The Southern Baptist Church Has Always Been Safe Harbor for ... Flamboyance

 

Southern Baptists are hilarious. The largest Protestant denomination in the nation, wagged by the tail of 10,500 "messengers" (out of way-over 12 million total members), voted overwhelmingly at this year's annual convention in Dallas (happening this week) to approve a resolution calling for the reversal of Obergefell, the Supreme Court's decision 10 years ago legalizing gay marriage.

Andrew Walker, an "ethicist" (what?) at a Southern Baptist seminary in Kentucky, wrote the resolution and admitted that he and his anti-gay allies in the church are playing the "long game," like Maoists of old, never giving up their longshot at reversing the Law of the Land -- a public policy of sweeping and basic humanity, the legal right for gay couples to form family units, which is actually supported by a huge majority of Americans in poll after poll. The long game of people like Andrew Walker is based, after all, on what worked just fine in eventually getting rid of abortion rights. Their fanatical patience to outwit, outplay, and outlast majority opinion seems blessed right now by the general run of authoritarianism taking over the nation, not to mention the current membership on the Supreme Court (Messrs. Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch and no telling who else). Political evangelicals -- those whose piety is most influenced (or dented, actually) by the colossal sinners they need to keep in power -- they know whose feet to kiss, who deserves a laying-on-of-hands. 

Anyhoo, I'm about to draw on decades of fairly intense immersion in the Southern Baptist ethos of West Texas -- as I contemplate how those Baptist messengers in Dallas must rationalize the implicit insult their vote against gay marriage must be to the closeted gays and, yes, queers, including frequently the church organist and music director, that sit in pews in every last one of those strict churches (I'm betting). Some LGBTQ Baptists, raised from infancy in Sunday School and Vacation Bible School and Sunday night preachings and spring revivals and special youth activities, never left home, physically or psychologically, and never gave up their innocent and true faith that they have been saved and born again by the grace of Jesus Christ. They can't quit the church that nurtured them, the family and neighbors they enjoy dinner-on-the-ground with, and besides, they don't cause any trouble, stay to themselves, and anyway, everyone knows already, like everyone also knows you don't mention it, you don't speak of it, you pretend it isn't even there. Good Lord! Gay people -- many who admittedly didn't know (yet?) that they were gay -- they were everywhere in the Southern Baptist world I grew up in.

Not that I was a Baptist at first. I was the sole Pentecostal -- speaking in tongues, the works! -- in school with mainly Baptists, and a smattering of what everybody called Campbellites, and one or two Methodists. (Loved the Methodists because they weren't afraid to have fun. People said they held young-people dances in the church basement.)

I was actually good friends with at least two queer Baptists in high school, though in those days I didn't have a clue what that meant and probably neither did they. I did know that queer was something you didn't want to be called, without understanding at all the physical implications in that word. Queer kids from good families were common, not numerous but certainly there, and I later understood that they knew how to pass, to fit in, to be a part of the social fabric of that society -- accepted for their quirks, especially their unusual talents and high IQs. Whatever went on in private in the dark was beyond my ken, not to mention my elementary understanding. I was not just a nerd. I was an oblivious nerd. My obliviousness actually got joke-awarded as a senior when I received the Out to Lunch Award at a graduation luncheon (where else but at the local Baptist Church). My classmates were trying to tell me something, which I still didn’t get. I took the trophy and turned to my (closeted gay) friend, “What does this mean?”

I began to get more of a rough education in definitions when I attended Wayland Baptist College on a scholarship, the only Pentecostal on campus. Ironically, despite the macho reputation of a Texas-upbringing, the place was pretty well supplied with soft boys and what I heard for the first time called "squishes," actually really nice guys who were kind and generous and often very funny, who were majoring in music and psychology and English, pursuing the trajectory of their religion into church music and counseling and teaching -- hell, some of those nice boys actually thought they wanted to be preachers and were heavy into religion classes -- hiding or playing games with their identities and (I guess) suffering in the hollow silence. Some dated girls. Some even married girls and enjoyed by all appearances long, successful marriages. They never unraveled an inch of their carefully ironed fabric of denial and conformity.

