A Pinched Social Ethic
William Trollinger
Answers in Genesis (AiG) CEO Ken Ham blogs daily, commenting on American culture, politics, and evangelicalism from a fundamentalist and highly moralistic perspective.
And there is so much for him to comment on these days. There’s an American president who paid off porn stars for their silence while the evangelical head of the Environmental Protection Agency is forced to resign amidst an ever-expanding set of scandals. There’s the ongoing drama of the U.S. government separating children from parents at the border and then “losing” the children in the vast government detention system. There’s the #MeToo phenomenon, which has now hit American evangelicalism full force, in the process bringing down both the founder of America’s most influential megachurch and a Southern Baptist fundamentalist luminary and seminary president.
But while all these topics seem tailor-made for an outspoken Christian commentator who claims to stand “unashamedly” on the authority of the Bible, Ken Ham has written nary a blog post on any of these topics. Not a word on sexual amorality or financial corruption in the executive branch. Not a word on this administration’s inhumane family separation policy. Not a word on sexual harassment scandals within white evangelicalism.
So what does Ham write about? What topic requires the critical attention of this prominent Christian Right leader?
Why, the LGBT threat, of course.
In the past two years Ham has written at least 48 posts on the menace posed by the gay rights movement and government agencies and church leaders in its thrall. Here are the most recent examples:
- Fulminating against LGBT activists who complained when the CEO of Twitter tweeted about eating at Chick-fil-A, Ham reminded his followers to remember that it is expected for people to “hate us for our biblical beliefs,” given that they “hated Christ first.”
- Attacking the Canadian Supreme Court’s decision not to accredit Trinity Western University’s law school for its requirement that its students sign an anti-homosexual “community covenant” statement, Ham pronounced this court ruling as further evidence that “God [is] withdrawing the restraining influence of the Holy Spirit and turning people over to their depraved natures.”
- Blasting a Newfoundland and Labrador judge for agreeing that three parents could be listed on a child’s birth certificate, Ham proclaimed this to be yet another example of a society “clearly in rebellion against God.”
- Lamenting that a group of Filipino Christians joined a LGBT pride parade as part of an effort to apologize for the ways in which Christians have used the Bible to harm the LGBT community, Ham sniffed that “we should not and do not need to apologize for what Scripture says about homosexual behavior” and suggested that what is really needed is “a parade for many Christians to apologize to God for the way they’ve compromised his Word, particularly in Genesis.”
There is much evidence that the evangelical hard line on gay rights and gay marriage is pushing young people out of the church. And as Rebecca Barrett-Fox noted recently, fueling this disillusionment among the young is the conviction that their pastors and other evangelical leaders are hypocrites: obsessed with homosexuality, they are silent about a host of social and political sins.
Ken Ham writes frequently and worriedly about young people leaving the church. It might be salutary for him and other Christian Right leaders to consider the degree to which their words and their silences contribute mightily to driving youth away from evangelicalism and from religion.
Ark Encounter Attendance: After Two Years, The Controversy Continues
William Trollinger
One of the most remarkable features of the Answers in Genesis (AiG) tourist site, Ark Encounter, is that, for a place that loudly and boldly proclaims itself as committed to the notion of biblical inerrancy, they make great use of what they call “artistic license.” For example, while there is no discussion in Genesis 6-8 regarding Noah’s family, Ark Encounter devotes a large section to the ark’s “living quarters,” including vivid descriptions of Noah’s daughters-in-law – ethnicities, hobbies, and the like – despite the fact that there is no mention of them in the Bible.
Interestingly, Ark Encounter’s “artistic license” is not limited to exhibits. See, for example, Ken Ham’s ongoing massaging of attendance numbers.
A little context is helpful. While commentators often focus on the tourist tax rebate that Ark Encounter receives from the state of Kentucky, the big gift that the Ark has received comes from Williamstown, a sleepy town of 3,952 just down the road. In hopes of spurring development in the town, in 2013 Williamstown awarded Ark Encounter $62 million in Tax Incremental Funding. What makes this deal especially sweet for the Ark is that, for the next thirty years, 75% of what the tourist site would have paid in property taxes will go to paying off these bonds.
To help convince Williamstown to issue bonds and forego a huge chunk of property taxes, Ark officials produced a feasibility study in which they asserted that the Ark would attract 1.2-2.0 million visitors in the first year. Even more striking, the feasibility report predicted annual attendance increases averaging 7% per year for the first ten years.
Within a few weeks of the Ark’s July 2016 opening, many observers suggested that these projected attendance numbers were inflated, perhaps significantly. Ham responded by doubling down, claiming that first-year attendance would be well over the minimum projection, approaching or even surpassing two million.
