she told him, they would not be able to afford his medication, which costs several hundred dollars a month.
In short, Ms. Klouda begged for her job.
The president, she says, was unmoved. She left his office knowing that her career at Southwestern was over.
Chapter and Verse
For Christians, the question of whether women can teach men often comes down to a single Bible verse: 1 Timothy 2:12. The King James Version translates this way: “But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.”
The verse is taken by some to mean that women should never, in any circumstances, instruct men. Others argue that the author was stating a personal preference, not passing along a heavenly dictate (the pronoun “I” argues for that reading).
Certain passages in the New Testament seem to contradict the more restrictive reading of the verse. In the book of Acts, a woman, Priscilla, is said to help explain the ways of God. Elsewhere, passages refer to women prophesying. In addition, Jesus’ own treatment of women appears to argue for equality in God’s eyes.
Even so, the role women should play in the church has long been a fraught topic for Roman Catholics and Protestants alike.
The Battle Over Women
In 2000 the Southern Baptist Convention adopted a new statement of belief that seems to diminish that role. It says that while both men and women are “gifted for service in the church,” the role of pastor is “limited to men as qualified by Scripture.” While this is far from a novel idea, making it part of the convention’s official statement of belief was a major step. At the time, the president of the convention was Paige Patterson.But does that rule prohibit women in the nation’s six Southern Baptist seminaries from teaching men?
Wade Burleson doesn’t think so. Mr. Burleson is the pastor of a Southern Baptist church in Oklahoma and serves on a leadership board in the convention. He is also the blogger who broke the story of Ms. Klouda’s dismissal.
Mr. Burleson has made the case something of a personal crusade, even showing up unannounced at Southwestern to confront the president. (Mr. Patterson has consistently declined to see him.) “The Hebrew professorship at Southwestern is a plum job,” Mr. Burleson says. “I know the students liked her. She is considered one of the best Hebrew scholars our convention has produced.”
On the issue of women serving as pastors, Mr. Burleson says he personally does not believe they should (though he thinks that decision should be left up to individual congregations). But that, he says, has nothing to do with women teaching in seminaries. “Where do you draw the line? What about business schools? What about the president of the United States?” he says. “Now they’re saying faculty members. If someone doesn’t stand up, then women will only be able to bear children and be homemakers.”
What happened to Sheri Klouda does not surprise Bill J. Leonard, who was a professor at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, in Louisville, Ky., until 1992. He left at the height of what he calls “the purges,” when Southern Baptist seminaries were insisting that faculty members sign statements of belief.
“You had to believe that Adam and Eve were real people and that there was a talking snake in the garden,” he says. “It became a litmus test.”
Conflicts followed over whether homosexuals could join congregations and, finally, over whether women could be ordained for the ministry. “Some people were fired. Some people were not given tenure,” he says. “Some people just realized these were places they would not wish to stay.”
Mr. Leonard, who is now a professor of church history and dean of the Divinity School at Wake Forest University, says Ms. Klouda did not stand a chance. “The landscape is littered with the bones of faculty members,” he says.
Southern Baptists remain divided over the role of women, according to Julie Ingersoll, author of Evangelical Christian Women: War Stories in the Gender Battles. Ms. Ingersoll, an associate professor of religious studies at the University of North Florida, begins her book with an account of a female faculty member at a conservative seminary who was so distressed about gender restrictions that she considered suicide.
In this internecine battle among Southern Baptists, she says, “attitudes toward women have become something of a badge that says which side of the battle you’re on.”
The question of whether women should teach in seminaries is especially contested. “There are passages in the New Testament that say women should be silent, and there are passages that talk about women prophesying,” says Ms. Ingersoll. “So which is it?”
The Christian Thing
Southwestern officials declined multiple requests for comment on Ms. Klouda’s case, as did several faculty members. Calvin Pearson, assistant dean for preaching and pastoral studies, said that professors had been asked by the administration not to comment on the case because of the lawsuit. A spokesman for the seminary said he did not know if there was a ban on women teaching theology and that questions should be directed to Van McClain, chairman of the Board of Trustees. Mr. McClain also declined to comment.
The seminary did, however, issue a statement saying that its policy is “to abide strictly by our confessional commitment and to hire the best possible person for each faculty position in keeping with the needs of the institution.”
The only woman listed as a theology professor is Mr. Patterson’s wife, Dorothy. But her position is within the women’s-studies program, not the School of Theology, according to the seminary’s Web site.
While Southwestern administrators are tight-lipped, Russell D. Moore, dean of the School of Theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, in Kentucky, did grant an interview. Mr. Moore says that professors must be “models of pastoral leadership.” Because women can’t be pastors, that isn’t possible, he explains.
“There could certainly be women teaching outside the School of Theology,” he says, “such as in the School of Music.”
A review of the Web sites of all six Southern Baptist seminaries shows no women listed among faculty members teaching in schools of theology.
Whether Ms. Klouda’s dismissal will create an accreditation issue for Southwestern remains to be seen. Daniel O. Aleshire, executive director of the Association of Theological Schools, which accredits Southwestern, says that banning women for theological reasons is not a problem in itself. However, he adds, “making it up as you go along would be viewed as a violation of a lot of the standards of academic life, if that’s what happened here.”
Ms. Klouda has recently accepted a position at Taylor University, an interdenominational Christian institution in Indiana. She emphasizes that while she is grateful to her new institution, the move has meant a sharp cut in pay and the resetting of her tenure clock. “I’m pretty much starting over,” she says.
There have also been personal difficulties. Her husband has not been able to find much work in Indiana, and they still have not sold their house in Texas. That is part of what prompted her, reluctantly, to file a lawsuit against Southwestern. It is not a fight she relishes, but one she feels obliged to take on. “I’m not angry. I’m not mad. I just want a response,” she says. “This suit is about righting a wrong.”
It is also about sending a message to Mr. Patterson. “No one wants to challenge him because they’re afraid of what he can do to them,” she says. “It seems like he can do whatever he chooses, even if it’s unethical — even if it’s not the Christian thing to do.”
http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Volume 53, Issue 32, Page A10