Here’s a confession: I wasn't baptized into the denomination, at a fairly big church in Plainview-By-God, Texas, where I was a Junior in college, until I decided to social-climb. I had been dating a brainiac Southern Baptist woman, and we were going to get married. Her whole family was Southern Baptist. I thought I needed to be too. I had grown tired of being the only holy-roller, and had begun to think for myself. Some of my humanist teachers were making me less doctrinaire. I had become a skeptic who asked a lot of questions.

Considerably later came the scandals that ripped at our pious smugness -- the literal outings of Bible-thumping evangelical shouters who were discovered to be covering up a secret life, or revealed to be imposing themselves on young acolytes, or proving to be blabber-mouth drunks. I seem to remember one of those coming out of Jerry Falwell University recently. Hell, Jerry Falwell hisownself had a gay speechwriter named Mel White who also ghost-wrote Falwell’s autobiography as well as the official autobiographies of Pat Robertson and Billy Graham.

So this is the message the Southern Baptist majority have sent: Gays are just fine in church and serving as amanuenses and organists and music directors, even counselors and youth directors, as long as they live the lie, stay invisible and undemonstrative about any secret proclivities, not to mention any legal rights they might wildly and mistakenly think they need.

That’s why the Southern Baptists are unintentionally hilarious.

Depend on the Southern Baptists

 

There is a movement in the Southern Baptist Convention, a denomination that is often a bellwether for evangelical America, to purge women from its leadership.

-- "Southern Baptists Move to Purge Churches With Female Pastors," NYTimes

Rick Warren

No one seems to know exactly how many Southern Baptist churches have female pastors, associate pastors, sub-pastors, youth pastors, etc. Some estimates go as high as 2,000 different churches. Five of those churches, including the famous Saddleback Church in Southern California (made famous by founding pastor Rick Warren and his bestseller, The Purpose Driven Life), have been expelled from the denomination. Warren had retired as pastor and named a husband and wife team as his replacements, a dangerous precedent that the fundamentalists can't countenance:

The right wing of the Southern Baptists, the largest Protestant denomination in America, is now — like conservatives more broadly — cracking down on what it sees as dangerous liberal drift. Most people in the denomination have long believed that the office of head pastor should be reserved for men. But an ultraconservative faction with a loud online presence is going further, pressing for ideological purity and arguing that female pastors are a precursor to acceptance of homosexuality and sexual immorality.

Wow. Whatever else, Southern Baptists are now not only tops in membership but tops at driving away young people. 

The annual Southern Baptist Convention is going on this week in New Orleans, and a proposed amendment to the S.B.C. constitution would further restrict the role of women. The amendment sez a church can be Southern Baptist only if it “does not affirm, appoint or employ a woman as a pastor of any kind.”

Tops at driving away educated women too, especially at a time when the whole church is under federal investigation for concealing and allowing widespread pastoral sexual abuse.

What's the polemical temperature of the "messengers" at the convention this week in New Orleans?

On Tuesday night, Mr. [Rick] Warren made that appeal [to have Saddleback Church reinstated in the denomination] from the floor of the convention to more than 12,000 delegates who would vote on whether to readmit his church.

“If doctrinal disagreements between Baptists are considered sin, we all get kicked out!” he said, noting that the S.B.C.’s theological statement is 4,032 words. “Saddleback disagrees with one word,” he said. “That’s 99.99999999 percent in agreement! Isn’t that close enough?”

The crowd shouted back at him, “No!”

The trumpian psyche in religion. But by their fruits you shall know them. Perhaps not incidentally, yesterday the Convention voted against allowing back into the denomination Saddleback Church and one other in Louisville that had allowed the ordaining of women.

The Shepherds Were Exploiting the Flocks

 

The Southern Baptist Convention represses sexuality in everyone but its preachers. That's not just the conclusion of an independent investigation (voted on by delegates at the church's convention last summer); that's the conclusion of someone who was a Southern Baptist for years, attended and graduated from a Southern Baptist College, and knew many Southern Baptist pastors and would-be seminarians. The last Baptist church I attended in Salt Lake City had a pastor who was accused of sexual harassment by a good friend of mine. I haven't forgotten that.