Through the summer and fall of 2016 Ham resolutely held to these attendance claims. But in May 2017, Ham announced that the Ark’s first-year attendance would be one million visitors. While he failed to acknowledge that this was but 50% of what he predicted just nine months before, he did claim that attendance would double in the Ark’s second year.
We are now at the end of the second year. And new sets of numbers have emerged, as Ham has just informed the Cincinnati Enquirer that one million people visited in 2017-2018. Not surprisingly, Ham again failed to acknowledge that this number was but ½ of what he predicted a year ago.
But there is more. From the same article, Answers in Genesis (AiG) reported that the one million visitors in the second year marked a 20% increase in attendance from the first year.
What? Ark Encounter attendance in its first year was 800,000, and not the one million Ham previously announced? Given Ham’s looseness with numbers, why would he make this downward revision? Is the point to maintain the narrative that Ark attendance is increasing at a significant pace?
At the moment it is impossible to know the accuracy of these latest numbers. But the evidence is overwhelming that Ark Encounter is attracting visitors at a much lower pace than they claimed in the feasibility study that was used to convince Williamstown to float the $62 million bond issue and to give the Ark a huge 30-year tax break. And it is difficult to see how adding a 2500 seat “Answers Center” and expanding the petting zoo – “objectively describe[d] as tobacco country’s saddest zoo“ – and developing “tasty new food options” at the Ark will result in a marked increase in attendance.
Will Ark Encounter be around in, say, ten years? Five years? I have no idea. But if I were a bondholder or a Williamstown official, I would find it very worrisome that the reported attendance numbers are ever-changing, and apparently never as promised.
Complementarianism, Rich Fundamentalists, and #SBCMeToo
With the May 2018 firing of Paige Patterson as president of the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (SBTS) the #MeToo movement hit the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) full force. But in response a group of wealthy donors – pledging their “absolute and unwavering support” to Patterson – has attacked the seminary’s Executive Committee while also threatening to withhold gifts and bequests worth “tens of millions of dollars.”
What does all this mean for the seminary, and for the denomination? To help us get some perspective on these questions, we have asked four rightingamerica contributors for their insights.
Elesha Coffman
It seems to me that the SBTS situation is more institution-specific than denomination-wide, but I could be wrong about that. Certainly, other institutions affiliated with the SBC will be watching to see how much the dismissal of Paige Patterson costs the seminary. Even so, the costs of continuing to look the other way on sexual assault and abuse strike me as being even higher. I don’t think the #MeToo phenomenon is reversible, anywhere.
What’s especially unsettling about the donors’ letter is its attitude of deference being owed, by seminary board members and everyone else, and its insistence that the due process of law would uphold the prerogatives of the already powerful. Certainly, it’s not only conservative donors who expect deference or assert, loudly, that the law is on their side. But the expectation of deference asserted in the letter cannot but remind me of the opposition faced by Martin Luther King, Jr., and described in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”:
I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.
I don’t think it’s a misapplication of Dr. King’s words to see their relevance for women who also struggle to see their “dignity and worth” recognized within the SBC and evangelicalism more broadly. Neither the women who came forward nor the SBTS board created the tension they now face; Patterson and his enablers did. The board lanced a boil. Unfortunately, the donors behind the letter do not seem interested in a cure, preferring to “block the flow of social progress.” I do not think they will succeed, although they might be able to cripple the institution they claim to love.
See Elesha’s “It’s Not about Paige Patterson, Continued: Sex and Gender Beyond Evangelicalism”
Rod Kennedy
The recent attempt by wealthy supporters of Paige Patterson to help him reeks of a nasty irony. Wealth and power, always ready to use coercive means, is now employed to restore Patterson, if not to his former job, at least to his former status. There’s a double irony because Jesus rejected the devil’s offer of wealth and power. Now, in the name of Jesus, some Southern Baptists want to use wealth and power against women. The very tools of the devil have long been used to abuse and mistreat women. One can hope that this brazen attempt to cover a multitude of sins against women with the trappings of wealth and power will be rejected by Southern Baptists.
See Rod’s “Is Revolution Brewing among the Southern Baptists?”
Adam Laats
It is absolutely right to focus on the ways institutional pressures can push these issues one way or the other. Especially when the question is as morally and emotionally wrenching as this one, it’s tempting to talk mostly about theology or ethics. But as you point out, interested parties can do much more than appeal to conscience or Biblical hermeneutics. The power of conservative alumni and trustees at evangelical colleges exerted enormous influence throughout the twentieth century. At least, that’s the argument I tried to make in Fundamentalist U. Time and time again, the combination of deep-pocketed activist alumni and obdurate trustees could push schools to take conservative positions—even fairly radical ones, as Wheaton College did in 1961.
