Al Mohler

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Five big takeaways from the Southern Baptist Convention's 2023 annual meeting

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Five big takeaways from the Southern Baptist Convention's 2023 annual meeting

Making headlines this past week: A tornado has devastated the Texas Panhandle town of Perryton, killing three people and injuring at least 75. As always, look for the “faith-based FEMA” to be among the helpers.

In Rome, Pope Francis has left the hospital where he had abdominal surgery nine days earlier. His surgeon says the pontiff is “better than before,” The Associated Press’ Francis D’Emilio reports.

This is our weekly roundup of the top headlines and best reads in the world of faith. We start with five key takeaways from the Southern Baptist Convention’s big annual meeting in New Orleans.

What To Know: The Big Story

1. No women pastors: As nearly 19,000 people — including 12,737 registered messengers — attended the SBC meeting, the nation’s largest evangelical denomination expanded restrictions on women in leadership.

See coverage by the New York Times’ Ruth Graham and Elizabeth Dias, Religion News Service’s Adelle M. Banks, the USA Today Network’s Liam Adams and Katherine Burgess, the Wall Street Journal’s Francis X. Rocca and the Washington Times’ Mark A. Kellner.

2. Saddleback out: The SBC rejected an appeal by Rick Warren to reinstate the California megachurch that he founded.

The reason for its ouster: It has women pastors. Also denied reinstatement: a smaller church with a female pastor in Louisville, Kentucky.

See coverage by The Associated Press’ Peter Smith, Christianity Today’s Kate Shellnutt, the Oklahoman’s Carla Hinton, RNS’ Banks and Bob Smietana and the Washington Post’s Michelle Boorstein.

3. Sex abuse reform: The debates about women’s roles threatened to push the issue that dominated last year’s meeting to the background.

But the slow work to address the abuse issue plodded on, as Christianity Today’s Kate Shellnutt explains.

4. The Rev. Bart Barber reelected: The small-town pastor from Farmersville, Texas, will serve a second one-year term as the SBC’s president.


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Podcast: Did the Southern Baptist Convention just become a different kind of 'Baptist' body?

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Podcast: Did the Southern Baptist Convention just become a different kind of 'Baptist' body?

Bill Clinton and Al Gore? They were once Southern Baptists and I imagine that they remain generic Baptists.

The Rev. Jerry Falwell? An independent Baptist who led a church that became Southern Baptist. How about the Rev. Pat Robertson? He was Southern Baptist, but his second ordination was totally post-denominational (with one Episcopal bishop taking part, for what it’s worth).

President Jimmy Carter was a Southern Baptist, but dropped his ties to the Southern Baptist Convention. I think journalist Bill Moyers fits that mold, too. Come to think of it, so does political science professor and pastor Ryan Burge.

So what does “Baptist” mean, with or without that whole “Southern” thing? Is it up to the individual believer, the local congregation or some kind of affirmation at the regional, state or national level? After all, there are hundreds of different “Baptist” brands and thousands of totally independent “Baptist” congregations.

These questions loomed in the background during this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in). The topic was press coverage of the national meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention, which was held in New Orleans this year.

As usual, the big SBC show drew lots of coverage — especially with the dramatic appeal by the Rev. Rick Warren, perhaps America’s best-known evangelical, for his Saddleback Church to be readmitted to the national convention, even after it plunged ahead and ordained women to various ministries.

Supporters of the ordination of women lost that move — by a wide margin. Also, the Rev. Bart Barber, the establishment candidate, was easily elected to a second term as SBC president.

That being said, what was the big news here? The best way to follow the crucial decisions in New Orleans is to dig into two Religion News Service pieces. Here is a key passage from the first, by religion-beat veterans Adelle Banks and Bob Smietana:

Warren and the Rev. Linda Barnes Popham, who leads the Louisville church, each argued that Baptists don’t agree on a range of matters — from Calvinism to COVID-19 — but that hadn’t halted their ability to have a shared commitment to spreading the gospel.

R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, argued against keeping either Saddleback or Fern Creek within the Southern Baptist fold. He said the idea of women pastors “is an issue of fundamental biblical authority that does violate both the doctrine and the order of the Southern Baptist Convention.”


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New podcast: Is SBC President Ed Litton 'woke'? What is a 'conservative' stance on CRT?