The report also revealed that an executive committee staff member working for Mr. [August] Boto [a poweful member of the church's executive committee] had, for more than 10 years, maintained a detailed list of ministers accused of abuse. But no one “took any action to ensure that the accused ministers were no longer in positions of power at SBC churches,” the report stated. The most recent list, it added, contained the names of hundreds of alleged abusers affiliated with the denomination at some time. Investigators reviewed the same list and reported that it appears nine people remain at least connected to work in a ministry setting, including two connected with a Southern Baptist church.

It said that leaders including Ronnie Floyd, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention who resigned as the head of the executive committee in October, had resisted the creation of a task force to investigate the executive committee. Mr. Floyd did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

The report described revelations in recent years that senior leaders had “protected or even supported abusers.” The leaders included three former presidents of the denomination, Steve Gaines, Jack Graham and Paige Patterson, as well as a former vice president and Mr. Boto, a former executive committee interim president and general counsel. A spokesman for Prestonwood Baptist Church, where Mr. Graham is pastor, said the church “categorically denies” the way the report characterizes an incident under his leadership in which it alleged Mr. Graham quietly dismissed an accused abuser on his staff rather than contacting police. Mr. Gaines and Mr. Patterson could not be immediately reached for comment.

 

Surprise! Southern Baptists Reject a Trumpist Leader

 

Late yesterday news broke that the Southern Baptist "messengers" at their convention in Nashville had selected Ed Litton as their president, which is considered a defeat for the hard right within the denomination. Litton "narrowly defeated" Mike Stone, the favored candidate of the far right (Litton 52%, Stone 47.81%). Stone actually led Litton in the first round of voting, when there were three candidates.

The Trumpists focused much of their wrath on "critical race theory," an effort by American historians to examine "structural racism," which has been baked so thoroughly into both white civic structures and white habits of mind that it's become essentially invisible to white people conditioned to deny its existence. According to Sarah Pulliam Bailey, some of the far right wore red stickers on their convention badges that read “Stop CRT” and “Beat the Biden Baptists.”

Yes, apparently there are "Biden Baptists." They, and a bigger than usual attendance by young people, put Ed Litton into leadership.

Litton, pastor of First Baptist Church North Mobile in Alabama, pitched himself as someone who would lead the convention toward more racial reconciliation. According to Christianity Today, Litton "has led efforts for pastors in the Deep South to acknowledge and heal from their racist history and joined black pastors ... in opposing 'any movement in the SBC that seeks to distract from racial reconciliation through the gospel and that denies the reality of systemic injustice.' ”

Southern Baptist Church Braces for a Trumpist Takeover

 

I used to be a Southern Baptist -- graduated from a Southern Baptist college in Texas -- so I paid sad attention when many of its most prominent leaders went ga-ga for Donald Trump, proclaiming that God Hisself sent Trump to save conservative Christianity from secularism and modernism and humanism and Democrats.

How odd for God to choose a lying, self-dealing, inheritor of Nebuchadnezzar's pride and arrogance to save Christianity, let alone the Southern Baptist Church. That would be kind of an impressive miracle in its own right, a twisted miracle.

Right now a rising tide of Trumpist pastors are intending a hostile takeover at the church's convention this coming week in Nashville. Ruth Graham reports: "Like the Trump movement within the Republican Party, a populist groundswell within the already conservative evangelical denomination is trying to install an anti-establishment leader who could wrench the church even further to the right, while opponents contend that the church must broaden its reach to preserve its strength. For three days, thousands of delegates known as 'messengers' — most of them white men — will fight over race, sex and ultimately the future of evangelical power in the United States."

Turns out the church hasn't been Trumpist enough? I'm stunned.

The Trumpist pastors are especially mad about the few -- the very few -- who dared proclaim to their congregations that Black lives matter, and it's like the whole pro-slavery, racist history of the church has been resurrected to do proxy battle for white supremacy. That's what it looks like to me. I have my own history with the church, and I know the lingo. The Trumpists have seized on "critical race theory" (like they seized on other handy words four years ago, like "socialist" and "Marxist") as the demon threatening their hegemony.

