These initial thoughts are going to be of a personal-reaction nature. Not because I'm inclined to take the subjective approach to matters of cultural import - quite the contrary; I generally feel that it's important to take into account the objective context for phenomena on the landscape - but because I feel I may be representative of a significant portion of the post-American public that is coming across this news item.
Significant, but probably not majority. Polls show that most folks, particularly within generations younger than me (I'm a Boomer), are secular agnostics at best. They generally conduct their lives as if the whole question of ultimate reality was way down the list of their priorities. (I was actually living that way until I began seriously grappling with the matter.)
I'd just wager, though, that there is a swath of the populace that, like me, sees this kind of development and reacts along the lines of "Well, just dandy. Where am I to go for some leadership with integrity as I try to deepen my faith walk?"
Not that I have explored the Southern Baptist route in my feeling-my-way-back process.
I've written about that process several times. One notable example is a piece I did at Precipice, my Substack, entitled I Never Feel Like Waving My Arms: Why I Still Need Apologetics on a Regular Basis."
A taste:
It’s not so much lingering doubt anymore. I’m done with cynical dismissals and gotcha questions. I have no patience with atheist snark. It reeks of a desire to assert superiority, which is hardly a mark of mature engagement with life’s most pressing questions.
No, I’m quite willing to concede that where I still encounter sticking points, the onus is on me to dig deeper. That’s principally because, for all the institutional rot in so many denominations and boneheaded means of evangelizing, the people I respect the most in this world and in history have been deadly serious about their faith.
I delved more extensively into the entire journey in a piece for Ordinary Times entitled, "Church Shopping, Again":
I’ve only been what I’d consider an actual Christian for a decade at most. I had to feel my way through a process of sorting out a lifetime of head trips to get there.I was raised in the Presbyterian Church where my father had been a member since 1945. Our family was regular about attendance. I sang in the primary and junior choirs, went to Sunday school after the service, and was confirmed at age 14. My parents, particularly my dad, were comfortable with the approach the congregation took toward a life of faith. The minister was a mix of sociocultural preoccupations – this was the 1960s – and a genuine theological foundation rooted in southern Presbyterian thought. This fit well with our family’s lifestyle. We and our neighbors were typically middle class. There was cocktail hour before dinner, a Republican political affiliation, civic involvement (my father insisted I join the Boy Scouts when I turned 11), and an emphasis on manners and comportment. There was, however, room for the occasional dirty joke told in the company of close friends. My parents slowly and with visible discomfort relented on issues such as hair length, and, by the time I got to college, my drug use.
Let me back up, though.
Shortly after I’d been confirmed, my father took the minister to lunch and announced he was leaving the church. The final straw, he told him, was the PCUSA’s donation to Angela Davis’s defense fund. Fast forward to my college years and early adulthood. I dove with abandon into the full panoply of secular-yet-sporting-the-facade-of-spiritual-earnestness offerings available to a boomer coming of age: beat literature, eastern thought, rock music, and the aforementioned drugs. My ideological conversion experience preceded my religious one by a good three decades.
I’d been attending a Unitarian fellowship, and one Sunday morning, the guest speaker was from the local Peace Fellowship (which met at the Presbyterian church where I’d grown up). He’d just come back from a “fact-finding” trip to El Salvador and Nicaragua and was eager to bad-mouth Reagan policy in the region.I’d just read Nicaragua: Revolution in the Family by Shirley Christian, and knew the speaker was leaving the most important part of the story out. During the Q&A portion of the service, I stood up and said as much, going into arcane detail about the Marxist-Leninist nature of the FMLN and the FSLN. I shocked myself, and the congregation as well. Jaws dropped. From there, I subscribed to National Review and Commentary and pursued a master’s degree in history. I also became a conference junkie.
The most memorable gathering I attended was a spring 1987 event hosted by Midge Decter’s Committee for the Free World in Washington. Among the groups that had people in attendance was the Institute on Religion and Democracy. That group was at the forefront of the effort to keep leftist ideology out of institutional Christianity.I wrote my master’s thesis on mainline Protestantism’s leftward drift as a major cause of its denominations’ bleeding members since the 1960s. It turned out to be a sprawling mess, because it had to pass muster with faculty advisors who were not sympathetic to my take.The years passed, and I focused on levels of life such as career, marriage, my zeal for conservatism, travel and music.I finally started church-shopping a little over ten years.
My longest stay was at a little country Methodist church. I went because the pastor was a friend. He’d been a student in my rock and roll history class at our community college. He was a recovering alcoholic whose sermons drove home the seriousness with which we ought to take the matter of grace.He was also great at fostering a sense of community. Chili suppers were particularly fun. He and I would talk smack about who had the more authentic recipe. He was moved to another church, and my attendance tapered off. I could tell how the next minister leaned on the question of a looming UMC split on the question of gay marriage. The families with children quit coming. The community feel dried up.Then I tried a few other churches, and then the situations recounted above transpired.
