Typically, on the second or third week of June, the Southern Baptist Convention would be having its annual meeting. Had 2020 been a normal year, that meeting would be finishing up today.
Of course it was cancelled because of the coronavirus crisis. With the current riots going on in cities across America, I bet that SBC leaders are privately thanking God they’re not meeting.
Can you imagine what a draw that would be for some protestors; several thousand mostly white Southern Baptists congregating at the Orange County Convention Center?
Not only is there ferment on the streets, there’s also unrest within the denomination. Longtime RNS reporter Adelle Banks just gave us a thorough look at the pivot Baptists are having to make, due to current events. Her June 4 piece about the race conversation within the 14.5-million-member denomination concentrated on the rifts that remain from the Civil War era.
Please stay with me during the lengthy intro:
(RNS) — The Southern Baptist Convention will not hold its annual meeting as it regularly does each June. But issues its members have long grappled with — including race and the roles of women — continue to be points of controversy in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.
In December, Founders Ministries, a neo-Calvinist evangelical group made up primarily of Southern Baptists, premiered a documentary called “By What Standard?: God’s Word, God’s Rule.”
The film includes selective footage of discussions around last year’s meeting about whether women should preach, juxtaposed with Founders Ministries head Tom Ascol speaking of motherhood as “the highest calling.” Much of the almost two-hour film that has had some 60,000 views online chronicles the passage of resolutions at the 2019 meeting, from one on “the evil of sexual abuse” to another on “critical race theory and intersectionality.”
Two months after the film’s release, the Conservative Baptist Network was founded, calling itself an alternative for dissatisfied Southern Baptists who might otherwise leave the denomination or stay and remain silent.
“A significant number of Southern Baptists are concerned about the apparent emphasis on social justice, Critical Race Theory, Intersectionality, and the redefining of biblical gender roles,” the network declared in its first news release.
I cannot define what critical race theory is, but there’s obviously a considerable number of Southern Baptists who consider it a sellout to political correctness.
I was also left wondering where this new conservative network, other than sending out press releases, is headed.
Ascol said his primary regret about the cancellation of this year’s meeting — which had been scheduled for June 9-10 in Orlando, Florida, but was scrapped because of the coronavirus pandemic — is that he can’t walk to a microphone on the convention floor and ask for a reconsideration of what has come to be known as “Resolution 9.”
The resolution, passed at the SBC’s annual meeting in 2019, states that “critical race theory and intersectionality should only be employed as analytical tools subordinate to Scripture — not as transcendent ideological frameworks.” It also notes that “while we denounce the misuse of critical race theory and intersectionality, we do not deny that ethnic, gender, and cultural distinctions exist and are a gift from God.”
Ascol is featured in the video atop this blog. The rest of the RNS piece is a debate on critical race theory by proponents and opponents, along with this fascinating aside further down the piece.
(Villanova University Professor Glenn) Bracey is an investigator with the Race, Religion, and Justice Project, which is studying Christianity and race in contemporary America.
The project’s researchers found in 2019 that 38% of white practicing Christians surveyed say the country “definitely” has a race problem, compared with 78% of black practicing Christians and 51% of the general population. Thirty-five percent of evangelicals — not broken down by race — gave the same response.
Here is another key group that really needs to be studied, if journalists really care about this issue. It’s the National African American Fellowship (SBC), which is a growing network of 4,000 or more African American pastors and predominately black churches affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention. How many stories have you read about that network, its growth and its impact on SBC life?
Meanwhile, a June 3 story in the Tennessean by Holly Meyer says the SBC need to do more about its public image on race.
The Southern Baptist Convention cannot stay silent about racism, one of the denomination's top leaders says.
"We must stand in solidarity with one another. We must continue to work with compassion until justice is served. And we must commit to eradicate racism in all its forms," the Rev. Ronnie Floyd, president of the convention's executive committee, said.
The article also noted that the denomination is still struggling with a sex abuse crisis that’s been addressed in recent years.
“Southern Baptists” and “evangelicals” are synonymous groups in America. This New York Times piece suggests that President Donald Trump is losing his grip — somewhat — on evangelicals.
Thus, it’d be interesting to know if Baptists are likewise wondering about him. It’d be fair to say the SBC contains a lot of Trump fans. If you disagree, look at how some of the leaders of the denomination treated Russell Moore, president of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission when he dared to criticize Trump. (Moore nearly lost his job).
There are reasons why Vice President Mike Pence was invited in 2018 visit to address the annual meeting.
But things are different now than in 2016, when many evangelicals voted for Trump because they could not bring themselves to support Hillary Clinton. But presumptive Democratic Party nominee Joe Biden is not Hillary Clinton (although the Democratic Party appears ready to adopt a platform that — especially on religious liberty and sexuality issues — is to the left of 2016).
It really is too bad the SBC isn’t meeting this week, because this would be the perfect group for reporters to quiz on their feelings about Trump. Because if some of the Southern Baptists decide to bolt, or simply stay home, it’s all over for our 45th president.
Meanwhile, the Baptists do seem agreed on that certain Confederate statutes need to go, as explained by this piece in Baptist Press.
As a child growing up in Virginia, Marshal Ausberry never understood it. Why were monuments to Confederate soldiers prominently displayed in public spaces across his state?
"To see the Confederate flag and these larger than life statues to over-romanticized Confederate heroes of the Confederate South strewn throughout Virginia constantly reminded me that there were people who were willing to fight, bleed, sacrifice and die to keep black people chained into a system of brutality and bondage," said Ausberry, who pastors Antioch Baptist Church in Fairfax Station, Va., and is first vice president of the Southern Baptist Convention.
Some white SBC pastors agree.
Steve Gaines, pastor of Bellevue Baptist Church in Cordova, Tenn., and a former SBC president, was among a dozen Memphis-area Southern Baptist pastors who joined others in 2017 to advocate for the removal of a statue honoring Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest. Gaines, who was serving as SBC president at the time, said Friday such monuments are a hindrance to Christian love and unity.
"I just don't see any need for us to have a stumbling block over a war that in my opinion, the South was not on the right side of that war," Gaines told Baptist Press. "It was holding and oppressing millions of African Americans that should have never been forced to be slaves, and obviously today their descendants are offended by it.
So watch these Baptist believers. They are the perfect bellwether for evangelical support of Trump. Or less support, whatever the case may be.