FORT WORTH, Texas (ABP) — The dismissal of a female Hebrew professor by Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary has triggered accusations of gender discrimination and a suffocating interpretation of Scripture.
The outcry involves Sheri Klouda, who taught Hebrew in the seminary's School of Theology, and seminary president Paige Patterson.
Patterson, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, holds to a strict interpretation of biblical texts he believes mean women shouldn't teach men, in church or seminary.
Wade Burleson, a Baptist blogger and former Southwestern student, denounced Klouda's dismissal in a Jan. 17 essay that prompted news reports in the Dallas Morning News and Religion News Service.
Klouda told the Morning News she doesn't think it was right for Southwestern to hire her for a position where she “in good faith assumed that I was working toward tenure, and then suddenly remove me without any cause other than gender.”
According to reports, Klouda was hired in 2002 to a tenure-track position at the Fort Worth, Texas, school. Patterson replaced then-president Ken Hemphill in 2003 and reportedly assured faculty members that fall they would not lose their jobs, regardless of gender.
But in 2004, Klouda was allegedly told she would not get tenure at the school and should look for another job. Then, in the fall of 2006, Patterson decided not to assign Klouda teaching responsibilities and sought to terminate her contract in December of 2006, Burleson wrote.
Neither Klouda nor seminary representatives responded to requests for comment. Van McClain, chair of the seminary's board of trustees, told Religion News Service Burleson's account was “filled with inaccuracies” but later declined to identify any.
The issue at stake, Burleson asserted in his post, was the fact that Klouda was dismissed because of her gender.
“It cannot be argued that the institution had religious convictions that a woman cannot teach men — the institution's ultimate authority (the trustees) hired Dr. Klouda,” Burleson said. “It cannot be argued that the institution had religious convictions against a woman being in a position of 'authority' over a man — the institution's ultimate authority hired Dr. Klouda. It can be argued that, in violation of federal law, Dr. Klouda was discriminated against because of gender.”
In a 2004 Baptist Press interview, referenced by Burleson, Patterson said the biblical passage in 1 Timothy that requires submission and silence of women in church is interpreted by “the evangelical world” to mean that a woman cannot serve as a senior pastor.
“It is a question of an assignment from God, in this case that a woman not be involved in a teaching or ruling capacity over men,” he said at the time. Patterson later added that the “highest and noblest calling of God” for women is to be a mother and grandmother, “even though it runs counter to an American culture that drives women to succeed in business and other endeavors.”
Ben Cole, who previously worked for Patterson, has also cried foul at the decision to release Klouda. In a Jan. 20 post on baptistblog.wordpress.com, he said he attended classes with Klouda at Dallas-based Criswell College, where Paterson previously served as president. Her husband has chronic illnesses that require her to generate income for the family, so she “pulled and scraped and fought to get her education so that she could provide for her family,” wrote Cole, pastor of Parkview Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas.
“I suppose she could have tried to get a job as a secretary or a librarian, but this woman has gifts of intellect and scholarship that God intends her to use to their fullest potential,” Cole wrote. “So she got two degrees from Criswell, both with honors. She received top honors at Southwestern Seminary, and she was able to buy a home and teach her students to love the biblical languages she spent years studying. But Paige Patterson thinks it's Sheri Klouda's job to be a homemaker….”
Burleson has written some of the same sentiments as well: “What bothers me is the extraordinarily restrictive views of certain leaders in our convention regarding women. This is not about 'being a pastor' of a church. This is not a [Baptist Faith and Message] issue. This is all about the belief among some that women should not have authority over men, whether it be in the home, the church, a business or society in general.”
Burleson is pastor of Emmanuel Baptist Church in Enid, Okla., and a trustee of the International Mission Board. His blog became well known last year when he used it to speak against an IMB decision not to hire missionaries who speak in tongues.
Klouda told the Morning News that she asked Patterson about the decision not to grant her tenure. “He essentially said that his perspective and understanding in this regard was that in the teaching role in the School of Theology, where we're training pastors, those teachers should also be qualified to be pastors. Therefore, those teachers should be men,” she said.
Klouda, who earned her doctorate at Southwestern, has since joined the faculty of Taylor University in Upland, Ind. She and her husband reportedly have been unable to sell the house they bought near the Fort Worth seminary when they expected to live in Texas for an extended period of time.
Trustee chair McClain told RNS that gender discrimination did not affect Klouda's departure and that she was not dismissed. She simply did not have tenure, he said, and was told she would not receive it.
“The … issue involves the desire of [the seminary] to have only men teaching who are qualified to be pastors or who have been pastors in the disciplines of theology, biblical studies, homiletics and pastoral ministry,” he said. “This is in keeping, of course, with the statement of faith of the [Southern Baptist Convention] that clearly says the pastorate is reserved for men.”
Dorothy Patterson — Paige Patterson's wife — teaches in Southwestern's School of Theology. McClain told the Morning News she teaches classes attended only by women.
McClain told the Morning News that Klouda's hiring was a momentary relaxation of school guidelines and that the seminary had done more than required to help her after her departure, even giving her financial support after her teaching duties had ended.
Although the past treatment of faculty members by some Southern Baptist seminaries has run afoul of the standards of the Association of Theological Schools, which accredits the SBC seminaries, Klouda's firing is not likely to attract ATS scrutiny.
An ATS spokeswoman told Associated Baptist Press that no complaint has been filed in Klouda's case. ATS would not get involved unless a complaint was filed by Klouda, another faculty member, a staff member or student, Nancy Merrill said. Then ATS would allow the seminary to respond before determining if ATS's membership criteria or accreditation standards, or the school's own faculty policies, had been violated.
ATS standards require that faculty hiring at member schools be “attentive to the value of diversity in race, ethnicity and gender,” but they do not specifically prohibit hiring or firing based on gender. Procedures for faculty retention and dismissal must be stated and followed, the guidelines add, but ATS does not stipulate what those procedures should be.
Whether or not Klouda's dismissal was illegal is open to debate.
In a 1981 case involving the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in EEOC v. Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Southwestern refused to file an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission report to determine whether unlawful employment practices were committed at the school.
According to Donald Balasa, executive director and legal counsel for the American Association of Medical Assistants, the seminary contended that compliance with the EEOC request would violate its First Amendment rights.
Southwestern argued that the Constitution's free-exercise clause exempts seminaries from Title VII, the portion of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin.
On the other hand, a 1982 EEOC case determined “although Congress permitted religious organizations to discriminate in favor of members of their faith, religious employers are not immune from liability for discrimination based on race, sex [or] national origin.”
Ultimately, the court partially agreed with that assessment and determined the seminary could not be ordered to provide information to the EEOC about “ministerial” employees. The EEOC, however, was not prohibited from seeing seminary information about “non-ministerial” employees.
“The Southwestern court deemed the seminary to be a ‘wholly sectarian' institution and thus on a par with a church,” Balasa wrote in an essay on the case. “Faculty and ministerial administrators were analogous to pastors and beyond the reach of Title VII. But the Fifth Circuit would not allow the seminary to escape its Title VII obligations vis-à-vis support staff and non-ministerial administrators.”
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