In recent years, too, we’ve seen this dynamic at work everywhere we look: Wheaton College again, Bryan College, and Mid-America Nazarene University, to name just a few examples.
In institutional politics, money talks. And often wins. The SBC has a rocky road ahead.
See Adam’s “The Perilous Challenge of Keeping Evangelical Colleges Safely Orthodox”
Emily Hunter McGowin
When it comes to the current situation in the SBC, I think it is important to keep in mind that classifying new denominational president JD Greear as a “moderate” is very problematic. I suppose he’s moderate in comparison to some and in certain respects (i.e., less given to the “culture war” mentality), but he is certainly not moderate compared to others (anyone outside the SBC, perhaps). For example, on the matter of women in the church, Greear is just as conservative as Patterson, Mohler, and others. His church is “unashamedly and uncompromisingly complementarian.” They “affirm without qualification the Danvers Statement on gender roles in the kingdom of God.” They forbid women to serve as elders or teach in any way that is “elder-like.” You can read their statement on women teaching in public here.
So, despite the fact that Greear seems to be a favorite of younger, less fundamentalist pastors and leaders of the SBC, he still promotes a gender ideology that is ultimately harmful to women. It is the very same gender ideology that empowered Paige Patterson to act as he has for so many years.
See Emily’s “It’s Not About Paige Patterson: Sex and Gender in the SBC and Beyond”
Southern Baptist Fundamentalists Strike Back!
by William Trollinger
It appears the battle in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) is just beginning. And that is not a surprise.
At the most recent SBC convention in Dallas the moderate (or, somewhat less conservative) forces seemed to have carried the day, with the election of J. D. Greear as SBC president, and – just as significant — resolutions acknowledging and repenting of the mistreatment of women. All of this led one optimistic observer (a former Southern Baptist minister would say much too optimistic) to declare that Southern Baptists have called off the culture war.
Much of what happened in Dallas had to do with the May 2018 dismissal of Paige Patterson – architect of the fundamentalist takeover of the SBC in the 1980s – as president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Patterson was fired for – as Emily McGowin summarized – a series of misdeeds, including
advising at least one rape victim not to report the rape to police (during his tenure at a sister institution), speaking of young women in sexually suggestive ways, and counseling a woman being physically abused by her husband to remain in her marriage and pray so that he might be saved.
Patterson withdrew from the SBC convention, where he had been scheduled to speak. But his supporters proposed motions that called on the seminary to review its decision and – more drastic – that would have simply dismissed the executive committee of the seminary.
Both motions failed. But now a group of wealthy donors are taking the battle directly to the Southwestern Baptist Seminary Executive Committee, with a June 29 letter in which they threaten to punish the seminary financially:
Our past financial gifts to the Seminary total in the millions of dollars. Our future possible gifts, and bequests from our estates, we estimate could be well in excess of tens of millions of dollars. Please know that until the serious wrongs against Dr. and Mrs. Patterson are righted, we will be unable to continue our financial support of the Seminary.
Given the odd arguments, the level of vitriol, and the number of writing errors, it is easy to imagine that the letter was constructed hastily and with much emotion. See, for example, the following:
The May 30, 2018 Statement by the Executive Committee Board refers only to “new information” and “details presented” in a vague attempt to explain your indefensible actions against Dr. Patterson. We note the careful selection of your works . . . We submit you chose your words as you did because while you knew Dr. Patterson had not done anything wrong, you nonetheless wanted to create the impression that he had. Your statement, while it clearly demonstrates a callus level of injustice and dishonesty toward Dr. Patterson himself, of equally great harm is the damage it does to the integrity of Southwestern Seminary itself.
Unsurprisingly, the letter is silent about both Patterson’s suggestive statements and his advice that an abused woman should stay with her husband in order that he might be saved.
One of the themes of Adam Laats’ Fundamentalist U is that administrators and trustees at fundamentalist and evangelical schools work overtime to mollify their conservative constituents. In the case of Southwestern Baptist Seminary, the signatories to the letter make clear what they need. They call for an investigative committee consisting of five members “selected by the full Board of Trustees, from either the Trustee Board or from individuals officially associated with the Seminary, and five individuals to be selected by the signatories of this letter.”
Given that the signatories assert in their letter that “Dr. and Mrs. Patterson continue to have our absolute and unwavering support,” it is hard to imagine that the thusly selected committee would confirm the seminary’s decision to fire Patterson.
Whither Southwestern Baptist Seminary, and whither the Southern Baptist Convention?
Here is the donors’ letter to Southwestern. Here are Elesha Coffman’s and Margaret Bendroth’s takes on the controversy re: sex and gender in the SBC, and beyond.