Understanding race in America exposes the foundational DNA of this particular brand of fundamentalism, and these Baptists don't relish looking at themselves critically, or honestly. They were a pro-slavery church when they split from Northern Baptists before the Civil War, and I can tell you that the impulse to separate people by race still runs deep among the brethren. Some have tried to repent those views, while some -- like the extremist preachers looking for a coup next week -- ain't repentin' nuttin.

"A Porous Sieve of a Denomination"

A collection of mugshots of some of the 220 SBC pastors
or other church workers who were convicted of or pleaded guilty
to sexual crimes -- just since 1998.
Compiled by The Houston Chronicle

Because I grew up in the nurturing embrace of Texas Southern Baptists, among other Christian fellow-travelers, and spent untold hours in church being warned about Hell, and went to college at a Texas Southern Baptist institution (where I was actually lucky to be invited to read widely and learn more than I had so far been taught), I have not been able to tear myself away from "Abuse of Faith," an extensive (3-part) investigation into Southern Baptist Church sexual misconduct by its pastoral leaders -- not just in Texas but across the nation -- including highly inappropriate and even criminal activity in the pastor's study, in the choir room, on the pews, and out in the parking lot (or wherever The Spirit leads).

A team of reporters from the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News has spent months investigating this sorry history:

1992. A lawyer for the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) writes in a court filing that the SBC does not distribute instructions to its member churches on handling sexual abuse claims, and therefore can't be held liable for negligence. Every Baptist church is famously independent, the lawyer argues, "autonomous" (a point of fierce pride), and therefore the Convention has no authority to order churches to track sex offenders.

2007-08. Some Baptist Church victims of sexual predation begin to organize in Texas (the largest concentration of Southern Baptists in the nation) and raise hell and demand a predator-tracking system. "Name names!" In response to the pressure, the Baptist General Convention of Texas publishes eight names of pastors who have been convicted of sex crimes.

2008-18. Baptist Church victims continue to cry out and encounter the stone wall of top SBC leaders who coincidentally include several who have themselves participated in or covered up bad behavior.

2018. A 40-year-old Texas woman, Debbie Vasquez, stands before the Southern Baptist Convention and again requests a tracking system that would identify pastoral personnel who have been creditably accused of abuse or convicted of sexual assault. The Convention rejected her request.

(In "Abuse of Faith," Vasquez reveals that decades earlier she had been sexually exploited by her pastor from the age of 14 until she was pregnant by him at 18. When the leaders of her church discovered the pregnancy, they "forced her to stand in front of the congregation and ask for forgiveness without saying who had fathered the child." Even though Vasquez sued pastor and church in 2006, and the pastor had to acknowledge paternity of her child, he was welcomed to continue pastoring and didn't go to jail.)

The Vasquez case caught the attention of Houston Chronicle reporters who began to search news archives, websites, and databases nationwide to compile an archive of allegations of sexual abuse, sexual assault, and other serious misconduct involving Southern Baptist pastors and other church officials. They focused the search on the 10 years preceding the victims' first call for a registry (1997-2007) and on the 10-plus years since (2008-2018).

At least 10 SBC churches welcomed pastors, ministers, and volunteers since 1998 who had previously faced charges of sexual misconduct. In some cases, they were registered sex offenders.

In the last 10 years more than 250 people who worked or volunteered in Southern Baptist churches have been charged with sex crimes. Since 1998, roughly 380 Southern Baptist church leaders and volunteers have faced allegations of sexual misconduct, leaving behind more than 700 victims, "many of them shunned by their churches, left to themselves to rebuild their lives. Some were urged to forgive their abusers or to get abortions."

Arriving at this inescapable conclusion: "... All a con artist has to do is talk a good talk and convince people that he's been called by God, and bingo, he gets to be a Southern Baptist minister. Then he can infiltrate the entirety of the SBC, move from church to church, from state to state, go to bigger churches and more prominent churches where he has more influence and power .... It's a porous sieve of a denomination."

All of this rings several bells of memory for me, and I could tell stories. You didn't grow up in the faith and come to an age of reckoning without hearing multiple tales, sometimes from your female friends who had just been pawed and told they were beautiful young instruments of God. It was different then, because nobody did anything. Women were more reluctant to raise a stink because they knew the condemnation would come down on them ... especially in an organized religion that still preaches "Wives, be subject to your husbands" and "the women should keep silence in the churches." 

