Uncover the truth about the scandal that shook the Texas Baptist community, buried for over a century. (TW: Sexual Abuse)
In 1894 Steen Morris raped Antônia Teixeira. Both had been guests in the house of Baylor University president Rufus Burleson. The assault took place in Burleson’s backyard and was the first of a series of assaults that eventually left the young Baylor student pregnant. Rather than hold the guilty party accountable, Rufus Burleson and other prominent members of the Baptist community in Waco launched a campaign of intimidation, victim-blaming, and cover-up to preserve the virtuous image of their institution.
In Remembering Antônia Teixeira , Mikeal C. Parsons and João B. Chaves painstakingly peel back the layers of concealment that have accumulated over a century of enforced silence about the case.
What People Are Saying
“When Toni Morrison told a story, she opened up a universe. This book does much the same thing: the specific story of Antônia Teixeira describes structures of transnational structures of racial and gendered inequity. This story from the nineteenth century reminds today’s careful readers of the continued persistence of inequity and possibly gives light to a way forward. As the church saying goes, ‘Tell the truth and shame the devil’!”
—Stephen Reid, Baylor University
“Haunting and heartbreaking, this meticulously researched narrative lets us finally see the victim of Baylor’s oldest sex scandal. By revealing the powerful currents of colonialism, racism, and sexism that not only destroyed the life of a young girl but kept her story buried for more than a century, this book forces us to face the reality of structural oppression. It is a must-read.”
—Beth Allison Barr, Baylor University
“This is a powerful and unflinching examination of how religious leaders, institutions, and historians have perpetrated and perpetuated violence against people like Antônia Teixeira. Remembering Antônia Teixeira not only rescues the story of Antônia, her courage, and her fight for justice, but it also provides an in-depth reevaluation of the legacies of two celebrated names in Baptist history, Antônio Teixeira de Albuquerque and Rufus Burleson. João Chaves and Mikeal Parsons have given us an innovative example of how collaborative research on transnational history can be done, and I hope that historians use this book as a model for future efforts.”
—Erika Helgen, Yale Divinity School
Read an Excerpt
Introduction: Power and Transnational Histories
The cultivation of a common memory is important to the identity and functioning of any social group, so the construction, imposition, and protection of memory are crucial to the exercise of power in that group. More broadly, access to institutions of cultural production, such as media outlets, printing presses, universities, and newspapers, help shape what is remembered. This is as true in religious institutions as anywhere else. As the Oxford historian Diarmaid MacCulloch argued in his Gifford Lectures—notably, on the history of Christian silence—the perceived need for evasion and the willful avoidance of truth has, at crucial moments in church history, driven people to remain quiet. To quote his apt coinage, church officials have both “monopolized noise” and “gathered silences of shame and distortion of the truth,” and they have done so for purposes of power.
This disposition can often join forces with more aggressive moves to erase memories that are particularly inconvenient. When effective, such processes both draw from and help maintain structures that benefit directly from the meanings so established, all the more so when they happen out of sight. As the social theorist Steven Lukes puts it, “power is the most effective when least observable”; the most powerful constructions of memory are those that do not feel constructed at all, the ones in which what is remembered does not include that which was intended to be forgotten.
The story told in this book was not supposed to be remembered, and it took place between the worlds of the US South and Brazil. It is the story of Antônia Teixeira, a young immigrant woman who was raped by a powerful man in Waco, Texas, where she had been taken by a Southern Baptist missionary who had met her in Brazil. It is a story that many people in both her worlds tried to forget because of what it threatened to reveal about US foreign missions, Christian universities, and their long entanglements with violence, racism, and xenophobia. Thus Antônia Teixeira’s story is also a story about how powerful men in Texas and Brazil tried to forget her, and how forgetting her long allowed them to construct their image in ways that distorted not only who they really were but also aspects of the institutions they represented: Baylor University, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), and its Foreign Mission Board (FMB). The case of Antônia Teixeira’s rape at Baylor University is important in and of itself but also because it enables us to explore ways in which power was used by key players in major religious institutions to reconstruct memories and suppress inconvenient truths.
Problematic Memories in Southern Baptist History
Historical selectivity has been a common phenomenon in Baptist life across the Southern United States. The particular value of Antônia Teixeira’s story lies in presenting a unique and powerful case study that illustrates how such a disposition could carry across borders. The SBC has often presented itself to the world in a skewed and self-congratulatory manner, making the control of collective memory especially important to the SBC’s institutional self-understanding. SBC intellectuals long resisted reinterpretation of its myths and canonical stories.
White denominational historians have done this from the very founding of the SBC in Augusta, Georgia, in 1845. Their narratives have deliberately obscured the role slavery played in that event. Between blaming Northern Baptists for infringing on the denomination’s constitutional documents and rights, stating that slavery was but a minor point among more important issues in its birth, and admitting that slavery was central while minimizing its impact, the real place of slavery was whitewashed from the prevailing denominational creation myth until after the Civil Rights Movement. That it took so long for SBC historians to confirm what has always been clear from the primary sources is so surprising that Walter Shurden and Lori Varnadoe had to comment in an essay covering the historiography on the topic: “Most non-Southern Baptist church historians would doubtless ask, ‘Is it not obvious that slavery was the decisive factor in the formation of the SBC?’ The answer: ‘No, it has not been obvious to white Southern Baptist church historians that slavery was the primary issue in the formation of the SBC.’” From the very beginning, SBC intellectuals were invested in crafting innocent versions of their denomination’s trajectory while simultaneously ignoring clear historical facts deemed to be impractical for the memories they hoped to construct.
Some Southern Baptist historians tried to digress from such triumphalism only to practice other distortions themselves. William Whitsitt, a one-time president
of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, offers a prime example. On the one hand, he suffered the consequences of disputing the Landmarkist myth that traced the origins of the SBC directly back to the New Testament. In the resulting Whitsitt Controversy, this corrective led many of his critics to charge him with “heresy” and led to Whitsitt’s resignation from his presidency in 1899. If he thus became the victim of one of the more famous purges in SBC history, Whitsitt was hardly a historiographical innocent. He held a largely ahistorical stance as to the place of slavery in the SBC’s origins and strongly supported the Lost Cause mythology that legitimized racial violence in the post–Civil War South. It has been difficult indeed to avoid the SBC’s selective memory entirely.
The Civil Rights Movement did start exposing a number of cracks in this fortress so that, while various whitewashed versions remain predominant, a few insiders, former insiders, and outside critics have been righting a number of historiographical wrongs. Studies on the relationship between the SBC and Southern racial violence have revealed how deeply the SBC has been involved in shaping Southern forms of White supremacy and deploying forms of racial violence. Recent biographies of Southern Baptist figures have started to move beyond the hagiography that once characterized the denomination’s literary projects to take critical stances revealing the complex and often problematic entanglements of denominational luminaries.8 Other scholars have addressed the long and continuing history of SBC resistance to offering space for full gender equality. More generally, historians of Christianity in the United States have uncovered the SBC’s central role in shaping broad social, cultural, economic, and political realities in the United States.
These sorts of contributions are welcome and essential for a better understanding not only of the SBC’s history but also of the history of US Christianity in general. Yet, approaches that are largely confined within national borders can fail to address the deeply transnational nature of US Christianity in general and US evangelicalism in particular. The SBC, after all, has been a transnational institution from the start, and transnational institutions are best understood via transnational histories.
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