Evangelicals and the Pimp
by William Trollinger
When I first read the story, I was stunned. Upon reflection, not so much.
The title of Tim Reid’s article says it all: “In age of Trump, evangelicals back self-styled top U.S. pimp.” The pimp is Dennis Hof, who runs a strip club and five brothels in Nevada (including the Moonlite BunnyRanch which has been featured on HBO’s “Cathouse”) and who has been accused of sexual abuse by several women.
On June 12 Hof defeated an incumbent legislator to secure the Republican nomination for a Nevada State Assembly position in a Republican-tilting district. According to Hof, his victory was evidence that:
People will set aside for a moment their moral beliefs, their religious beliefs, to get somebody that is honest in office. Trump is the trailblazer, he is the Christopher Columbus of honest politics.
In the article Reid quotes a number of evangelicals who have no trouble setting aside their moral and religious commitments to support a man who makes his money from selling women’s bodies for sex. This includes an evangelical pastor who thanked God for Hof’s primary victory, and who explained his vote thusly:
We have politicians, they might speak good words, not sleep with prostitutes, be a good neighbor. But by their decisions, they have evil in their heart. Dennis Hof is not like that.
What does this mean? Is this where evangelical political thinking in 2018 has landed?
Importantly, Reid’s article on the Dennis Hof campaign is based on interviews. There seems to be no polling data – yet — regarding the percentage of evangelicals in Hof’s district who are supporting his candidacy.
That said, if we look at the polling data that is available regarding evangelicals and their political choices, we have to say that it would be more surprising if evangelicals did not support Hof. After all, 70% of white evangelicals continue to support Donald Trump, despite his breathtaking sexual amorality, including his hush money payments to porn stars. And 80% of white evangelicals in Alabama voted for Roy Moore in his bid for the U.S. Senate, despite his past sexual relationships with underage girls.
Last week I was at USC with a small group of scholars working on the phenomenon of growing religious non-affiliation in the United States. When I mentioned the possibility of evangelicals supporting Dennis Hof for the Nevada state assembly, one of my colleagues pointed out that patriarchy is at the very heart of white evangelicalism: “Supporting a pimp for political office does not threaten that – in fact, it fits!”
In 2018, it is more visible than ever that, for many evangelicals, “family values” is simply code for white heterosexual males running the show.
Youth are Fleeing Anti-LGBTQ+ Churches
Rebecca Barrett-Fox is Professor of Sociology at Arkansas State University. The author of God Hates: Westboro Baptist Church, American Nationalism, and the Religious Right (University Press of Kansas 2016), she researches and writes about religion, hate, and sexuality and gender. Her work has appeared in Contention, Youth & Society, The Journal of Hate Studies, Thought & Action, Radical Teacher, and elsewhere. You can follow her research at her blog, Any Good Thing, or read her commentary on politics, culture, and family from a (mostly) Mennonite perspective at Sixoh6.
(c) 2016, University of Kansas Press.
“Is this how it is now?” my student asked me, gesturing to her field notes from a recent visit to a Sunday worship service in our area. She was technically still a member of the denomination that the multi-campus evangelical megachurch, one of the town’s largest and most prestigious, was part of, though she had not been to a church service in over a year. Even before that, though, her attendance had grown spotty. She used the excuse of her college workload when her parents asked, but there was more keeping her away: growing unease with conservative Christianity’s views on LGBTQ+ people.
But the day prior, after a long absence from church, she found that, even if she had been a member of this particular congregation, which, like the church of her childhood, practiced closed communion, she would have been disinvited from participation in the ordinance. Before the pastor broke the bread and shared the story of the Last Supper, he informed the congregation that the bread and juice being served was not to be consumed by those “engaged in any sexual practices contradictory to Scripture,” including sexual conduct outside of heterosexual marriage and political support for the rights of gay people to marry. Those people could seek counseling from church elders, he said, gesturing toward the rear of the sanctuary, where heterosexually-married men and women stood ready to listen to the stories of worshippers trapped in sin.
My student was bothered by this. Yes, she admitted, the pastor stressed that this exclusion wasn’t just for gay people but for everyone engaged in what the church called “sexual sin.” But she strongly suspected that the policy came as a response to the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision. It was one thing for the church to object to gay rights, but it was another for it to withhold communion from gay people, regardless of whether they were sexually active. And to say that one’s political support for gay marriage should determine one’s eligibility for communion politicized the sacred.