A Boy From Yadkinville Is Now President of the Southern Baptist Convention

Pastor J.D. Greear

J.D. Greear won the election for the presidency of the Southern Baptist Convention, and you might think it's the Beginning of the End, at least so far as conservatives are concerned. American Family Radio's big mouth, Bryan Fischer, thinks Greear is too homosexual-friendly and will lead the denomination into the darkness. He's been attacked for being liberal on immigration (oops, DJT!) and for wanting to protect the Dreamers. And I believe I just heard Greear interviewed on National Public Radio this morning, suggesting that Southern Baptists needed to de-couple themselves from the Republican Party. Whaaa?

Greear is pastor of an odd mega-church in Raleigh-Durham-etc. "Odd" because it's not a single congregation but a series of "campuses" equipped with big-screen tvs. The church is building itself a big new facility in north Raleigh estimated to cost $20 million.

Greear is a hit among millennials, which apparently makes some of the old church lizards mighty nervous. He's a theological conservative -- everyone agrees on that -- but he thinks women should have leadership roles in the church (short of being pastors, mind you!), and he condemned the recent scandal surrounding Paige Patterson's covering up of rape allegations at Southwestern Theological Seminary. (Greear actually studied theology under Patterson.)

But then there's that stuff about embracing homosexuals. And that other stuff about not endorsing Donald J. Trump or his policies.

When I was a young Southern Baptist, attending a Southern Baptist College in Texas, I would have welcomed the arrival of a J.D. Greear as a breath of fresh air. Is it a passing and insignificant zephyr? Or is it a muscular wind that will blow away the bargain the historic church made with the White Jesus of politics?

Blessed Be the Peacemakers

Certainly is instructive to our Christian faith to find out -- via a Texas Baptist, no less! -- that God has given express permission to Trump to nuke North Korea.

Can the rapture be far behind?

Religion and Politics in the Age of Gay Marriage

When the president of the Southern Baptist Convention publishes an essay titled "A Country in Chaos: What Southern Baptists Should Do" in The Baptist Press, no way under God's blue sky shall I not pay heed.

"Chaos"? It's the gay marriage thing and the incipient threat that any minute now some gay couples are going to be showing up at Southern Baptist congregations all across the land and demanding a big church wedding, with gay ring-bearers and the whole works!

With the legalization of same-sex marriage, the reverend writes,

we see a country divided and teetering on a moral collapse. You see, as many of us warned, this is not the end, but the beginning of so much more. The court's overreach could now push us to more of a divide, creating chaos in many towns, cities and states. Plus, the court itself, the White House and Congress will begin to see that some people are just not going to give up their values.

Some will be willing to walk away. Southern Baptist Linda Barnette resigned her county clerk job after 24 years, refusing to issue marriage licenses for same-sex couples. I spoke with Linda and her husband Sherman of Mississippi, encouraging and thanking them for their stand. Let me make something clear: This couple and others like them are not troublemakers or radicals, but born-again Bible believers who stand on the authority of Scripture.

I'm totally cool with "Southern Baptist Linda Barnette" resigning her job because of her "values." She should do exactly that. She's in the minority, apparently, among public officials paid to do a job who subsequently refuse to do that job because doing it would offend their Christian beliefs. (There are such officials, a few of them, in certain counties of Alabama, where the clock hasn't ticked a second past 1926, and in Texas, where clocks are actually running backward now. Even in North Carolina, where the General Assembly, accompanied by much religious grandstanding, passed the magistrate recusal law, only a handful of magistrates, out of over 600, have opted out to issuing marriage licenses. They didn't want to do their jobs. They don't have to now by law.)

I wanted to push on to the end of the reverend's article, to the subhead "What We Should Do." Pray is number 1, and of course. Nothing wrong with that. Number 2 is "Raise up convictional leaders who will do what is right in the eyes of God," and that Byzantine word-choice seems designed to hide what is actually being said.

"Convictional leaders"? What does that mean? After much prayerful thought, I believe it means "leaders who will never relent on their opposition to gay marriage," and the good reverend is in very good stead with the entire 128-candidate field of Republicans running for president. Every last one of them has expressed outrage about the Supremes' gay marriage ruling.

