If you follow the news on religion and homosexuality, then you’ll remember Matt Bass from last year. He was kicked out of Baylor’s seminary for being gay. He made the talk show rounds before transferring to Emory’s seminary.
But now there’s a new twist. Of sorts.
The lawsuit charges Bass with masquerading as various members of the Baylor community.
According to the Baylor student newspaper, The Lariat, about 10 Yahoo! e-mail addresses were created under the names of Baylor faculty and their family members, including Paul Powell, dean of Truett Seminary; Steve Graves, dean for University Ministries; and President Robert Sloan’s wife, Sue Sloan.
In one e-mail, Bass allegedly pretended to be an administrator’s child reporting sexual abuse.
In others, he allegedly sent pornography, described sexual acts involving Jesus, used racial epithets and reported the death of someone who had survived a recent stroke, according to the suit.
Bass is also charged with telling one of Baylor’s accrediting agencies that the university’s Truett Seminary was embroiled in a cheating scandal.
That’s not what my mother-the-daycare-manager would call “playing nice with others.” Without even asking her I feel confident saying that this would lead to flunking the important “be nice to others” section in pre-school.
At lunch a few of us talked over the case. The most insightful comments came from our clinical ethicist, who has been studying narcissism and medical error.
The post-seminarians in the bunch talked about the rage we’ve seen when someone is rejected by the Church. Our clinical ethicist said it sounded a lot like an idealization transference, a psychodynamic where the subject places someone/something on a pedestal in exchange for some tit-for-tat recognition of the subject’s goodness. It’s a case of, “If you’re good, then I must really be good too.” When the dynamic collapses, rage is a frequent response.
Frequent MyIrony readers will suspect that this hits close to home for me. I left the ordination track for related reasons—the Church just wouldn’t or couldn’t put its money where its mouth was, but it expected me to act like nothing was wrong (and even be grateful) when it hurt me or my friends to cover its tracks.
In seminary we liked to remind each other from time to time that the ministry is the perfect job for codependents (it was the 90s, so this was considered deep). But now I think we were being too easy on each other. Idealization transference sounds closer to the mark. It certainly describes my rage and desperation when I left.
In that year or so after I left, if I had run into a certain bishop or minister or church bureaucrat in a dark alley somewhere, I just might have committed real world versions of the virtual crimes Matt Bass is alleged to have committed. I probably said as much after a beer or two too many. And I know I caused as much trouble as I could on my way out, in my own, officialdom-friendly way.
What Baylor did to Matt Bass is sinful, not in a personal sort of way but in a systemic sort of way. But you can’t be mad at a system. Anger doesn’t do abstractions. And the biblical prophets, who after all are the anchors of social justice, didn’t speak out against systems so much as individuals participating in those systems. They didn’t cry out about greedy capitalism, they railed against those who would sell someone for a new pair of shoes.
By directing his anger at specific persons, Bass put himself in good company. “For the sake of the system” covers a wealth of sinners, and for the sake of all of us those sinners need called out.
But the prophets didn’t make up false charges. And that was there Bass started to go wrong. You can’t play the prophet (as Bass did on the talk show circuit) and then play vigilante. You have to turn the other cheek, thereby heaping coals on their head. Because if you don’t, you risk letting your wrath turn you into the worse sinner. And I’m afraid that might be just what Matt Bass has done.