She was disgusted with the church, as are many of her peers. They are leaving conservative Protestant churches in droves, some for the richness and tradition of Orthodoxy, some for Pope Francis’ particularly warm expressions of Catholicism, and some for mainline Protestantism, but many for nothing. They don’t end up anti-religious as much as areligious—or as might better capture their attitude “eh? religious? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.” According to research from PRRI, 39% of young adults are religiously unaffiliated, and 29% of them cite their conservative religion’s views on sexuality as an important reason for going.
While such churches may lament what they see as a turning away from faith and toward “the world,” some of the young people I know who are saying goodbye to church frame their departure as acting out their faith, not rejecting it. They are keeping the best parts of their religion and rejecting what they see as beliefs and behaviors that mock those best parts. Here is what I mean:
They know that God loves their LGBTQ+ selves and friends. As they learned from their pro-life picketing and volunteer hours at the crisis pregnancy clinic, each person is lovingly created by God and thus has dignity and worth and bears God’s image, including queer people. They believe that excluding them from church and denying them communion is an act of hostility. Moves like refusing to baptize infants or children if their parents are gay or denying people communion are seen as a way that the church tries to limit who and how God loves people.
They want their gay and same-sex loving friends to be able to be blessed in their relationships. As long as same-sex marriages were not legally valid, conservative churches could sidestep their bigotry by saying that only married people could engage in blessed sex, so gay people had to practice celibacy in order to avoid sexual sin. After Obergefell, in order to deny legitimacy to same-sex marriages, they had to argue that the church alone defined marriage. But churches preach that marriage is about two people called together by God toward God. Love makes that call audible, and sex is one of the kinds of glue that holds people together. Marriage takes work, too, of course—as every Christian marriage retreat stresses, it’s not just romance and sex all the time. So when same-sex couples want to work together to be married, young people figure, their love and even their sexual desires should be blessed by a congregation that supports marriage. If marriage is to be “held honorable by all,” then churches should bless same-sex marriages. If Christians care about people, they should not force celibacy upon them—for celibacy is a calling for the few, and it cannot be a gift if it is required to be accepted. By making “the marriage bed” available to same-sex couples, churches provide an alternative to more potentially exploitative relationships. Young people have seen the consequences of marriages falling apart, and they want the marriages of same-sex couples to be supported so that they don’t. Despite what critics claim, they support same-sex marriage not because they love casual sex and no-fault divorce but because they value marriage.
They do not trust the marriage advice of their parents and grandparents. And for good reason. While the overall divorce rate continues to fall, it is rising among those over 50. They also cheat less on their partners. On average, they delay the onset of sex longer and have fewer sexual partners. Their smart choices are one reason both our unplanned pregnancy and our abortion rates are declining (though we are seeing worrisome increases in some STDs; are showing share increases in rates of such diseases, too). They understand sex—both the pleasure and the pain it can cause—pretty well.
They recognize hypocrisy. This was my student’s chief complaint: that of all the sins committed by people in the congregation, sexual sins—not greed or racism or violence—were the pastor’s concerns. And, on top of that, he listed sexual sins that, if they hurt anyone, hurt the people committing them and their families. In contrast, the region where I teach has seen arrests of many Protestant pastors (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here) on charges of sexual assault and the possession of child pornography. These young people have witnessed #churchtoo—congregations as a place where sexual violence happens. The harm that has happened because of sex isn’t because their queer friends love each other; it’s because their churches have been sites of, and sometimes covered up, sexual violence. They know a world in which many gay-friendly spaces are safer than churches, where anti-gay theologies kill people and where queer-affirming friendships save lives.
When churches double down on exclusion, they lose young people. Churches may face a practical conundrum: welcome and affirm LGBTQ+ people and their relationships and anger older congregants who do so much of the work and funding of the church or risk losing the young people who could repopulate the pews. That may feel, in the moment, like a hard decision, but when churches waver in making it, young people see no reason to forebear. By and large, the young people I know who left their churches feel that their congregation made them a good person, but they had to leave before it made them a bad one.
Is Revolution Brewing among the Southern Baptists?
Rodney Kennedy has his M.Div. from New Orleans Theological Seminary and his Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Louisiana State University. The pastor of 7 Southern Baptist churches over the course of 20 years, he pastored the First Baptist Church of Dayton (OH) – which is an American Baptist Church – for 13 years. He is now the interim senior pastor at the First Baptist Church of Peoria (which is also an American Baptist church). He is currently putting the finishing touches on his sixth book: The Immaculate Mistake: How Southern Baptists and Other Evangelicals Gave Birth to Donald Trump.
