Baptist Missouri pastor’s sermon against fat wives is not so shocking
By Melinda Henneberger
The Kansas City Star
March 6, 2021
A Baptist preacher in the Missouri Bootheel went on leave this week after his sermon advising that those women who “can’t be the epic trophy wife of all time like Melania Trump” should still try to compete in wifely hotness. “Maybe you’re a participation trophy.”
There was nothing particularly Bible-based about Pastor Stewart-Allen Clark’s many tips to the women in his flock at First General Baptist in Malden on how to keep their husbands from being “distracted.”
As Jesus never said, but Clark did: “You don’t need to look like a butch.”
Somehow missing from the Sermon on the Mount: Blessed are those who don’t wear sweatpants or slouch around Walmart in flip-flops, but do put on makeup and perfume. “You don’t want to be ugly and stink,” he told the women in his church.
Clark’s wife used to be “quite robust” herself, he said, but praise God went to Weight Watchers after the birth of each of their children.
He did not similarly encourage men in his congregation to stay in shape, because only men, apparently, were created “to look.”
“God made men to be drawn to beautiful women. Ladies, it’s the way God made us. It’s the way we are. Men are going to look. He made us to look. We can’t help ourselves. We are like that. That’s how God made us.” How’s that, you ask?
Highly visual, of course. Which as described by the reverend is an uptown synonym for “might not love you unless you’re thin.”
“I really don’t think women understand how important it is for a man to have a beautiful woman on his arm,” he said. “Amen, ladies?” (“Yes!” shouts a male voice.) “Why is it so many times that women after they get married let themselves go? Here’s how way too many women are: ‘I got him now!’”
The only Scripture he quoted was 1 Corinthians 7: 4, which he said husbands should have inscribed over their beds: “The wife has no longer all the rights over her body, woo woo, but shares them with her husband, double woo woo.” (Woo woos not added by Paul, but by the pastor.)
Anyone who is confused about how so many white evangelicals turned into Donald Trump worshippers can watch the whole sermon, which overtly values appearances over substance, men over women and cruelty over kindness.
They laughed when he explained the difference between a wife and a girlfriend. (“About 60 pounds.”) And seemed delighted when he mocked a photo of an older woman in a bandeau. (“Not a man under 99” finds her attractive in such skimpy attire, he said.)
The story about that time he’d been counseling a skinny man and his wife who “looked like a sumo wrestler,” was a hit with his congregation, too.
“I’m trying to keep a straight face,” he said, while asking what the trouble in the bedroom seemed to be. “He said, ‘because she’s a fat beep,’” and she “came over the table and started beating the crap out of him.”
Happy ending, though, after he counseled her to lose weight: “Ten months later, she had lost 100 pounds and was pregnant with their second child, so I guess it worked. ‘Preacher man saved our marriage!’”
Clark himself is getting counseling now, after the Executive Committee of the General Baptist Council of Associations admonished him in a statement that said, “General Baptists believe that every woman was created in the image of God, and they should be valued for that reason.” For that I’ll give up an “amen.”
But this is not some random outlaw preacher. Clark was to have been the moderator of this summer’s General Association of General Baptists meeting. He’s been handing out this same advice for years, he said in the sermon.
Christians, and I am one, or try to be, are supposed to challenge the culture rather than reflecting it.
But Clark’s view of women does mirror our culture, still. His message is not so different than the one from KU officials, who expect us to believe that when they hired Les Miles to coach football, they had no that he had a history of sexual harassment complaints or had been banned from one-on-one contact with female students at Louisiana State University. One LSU staff member reported that Miles had tried “to sexualize the staff” by specifying that he wanted only “pretty girls” and “blondes with the big” breasts.
Clark’s view of our inherent worth is right in line, too, with the one reflected in the recent election of freshman Rep. Madison Cawthorn, a Republican from North Carolina, whose former fellow students at Patrick Henry College organized a petition accusing him of being a sexual predator. Three women told their stories on the record, and he won anyway.
Then there’s New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, who responded to multiple recent allegations of sexual harassment by apologizing “for whatever pain I’ve caused” without really acknowledging that he did anything wrong.
Pastor Clark is wrong that “all men are that way.” They aren’t.
But as long as you can be hired for a top coaching job, elected to Congress or defended by those in your party despite this kind of behavior, Pastor Clark’s views on women won’t ever go extinct.
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