"Raise up convictional leaders," the reverend advises. Raise up. Is that more of the call to action of # 1, i.e., pray? Probably it means something a little more, something along the lines of "make your local church a forward base for political activism, O my brethren."

In other words, do exactly what you've been doing for years.

Hardly seems like action commensurate to the destructive chaos descending on America, does it? What? No pitchforks and torches? No calling down fire from heaven on the heads of sinners?

Southern Baptists: "Gay Rights" Are NOT Civil Rights

The Southern Baptist Convention, meeting in New Orleans, elected its first black president, proving that racial justice can eventually penetrate even the most fossilized doctrinal mind, and then the Convention turned right around and affirmed its belief that "gay rights" is not and cannot ever be the same as "civil rights." The new black president of the Convention apparently approved that formulation.

SBC Goes Heretic Hunting

Watching from this distance the accusations of "heretic" being tossed about within the Southern Baptist Convention, I'm reminded of something Robert Ingersoll said more than a century ago: “Heresy is a cradle; orthodoxy, a coffin.”

Whose Chickens Are Those, Flocking Home To Roost?

The Southern Baptist Convention, which stigmatizes gays, campaigns against gay marriage, and hates a possibly Kenyan-Muslim President for endorsing equal rights (among other Great Sins), wants everyone to know that it has no connection to the Baptist preachers currently (and very recently) in the news for advocating physical violence against a minority. "We don't even know these guys," they write, but we appreciate the detailed summary they provided in The Baptist Press of the evidence that they share a certain DNA, despite their desperation to deny it:

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (BP) -- Anti-gay sermonizing by several independent Baptist pastors has stirred a backlash of death threats, calls for criminal prosecution and planned public protests. 

In question are sermons and comments posted to YouTube and Facebook promoting the genocide, punishment or prosecution of gays or suspected gays. The posts have gone viral on the Internet. 

Among them are anti-gay comments by pastor Charles L. Worley of Providence Road Baptist Church in Maiden, N.C., advocating the genocide of gays by enclosing them behind electrified fencing until they "die out" from the inability to reproduce. 

Pastor Sean Harris of Berean Baptist Church in Fayetteville, N.C., has apologized after he encouraged parents to "punch" and "crack that wrist" of their sons and daughters if they exhibit suspected gay behavior. 

Pastor Ron Baity of Berean Baptist Church in Winston-Salem, N.C., has called for the criminal prosecution of gays. Conversely, a Washington watchdog group is calling for the criminal prosecution of pastor Ronnie Spriggs of Hager Hill Freewill Baptist Church in Kentucky after he preached a sermon telling congregants not to vote for President Obama. 

State Rep. Andy Gipson, R.-Miss., is defending himself against death threats at his home after he posted on his Facebook page the Leviticus 20:13 law calling for the death of those engaging in homosexual sex. 

None of the pastors are affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention; only Gipson is a member of a Southern Baptist church in Magee, Miss., and a bivocational minister....

Holy Crap

Where the Pro-Discrimination Folks Are Getting Their Talking Points

Many of the leaders supporting Amendment 1, and some of those posting comments on this blog, echo the preachments of a crowd that gathered in Wake Forest last week at a Baptist seminary. Bob Geary was there and wrote a lengthy account in The Independent, "Does the Religious Right really believe equality will allow us to marry ice cream?"

Geary's account is certainly a window into the theocratic soul: the paranoia, the group coercion, the fantasies of persecution ... all the stuff I grew up with and was surrounded by continually in West Texas, the firm belief that The Devil was after US and was represented most clearly by THEM.

"We can leave this morning determined that we're going to do God's will on this amendment," thundered former Republican state Sen. Jim Jacumin of Burke County. "Confront the devils who are arranged on the other side."

Ah! Everything's so much clearer when there are DEVILS.

On the issue of the constitutional discrimination represented by the language of Amendment 1, Daniel Heimbach, senior professor of Christian ethics at Southeastern Baptist Seminary in Wake Forest, said:

For starters, gays can marry.... They just can't marry each other. Heimbach then spun out an amazing circular argument: Restricting marriage to straight couples cannot, by definition, be discriminatory as long as marriage is defined as a man and a woman and same-sex couples are barred from marrying or entering into civil unions.