Last week, the messengers to the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) elected a new president, the Rev. Dr. J. D. Greear, from Dunham, North Carolina. While some pundits have indicated that this represents a paradigm shift, I’m not convinced that the election of a president, a two-year and mostly ceremonial position, can actually produce revolution within the SBC. That said, I want it to be, and so I am praying that it will happen. As Baptist historian Buddy Shurden puts it, “The BIG church needs the SBC, and so does America now, more than ever before. The SBC is filled with some wonderful, faithful Christians, and they need leadership that will bring them back into the mainstream of American life, religiously and culturally.”
Southern Baptists are to be commended for confronting their own version of the #MeToo movement. Resolutions passed at the annual convention in Dallas were powerful statements of confession and repentance about the mistreatment of women. A month before the convention, Rick Patrick, an Alabama pastor, publisher of SBC Today and executive director of the Connect 316 ministry, apologized for an extraordinarily offensive Facebook post mocking prominent evangelical supporters of the #MeToo movement.
There is also much to applaud in the election of J. D. Greear as SBC president. He’s not a member of the old guard fundamentalists that have long dominated the SBC. As one can see by looking at Rev. Greear’s website, he is not a “culture war” guy in his public pronouncements. He is articulate, he sticks close to the biblical texts as he preaches, and he is appealing, comforting, and persuasive.
There’s nothing here to dislike. There’s also nothing here that suggests revolutionary change. Like a Texas river, what Greear preaches seems a mile wide and two inches deep. This is not surprising, given that he is the pastor of a mega-church. His ministry, like that of Joel Osteen and others across the country, is savvy, slick, smooth, and successful. There’s not much there to “turn the world upside down,” or create any sort of tension about beliefs and actions in the larger cultural/political context.
Instead of paradigm shift, what we seem to be witnessing is a slight adjustment that generational change always brings. While young SBC ministers have been trained in seminary to hold to inerrancy and literalism, they have, in fact, still been reading the Bible. I am convinced that God continues to use Scripture to change all sorts and kinds of churches. In fact, there are millions of people who are Southern Baptists, who read the Bible, who have never embraced the stringent fundamentalist theology of their leaders. This may, in time, engender a movement, from the “pew up” that undoes the current order.
But this will take time. I am incredulous that certain members of the media are claiming that the Southern Baptists are dropping out of the culture war. Yes, the SBC messengers indicated a desire to break from their rock-solid commitment to President Trump, but this will not be as easy as it sounds. The Southern Baptists and sundry other evangelicals created President Trump and it is a mistake to believe that they can back away from this deep commitment to his angry, racist, populist, protectionist, “America first and only” politics. President Trump imitates the authoritarian rhetoric of many Southern Baptist preachers, and his followers accept it as readily as they do the messages of their pastors. Call it the immaculate mistake, or how Southern Baptists and other conservative evangelicals gave birth to Donald Trump.
More than the deep attachment to culture war and Trump, real change in the SBC bumps up against a number of deeply entrenched factors:
1. Al Mohler
For all intents and purposes, Al Mohler, president at Southern Seminary, is the de facto pope of the Southern Baptist Convention. With the fall of Paige Patterson, Mohler now has even more influence. As Buddy Shurden accurately points out, “The leader of Southern Baptists for the last decade has been Al Mohler. He has produced more students, been on more national TV programs, is quoted by more writers about Southern Baptists, and is the person journalists turn to when they want to know what the SBC believes. He is a more principled, informed, and dogmatic fundamentalist than was Paige.”
2. Calvinism
The Calvinism promoted by Al Mohler and taught at Southern seminary is the vigorous 5-point, hyper-Calvinism. This rigid Calvinism mitigates against the possibility of the SBC becoming more moderate. It is much more likely that the SBC will become the Baptist version of the Presbyterian Church in America – the Calvinist Presbyterians located primarily in the South who in the 1970s rejected merger with mainline Presbyterianism – than becoming more moderate.
3. Complementarianism
The doctrine of complementarianism (men and women are equal but have different roles) is also promoted by Mohler, and it will continue to dominate the SBC. In spite of the sudden impact of the #MeToo movement, women still will not be ordained to serve as pastors in the Southern Baptist Convention. This also means that the strident opposition to gays will remain intact given that, as William Sloane Coffin, Jr. observed, how a culture treats women is the way gays will be treated. Any breakdown in the hierarchical setup of the SBC, with its “authoritarian” understanding of sexuality and sexual roles, would cause a fight as large as the one that brought the fundamentalists to power in the 1980s.
4. Creationism
Perhaps even more consequential in the long run is Mohler’s embracing of young earth creationism, and thus the influence of Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis on the SBC. The SBC can’t return to the center or rejoin the more ecumenical mainline churches while continuing to preach and teach a literal six-day creation, a young earth creationism, and an anti-science ideology.