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New podcast: Is SBC President Ed Litton 'woke'? What is a 'conservative' stance on CRT?

It certainly was an interesting way to start a podcast (click here to tune that in) about press coverage of the 2021 national meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Here’s the gist of what “Crossroads” host Todd Wilken wanted to know: If journalists were going to write that the Rev. Mike Stone — who lost his bid to become SBC president — was “right-wing” and “ultraconservative,” then why didn’t they pin “left-wing” and “ultraliberal” labels on Bishop-elect Megan Rohrer, the first trans/queer/gender fluid bishop in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America?

Think about it this way: Stone and the new Conservative Baptist Network — many flew pirate flags — set out to attack the already conservative (theologically speaking) leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention, saying that it was not conservative ENOUGH on several issues. In other words, the goal was to move the SBC further right and away from recent pronouncements by the convention.

Meanwhile, Bishop-elect Rohrer is an open advocate of the CURRENT teachings of the ELCA. In the context of this denomination and its doctrines, Rohrer is part of the ruling class.

Now, is Rohrer “ultraliberal” in the context of American culture? How about liberal mainline Protestantism? How about other Lutheran bodies? Was Stone “ultraconservative” in the context of today’s SBC?

You can see the struggle here. Are journalists supposed to label religious leaders in the context of the wider culture or of their own flocks? I have argued that this depends: I go with the “flock” framing when discussing news events that are taking place inside a given “flock.”

As I argued the other day (#SBC21: Press wrestles with Twitter-niche labels as Southern Baptists choose a new leader), most of the religion-beat pros who gathered in Nashville tried to be very cautious when describing the various groups under the conservative SBC umbrella. The exception was the New York Times, which offered a kind of acid-flashback return to the SBC civil wars of the early 1980s.

The key was the labeling in this early headline — “Southern Baptists Narrowly Head Off Conservative Takeover” — and then this overture:


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#SBC21: Press wrestles with Twitter-niche labels as Southern Baptists choose a new leader

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#SBC21: Press wrestles with Twitter-niche labels as Southern Baptists choose a new leader

If you have followed mainstream coverage of religion (and politics) in recent decades, you know that many journalists tend to make liberal use of the vague term “moderate.”

This has certainly been true of coverage of warfare inside the Southern Baptist Convention.

Since “liberal” is kind of scary, journalists have long divided the SBC into “moderate” and “conservative” camps. With very few exceptions, your typical “moderate” Southern Baptist would be a “fundamentalist” in the world of mainline Protestantism.

Thus, in the great SBC civil war of 1979 and the years thereafter, the term “moderate” came to mean Southern Baptists that mainstream journalists thought were acceptable. These were the folks in the white hats who backed abortion rights, women’s ordination and, at first, were silent or vague on LGBTQ issues. Most of all, they were the enemies of those Southern Baptists who fit under the Religious Right umbrella.

With that in mind, consider the tweaked double-decker headline on The New York Times report after the fireworks at the SBC national meetings in Nashville:

Southern Baptists Narrowly Head Off Ultraconservative Takeover

Ed Litton, a moderate pastor from Alabama, won a high-stakes presidential election with the potential to reshape the future of the country’s largest Protestant denomination.

The original headline stuck with the old-school “moderate” vs. “conservative” language.

The leadership of the Conservative Baptist Network may have been sad about their candidate, the Rev. Mike Stone of Georgia, losing the election. But they had to be elated at how the Times described this event in terms that meshed with their views on SBC life. Here is the top of that report:

NASHVILLE — In a dramatic showdown on Tuesday, Southern Baptists elected a moderate pastor from Alabama as their next president, narrowly heading off an attempted takeover by the denomination’s insurgent right wing.


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#SBC2021, CRT and sexual abuse: Are compromises possible in this complex showdown?

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#SBC2021, CRT and sexual abuse: Are compromises possible in this complex showdown?

When most journalists, and thus most news consumers, think of Southern Baptists it’s highly likely that “compromise” is not one of the first words that leaps to mind.

But think about this for a moment. The current firestorm surrounding the Southern Baptist Convention’s national meetings in Nashville (tomorrow and Wednesday) centers on recent efforts by the convention’s leaders to find working compromises on two explosive issues in church life — racism and sexual abuse. In both cases, forces have pulled at convention leaders to move further to the right or to pursue more “progressive” options that would clash with realities in SBC life and polity.