Since that piece ran, I have found what looks increasingly like my church home. It's of a denomination that structures things congregationally - that is, each church runs its own affairs without any kind of district-wide or national authority involved. I like the pastor a lot. His sermons always stick with me throughout the week. The people I've met clearly genuinely care about one another, and a lot of them are smart and funny, two traits I always find attractive.
I'm sure that the longer I attend and the more I get involved, I'll find collective differences of opinion on something or other, but I'm inclined to think these would be handled in a spirit of fellowship and recognition that it's happening within the body of the Lord.
So shouldn't that be good enough? Shouldn't I just shrug and say, "Well the Baptists certainly have some things to iron out, but I'm on a solid path"?
That doesn't work. During this feeling-my-way process, I've run into too many theological and doctrinal questions that I'll have to grapple with at some point.
For instance, there's the matter of the egalitarian-complimentarian dichotomy, and the question of whether one's spiritual health demands that one take a hard-and-fast stance on it. To the point of this essay, it has much to do with Beth Moore getting hounded out of the SBC.
There's also the matter of race.
My position on the impact of Critical Race Theory and the whole Ibram X. Kendi-Robin DiAngelo take on race is along the lines of that of John McWhorter and Glenn Loury: it's toxic. It's one of the main sources of our societal brittleness.
But the official SBC response to it comes off as egregiously boneheaded:
In December, several well-known Black pastors broke with the Southern Baptist Convention after its seminary presidents, who are white, released a statement saying critical race theory, an academic concept that racism is deeply rooted in U.S. institutions to the benefit of white people, was "incompatible with the Baptist Faith and Message."
At the end of a grueling year of racial reckoning for American society, some Black leaders saw the statement as ill-judged at best and, at worst, as a callback to the overwhelmingly white Southern Baptist Convention's founding in 1845 in defense of missionaries who owned enslaved people.
"It was the most tone-deaf statement they could have made," said William Dwight McKissic, senior pastor of Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas, which is a member of both the Southern Baptist Convention and the National Baptist Convention, the largest Black denomination in the U.S.
Over 400 Southern Baptist leaders replied, criticizing those in the denomination who "deny the existence of systemic injustice as a reality."
"Many who recognize systemic injustices are labeled as 'Marxists,' 'Liberals,' and 'Critical Race Theorists,' even though they are theologically orthodox and believe in the total sufficiency of Scripture," they wrote.
"Future cooperation remains possible and preferred if we commit to biblical justice and repentance in the SBC. However, if these commitments are not upheld, then it will signal to many in the SBC that cooperation has already ceased to exist," the statement warned.
And with regard to the sexual abuse exhaustively documented in the Guidepost Solutions Independent Investigation, we as a larger society have had plenty of opportunity for at least a couple of years now to have our collective gasp.
In February of 2019, Moore had supported SBC President J.D. Greear’s push to investigate 10 Southern Baptist churches where allegations of clergy sexual abuse had been made. The Executive Committee chose at the time to follow up on only three of the churches.
“This Executive Committee, through their bylaws workgroup, ‘exonerated’ churches, in a spur-of-the-moment meeting, from serious charges of sexual abuse cover-up,” Moore complained in his letter.
He also pointed to an incident where a speaker at an ERLC conference in 2019 criticized the Executive Committee.
In the fall of 2019, during a conference on sexual abuse in the SBC called Caring Well, Moore interviewed Rachael Denhollander, a former USA gymnast who outed team doctor Larry Nassar’s serial sexual assault. Denhollander criticized the Executive Committee for how it had reported on the case of Jennifer Lyell, who had accused a Southern Baptist seminary professor of abuse.
“That enraged some Executive Committee trustee leadership, who communicated that they were incensed that we would allow such a story to be told,” Moore wrote. After the conference, Moore said in the letter, he had received a veiled threat from Executive Committee trustees, characterizing it as being delivered with Mafia-like menace: “You’ve got a nice little Commission there; would be a shame if something happened to it.”
So, as a still-wobbly Christian, as a conservative who still believes in Frank Meyer's fusionism, in eternal verities, in the vindication of a search for the true, honest, just, pure and lovely, and in the centrality of the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ to everything everywhere, what is going on within the SBC is not helpful at all in tipping my internal scales away from doubt and cynicism toward solid conviction.
I just hang on to the belief that such an abundance of counterfeit must mean that there is such a thing as real gold.
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