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Note: This essay first appeared in the
May 2008 Baptist Studies Bulletin.
"We despise all reverences and all the objects of reverence which are
outside the pale of our own list of sacred things. And yet, with
strange inconsistency, we are shocked when other people despise and
defile the things which are holy to us." So declared Mark Twain at
the very time that white Baptists in the South finally succeeded in
muscling their way into religious and cultural dominance in the
American South.
A little over a century later, some Baptists in the South
are loath to accept their steadily declining influence. Long the
standard-bearer in the South, the Southern Baptist Convention reached
its zenith of growth related-to-population in the 1950s, and a
numerical peak in baptisms in 1972. It's been downhill ever since. A
fundamentalist takeover of the denomination, ostensibly for the
purpose of theological purification and numerical revival merely sped
up the decline. Marriage to the evangelically conservative Religious
Right only added to the problems. Frank Page, current SBC president,
recently concluded that the decline of the SBC is in part because of
widespread perception of Southern Baptists as "mean-spirited,
hurtful and angry people." Furthermore, Southern Baptists "have
not always presented a winsome Christian life that would engender
trust and a desire on the part of many people to engage in a
conversation on the Gospel," lamented Page.
While the SBC president places much of the blame on the
shoulders of his own denomination, J. Gerald Harris, editor of the
press arm of the Georgia Baptist Convention (affiliated with the SBC),
exhibits the tendencies lamented by Page. Agreeing with
Page that conservative Christians are portrayed by the media as
intolerant, "narrow and sectarian," Harris nonetheless revels in the
negative labels, insisting that "evangelical Christians" are the "good
guys" in America, while all others are "bad guys." Tolerance is evil
and public schools are pagan, Harris insists, claiming to speak for
all "Bible-believing, Christ-loving and soul-winning Christians."
While Southern Baptist leaders alternate between regret and
defiance, conservative evangelicals in general are having a
larger-scale wilderness experience, their long-sought secular
political ambitions largely unrealized and now fading fast. The
recently released
Evangelical Manifesto, recognizing serious problems among
conservative evangelical ranks, is a half-hearted apology that skewers
liberalism and refutes the excesses of the Religious Right without
completely annulling the conservative evangelical marriage with the
Republican Party. At least one prominent SBC leader disagrees with a
softening of Religious Right rhetoric. Al Mohler, president of The
Southern Baptist Theological Seminary,
rejects the Manifesto acknowledgement that evangelical
faith is merely one of many valid expressions of Christianity and
scoffs at the affirmation that other faiths should have equal access
to the "public square."*
The wilderness sojourn of the Southern Baptist Convention
and the conservative evangelical movement at large did not have to
happen. Baptists of the 17th and 18th centuries understood the
importance of diversity. Unafraid of pluralism, they insisted
religious liberty applied equally to persons of all faiths and no
faith, and in turn they put their lives on the line to secure the
separation of church and state. Southern Baptist leaders of recent
decades have strayed far from the teachings of the long-ago heroes of
their own denomination. Marrying politics and religion in an arrogant
effort to secure the rights of evangelical Christians above the rights
of all others, they have boldly rejected their own faith heritage. And
in their rebellion, they have led the way into a dry and desolate
landscape of self-serving myths and self-glorifying rhetoric.
Grudging regret, continued defiance and half-hearted
apologies are not paths out of the wilderness. As Jesus taught two
millennia ago, a recognition of lostness must precede renewal and
rebirth.
* Editor's Note: For further reading
regarding the significance of the Evangelical Manifesto, read
Melissa Rogers,
Marci Hamilton, and
Joseph Conn. Also of interest is an
Associated Baptist Press story. |