Consider the hellish realities of racism and, in particular, the complex secular doctrines of “Critical Race Theory.” The SBC could praise CRT and embrace it or totally reject this school of thought. A compromise? That would stress listening to conservative Black church leaders and saying that CRT makes some points about racism in America that are valid, but that it also contains secular views of evil and race that do not mesh with traditional Christian beliefs. Hold that thought.

On sexual abuse, there are progressives who want the SBC to start some kind of national agency that would be granted powers to yank abusive clergy and congregations into line. This would clash with Baptist teachings on the autonomy of local churches. At the same time, others say SBC leaders have already gone to far while trying to create a centrist, compromise, stance — providing some guidelines for churches facing accusations of sexual abuse, as well as best-practices materials on how to help victims.

So, here is the journalism question to ponder in the next few days: Can national-level religion reporters find a way to avoid the classic two-army, left vs. right, template that dominates most news coverage of clashes of this kind? This would allow readers to see the larger picture — the attempt to find compromises between two extremes that please enough conservatives to prevent a damaging explosion in SBC life.


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Beyond Potiphar's wife: Leaked letters yank SBC debates about sexual abuse into the open

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Beyond Potiphar's wife: Leaked letters yank SBC debates about sexual abuse into the open

It's hard to follow warfare inside the Southern Baptist Convention without a working knowledge of biblical symbolism.

Consider this passage in a May 31 letter (.pdf here) from the Rev. Russell Moore to SBC President J.D. Greear, which described key events leading to his recent resignation as head of the denomination's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.

"You and I both heard, in closed door meetings, sexual abuse survivors spoken of in terms of 'Potiphar's wife' and other spurious biblical analogies," wrote Moore, in a letter posted at the Baptist Blogger website. "The conversations in these closed door meetings were far worse than anything Southern Baptists knew. … And as you know, this comes on the heels of a track-record of the Executive Committee staff and others referring to victims as 'crazy' and, at least in one case, as worse than the sexual predators themselves."

Who was "Potiphar's wife"? She was known for her efforts to manipulate Joseph during his enslavement in Egypt. The Genesis narrative notes: "Now Joseph was handsome and good-looking. And after a time, his master's wife cast her eyes upon Joseph, and said, 'Lie with me.' " When Joseph refused, the seductress accused him of assault and had him jailed.

It's easy to see how "Potiphar's wife" insults would fit into attempts to discredit Moore and activists who want America's largest Protestant flock to change how its agencies, seminaries and nearly 48,000 autonomous congregations deal with sexual abuse.

Moore's resignation, after years of attacks by critics, has pushed sexual abuse to the top of the agenda at the SBC's June 15-16 national meetings in Nashville -- along with the election of a new president.


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New podcast: Will SBC politicos answer questions about doctrinal clashes in this new war?

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New podcast: Will SBC politicos answer questions about doctrinal clashes in this new war?

Whether they’ll admit it or not, when covering conflicts and controversies many (not all) journalists seem to think that one of their main duties is to help (wink, wink) readers separate the people in white hats from those in black hats, smart people from the not-so-smart people and kind people from mad people.

There are several ways to do this. Reporters can quote calm, articulate people on one side, will seeking the most radical, scary voices on the other. I have, when covering events linked to abortion, seen TV crews rush past women who oppose abortion (including women who have experienced abortions) in order to interview screaming male protesters who are waving (literally) bloody signs.

Journalists can do long, personal interviews with people on one side, while pulling dry, boring quotes from press releases on the other. They can allow one set of activists to define all the crucial terms and questions, while ignoring or distorting the beliefs of activists on the other side.

Journalists also get to choose the labels they pin on the competing armies. That was the subject that loomed over this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in), which focused on the bitter debates surrounding the resignation of Russell Moore as leader of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.

The obvious other news hook: The nation’s largest non-Catholic flock will hold its 2021 national meeting next week (June 15-16) in Nashville. For more background, see this earlier post: “That SBC powderkeg: Clearly, executive committee is bitterly divided on sexual-abuse issues.”

As the old saying goes, “You can’t tell the players without a program.” Well, it’s going to be crucial how journalists label the “players” in this conflict.

