A member of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee is under fire for social media posts that included crude and sexual humor. Guy L. Fredrick, a bivocational pastor in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, has drawn criticism from fellow SBC leaders who feel that his posts and subsequent justification for them constitute a red flag for his leadership.
Fredrick subsequently apologized.
The Executive Committee is an entity that exists to conduct denominational business in the interim period between SBC annual meetings. It is staffed by a team that carries out daily operations, and elected members of the Committee convene at least three times a year to assess matters pertaining to the SBC and its various entities, providing recommendations.
Fredrick is one of these elected members of the Executive Committee. The term of the position is four years, and members of the Committee are able to serve two terms. Fredrick’s first term is set to expire this year.
Of note is the fact that the Executive Committee is the SBC entity that was the subject of a lengthy investigation and subsequent report commissioned by the denomination into whether leadership had mishandled sexual abuse allegations over the course of two decades.
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The report found that the Committee’s offenses and shortcomings were myriad, systemic, and longstanding, which prompted a motion to institute reforms, a proposal that was overwhelmingly adopted by SBC members at the 2022 annual meeting and which is being implemented by the newly formed Abuse Reform Implementation Task Force (ARITF).
Among the offending posts was Fredrick’s response to another Twitter user who asked conservative men an “honest question, is AOC hot?” Responding with how he felt about Congressional Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Fredrick wrote, “Like boob sweat hot, or like sexually attractive?”
An anonymous Twitter account, called “SBC Platform,” posted a screenshot of the tweet, arguing that Fredrick has “a pattern” of problematic social media posts.
As proof, the Twitter user provided another screenshot of a Facebook post that Fredrick shared some time ago. The post features an image of a corporate setting in which a male coworker is wrapping his arm around a female coworker despite her obvious discomfort with the physical contact.
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The caption of the meme, which was a criticism of COVID-19 vaccination requirements for workplaces, reads, “Why is it that if your boss says ‘have sex with me or you’re fired’ it’s considered coercion, but your boss says ‘take the shot or you’re fired’ and it’s not coercion? They both want to stick something in you that you don’t want.”