5. Contempt for Social Gospel
Deeply tied to individualism, Southern Baptists are not ready to embrace any part of the social gospel (which they view with contempt). It is hard to imagine Southern Baptists aligning with the mainline Protestant and Roman Catholic commitment to the social nature of the gospel.
6. Americanization of Faith
Finally, the SBC preaches a “hybrid” religion that promotes patriotism as a Christian virtue and that constantly insists that America is a Christian nation. One of the leading proponents of these notions is the Rev. Robert Jeffress of FBC Dallas. The SBC has largely abandoned the historic Baptist commitment to the separation of church and state, as the individualism, the politics, the aggressive capitalism of the American way of life has conquered the SBC. There are more flags flying in places where crosses should be displayed in SBC churches, and the pledge of allegiance has become – in many ways – the SBC creed.
Given these deeply embedded ideological principles, it is very hard not to see the recent SBC convention in Dallas as anything more than window dressing. And yet, I am convinced that we must pray for a revolution in the SBC. The Southern Baptists are the heart and soul of the resurgent “old South” and with it come a lot of ideological creatures from the ghostly past. These creatures, disinterred from the grave, fuel the anger, racism, anti-immigrant animus, and opposition to female equality and gay rights so prevalent in the SBC. So, I will be praying for the revolution that so many commentators believe they are seeing in the SBC. And I’ll be praying for the organization’s new president, the Rev. Dr. J. D. Greear. May new leadership in the SBC and all the men and women who insisted upon that change lead the SBC, the South and, indeed, America out of the culture wars.
History, Women, and the Southern Baptist Convention
by Patrick Thomas
We were thrilled to see that a recent post on our blog authored by our colleague Margaret Bendroth has led to an even more impressive and insightful piece for The New York Times.
Appearing yesterday in the Opinion section, “Could Southern Baptists Actually Become Feminists?” addresses how, despite the ousting of Paige Patterson, the SBC’s history of complementarian theology and local governance of church authority complicate further efforts to acknowledge and deal with claims of domestic abuse and sexual violence against women and children. As Bendroth notes,
Southern Baptists do not take these steps lightly. They are acknowledging not just individual wrongdoing like Mr. Patterson’s but also a longstanding pattern of failure. This is a rare moment for any religious organization. Moreover, given their polity, the task ahead is especially daunting. Tracking and punishing abuse is hard enough under a hierarchy, but in a church body historically dedicated to “soul freedom” and the autonomy of local congregations, the logistics are formidable.
The 2018 Convention statement on SBC abuse offers some consolation with its concluding resolution: “…That we uphold the dignity of all human beings as image-bearers of God and the responsibility of all Christians to seek the welfare of the abused.” Whether and how the SBC continues to pursue and remove abusers and predators remains to be seen.
Or, as Bendroth puts it: “History has teeth, and it can bite. We best pay attention. Will Southern Baptists?”
Great question.
So Much Good Stuff to Read About Jeff Sessions and Romans 13
by William Trollinger
“Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad.” (Romans 13:1-3a)
Much has been written about Romans 13 – including here! – in response to the efforts by Jeff Sessions to use the first few verses of the chapter to justify the Trump Administration’s ghastly policy of separating migrant children from their parents. In fact, so many good articles and posts have been written in the last few days that it is a challenge to keep up. Below are links to three of these pieces, with a few brief comments.
Melissa Florer-Bixler, “How Jeff Sessions Reads Romans 13 and How My Mennonite Sunday School Class Does,” Christian Century.
Florer-Bixler is pastor of the Raleigh (NC) Mennonite Church, and she reminds readers that Mennonites are descendants of the Anabaptists, who in the 16th and 17th centuries were persecuted “for the anti-government action of baptizing one another upon confession of faith in Jesus Christ.” So it makes great sense that her Mennonite Sunday School class struggled mightily to understand Paul’s admonition to be subject to the governing authorities. She lays out various ways to read this passage, including an argument advanced by Mennonite theologians that to be “subject” means that a Christian must submit to the state’s punishment when they rightly disobey an unjust law. Interestingly, in this post Florer-Bixler does not endorse any particular reading strategy. But she is quite clear on the point that “the Bible is a weapon in the hands of coercive power,” as evinced by “Jeff Sessions, [who,] like other tyrants before him, utilizes scripture for the good of the empire, to keep people silent, in line, submissive.”
Lincoln Mullen, “The Fight to Define Romans 13,” The Atlantic.