For example, here is a crucial section of a new Peter Wehner essay at The Atlantic, which ran under this headline: “The Scandal Rocking the Evangelical World — The sudden departure of Russell Moore is forcing an overdue conversation about the crises of American Christendom.”


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State and federal elections spotlight America's diversity and (yet again) religious nones

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State and federal elections spotlight America's diversity and (yet again) religious nones

The mayhem at the U.S. Capitol last week did not prevent Congress's ceremonial tally of the Electoral College victories of the nation's second Catholic president, Joseph Biden, and of Kamala Harris, the first African-American, first Asian-American and first female vice president.

Simultaneously, diversity was also demonstrated in the two Georgia runoff wins that give Democrats control of the U.S. Senate. Jon Ossoff is this heavily Protestant state's first Jewish senator. Baptist pastor Raphael Warnock makes history as only the South's second African-American senator elected since the Reconstruction era. The first is Republican Tim Scott in neighboring South Carolina.

OK. The press has reported all that.

Less noticed are some diverse Democrats newly elected to state legislatures, as featured in the "mainline" Protestant magazine Christian Century. Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Wisconsin and Oklahoma all elected their first-ever Muslim lawmakers, and the Oklahoman, Mauree Turner, is also America's first legislator to identify as non-binary. Episcopal priest Kim Jackson becomes the first openly lesbian member of Georgia's Senate. Kirk White, founder of the Wiccan Church of Vermont, joins that state's Assembly.

Journalists should also be reflecting on the societal change reflected in the religious makeup of the new U.S. Congress, documented in Pew Research Center's latest biennial report, drawn from CQ Roll Call data. Pew's report page is here and for future reference note you can click on "Detailed Table" for a listing of each member's religious identity.

Religious affiliations do not necessarily define members' policies and voting records. Consider all those Democrats who call themselves Catholic but are pro-choice on abortion -- churchgoer Biden among them. But the numbers tell the media something about society's broad religious trends.

Diversity rundown: Way back when, Congress was exclusively Christian and heavily Protestant. The new House and Senate have 33 Jews, three Muslims, three Hindus and two Buddhists. Like Jews, Unitarian Universalists are over-represented relative to the U.S. population with three members, while Pentecostalists are under-represented, with only two members.

Several organizations have compiled religious censuses of Congress over the years. Pew Research issued its first after the 2008 election.


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Thinking about, and with, Al Mohler: America's 'ordered liberty' was set afire -- by Trump

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Thinking about, and with, Al Mohler: America's 'ordered liberty' was set afire -- by Trump

If you have followed the divisions inside the Southern Baptist Convention since 1979, or even earlier, you know this name — R. Albert Mohler, Jr. He was — for some — a L’enfant terrible among the conservatives in the early biblical inerrancy wars who (like him or not) grew, as president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, into one of the most important Southern Baptist voices of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

It would be hard to describe the degree to which many Southern Baptists in the defeated “moderate” establishment detest Mohler, for a variety of theological, cultural and political reasons. At the same time, in the Donald Trump era, there are many in the ranks of far-right Southern Baptist life who view him as a traitor or even “politically correct.”

This is not an easy era in which to lead conservative religious institutions, even those with clout and many supporters. And it’s crucial to know that Southern Baptists leaders were, like evangelical leaders in general, sharply divided on whether to support the rise of Trump in 2015-2016. (Click here for the GetReligion typology describing six different evangelical views of Trump.)

Out of the tsunami of important statements by religious leaders following the U.S. Capitol riot, I have selected — as this weekend’s “think piece” — two articles by and about Mohler, Trump and the hellish scenes of January 6th. The first is a Houston Chronicle interview with Mohler by Robert “wut is happening?” Downen, an emerging religion-beat force in Texas and American in general. The headline: “Evangelical leader Albert Mohler says he’s horrified by chaos at Capitol, but stands by Trump vote.”

Downen notes that:

Mohler is the longtime president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s flagship seminary in Louisville, Ky., and is a contender to lead the SBC when the faith group elects a new president in June.

The evangelical leader has forcefully condemned Trump over the last half-decade, characterizing him as a sexual predator at one point and, after Trump clinched the Republican Party nomination in 2016, Tweeting simply: “Never. Ever. Period.”


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