In this erudite article Mullen – a history professor at George Mason University – details the ways in which Romans 13 has been used in American history. It played an important and interesting role during the American Revolution: while it is not surprising that the Loyalists made great use of the call to obey the established authorities, the rebels also appealed to the text, arguing (in keeping with John Calvin) that only just authorities had to be obeyed, and unjust authorities were to be resisted. As Mullen details, the argument over Romans 13 was reignited with the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act: defenders of slavery naturally argued for active obedience to the law, while abolitionists (in keeping with the Mennonites mentioned above) argued against complying with the law while also accepting the government-imposed penalties. Mullen ends with this indictment: “Sessions may claim the Bible’s contested authority, but what the attorney general actually has on his side is the thread of American history that justifies oppression and domination in the name of law and order.”
Casey Strine, “What the Bible’s Romans 13 says about asylum — and what Jeff Sessions omitted,” The Conversation.
The thesis of Casey Strine’s compelling article comes at the very end: “The logic of Paul’s words might have sounded helpful to Sessions in isolation, but the letter they come from undermines nearly everything Sessions wants them to support.” To make his case, Strine – a Lecturer in Ancient Near Eastern History and Literature at the University of Sheffield (UK) – explains the occasion for Paul’s letter, which was the return of recently-exiled Jewish Christians back to Rome. Paul was determined that the non-Jewish Christians welcome the Jewish Christians as equals. Encouraging his readers to love their neighbors as themselves (Romans 13:9-10), Paul was drawing on Leviticus 19, which calls on the host people to care for migrants. As Strine observes, “the command to love a foreigner and to let them freely gather food that belongs to you puts us a long, long way from Sessions’ arguments.”
It is no wonder that Sessions (a United Methodist) has been issued a formal church complaint, filed by more than 600 Methodist clergy and laity for child abuse, immorality, racial discrimination, and “dissemination of doctrines contrary to . . . the United Methodist Church,” including “the misuse of Romans 13.”
Finally: if you know of any individuals or organizations needing a trial lawyer to represent asylum-seekers, please contact Barry Sawtelle at bsawtelle@kozloffstoudt.com. He has received specialized legal training with the Mennonite Central Committee, and he is volunteering his services.
Romans 13:1-2: How to Quell Dissent in Two Short Bible Verses
by William Trollinger
“Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment.”
By the time I headed off to college in 1973 I was absolutely sick of these two verses.
Growing up in evangelicalism, I was instructed — again and again and again — by my pastor and my youth leaders and my Sunday School teachers and my parents that our Baptist faith rested on the authority of the Bible. So it was my task was to immerse myself in God’s Word. Not always an obedient child, in this instance I heeded their admonitions and read the Bible, particularly the Gospels.
But by the time I was 12 or 13, I had encountered a major problem. What I read in the Bible did not square with other things I was being told in church and home, particularly when it came to politics. How was I to square Jesus’ call to love one’s neighbor with my father’s support for segregation and angry opposition to the civil rights movement? How was I to align Jesus’ instructions to “turn the other cheek” with my congregation’s full-throated support for the Vietnam War and disdain for the antiwar movement?
So in church and home I made what I thought were good biblical arguments in support of civil rights and in opposition to the war. And at some point in the “conversation” – things inevitably heated up beyond what could be called a conversation – my interlocutor(s) would often trot out a version of Romans 13:1-2.
God established government. So we are obliged to obey government. Those who resist will incur judgment. Argument clinched.
I thus felt as if I had been transported back to my adolescence when I watched Jeff Sessions and then Sarah Huckabee Sanders use Romans 13 to justify the Trump Administration’s morally reprehensible policy (just to be clear, it is not a law) of taking babies and toddlers and children away from their parents at the border. And in Dana Milbank’s op-ed piece, “This isn’t religion. It’s perversion” – where he points out all the other biblical passages that counter “the attorney general’s tortured reading of Romans” — I recognize my own adolescent counter-arguments.
The difference is that now I have a much clearer sense that those who use Romans 13:1-2 as their trump card are simply using it to shut down the conversation. That is to say, countering with other biblical passages is a pointless exercise. When it comes to separating children from parents at the border – as with the Vietnam War or the civil rights movement or even antebellum slavery (another instance where Romans 13:1-2 were favorite verses) – biblical context is not the issue. In this regard, my wise colleague Meghan Henning said it very well in a June 15 Facebook post:
I could offer an alternative interpretation of Romans, one that takes into account context, or even reads more than a single verse in isolation. But I won’t do that because the problem here isn’t one of interpretation, but of the history of interpretation. Sessions and Sanders have joined themselves to a long history of US figures who were comfortable reading the Bible in ways that do violence to other people. You don’t have to have advanced degrees in Biblical Studies to test whether your interpretation of the Bible is a part of this interpretive history. You only need to ask yourself one question: “Does my interpretation of this text hurt someone else or support violence to another person’s body?”
And then there’s Stephen Colbert’s brilliant “Jeff Sessions Cites the Bible in Separating Children From Parents”