It was as if he had said that, because voting was at one time limited to white people, not allowing blacks to vote wasn't discriminatory because, well, blacks weren't white.

Heimbach said marriage is defined now as the union of two people who together can produce a child. "If marriage is radically redefined as a way of just affirming loving feelings of attraction," he said, "then equality will require allowing people who love dogs to marry dogs. And people who love ice cream to marry ice cream."
That's what he said.

"Senior professor of Christian ethics"!

Suddenly, I feel like agreeing with every poster on this blog who screams that college professors are complete idiots.

Sunday Morning Wake Up

The Baptist State Convention of North Carolina has forced out the editor (since 2007) of its bi-weekly newspaper, The Baptist Recorder ... one Norman Jameson. The increasingly conservative denomination was increasingly unhappy with Jameson's writing mainly -- it appears -- because he was increasingly a voice of skepticism about "the creeping Calvinism" that is taking over in Baptist theological training and the movement to purge "unregenerate" Baptists from church rolls.

You can read a sample Jameson editorial here, one particularly aimed at that "creeping Calvinism" mentioned above. It's good writing. Offers insight, too, into those denominational cross-currents that were riling us up even back in the early 1960s when I was a student in a Baptist college in Texas. There's nothing much new under the doctrinal sun.

One of Jameson's targets for criticism was Al Mohler, President of the Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville, whose various hair-brain preachments recently included the dangers that yoga offers your immortal soul and the suggestion that, if indeed homosexuality turns out to be a predetermined genetic predisposition, then maybe future homosexuals can be "cured" in the womb.

The North Carolina Baptist empire is certainly safer this morning for the viewpoints of Al Mohler.

Looking for Sin in All the Wrong Places

Albert Mohler, President of the Southern Baptist Seminary, has surveyed the current landscape and come to the inescapable conclusion that the greatest danger to the mortal souls of his flock is ... wait for it ... yoga.

It took Mohler exactly three paragraphs in his essay to finger a principal culprit in spreading the popularity of yoga ... wait for it ... Michelle Obama. Yup. When you've got agents of Satan as supple as the Obamas, might as well use 'em!

Rev. Mohler: "...the growing acceptance of yoga points to the retreat of biblical Christianity in the culture. Yoga begins and ends with an understanding of the body that is, to say the very least, at odds with the Christian understanding."

Ah, the Southern Baptist understanding of the body! That's a topic that never took more than a single sentence when I was growing up: "Don't touch anything! You're going to hell if you do."

This silly attack on an exercise regimen is gonna rank right up there with a few other recent Southern Baptist initiatives, like the S.B. Convention's vote on June 12, 1996, to boycott Disney World because of employment policies recognizing gay partnerships for insurance coverage and the June 10, 1998, doctrinal mandate that "a wife is to submit herself graciously" to her husband.

That's the kind of "sin" that my church likes to fixate on. Not a word about the exploitation of people and the planet by the forces of greed.

Franklin Graham, Chief Pharisee

It's all about Franklin Graham. No closet praying for him. He needs to be noticed. Like the Pharisees of Jesus' day, if you're not standing in the middle of the crowd, making a giant show of your piety, what's the point?

On Tuesday, Graham threw down the gauntlet to President Obama. If the president didn't intercede and get him re-invited by the Pentagon to display his significant holiness on the National Day of Prayer, "it will be a slap in the face of all Christians."

Because, see, Franklin Graham is all Christians. Resistance is futile. He not only speaks for all of us; he is all of us.

In His day, Jesus couldn't stand this kind of self-righteous church jerk.

FOOTNOTE
Matt. 6:5-6

And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.

But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.

Mount Airy Baptists Turn Wine Into Gall

About 100 Mount Airy Baptists say that drinking wine is "not a Christian thing to do," and intend to be obnoxious this weekend to people attending the Mount Airy Budbreak Wine Festival on the obviously sinful streets of Andy Griffith's hometown.

The Baptist preacher leading this sanctified effort said, "We are taking an opportunity to proclaim Christ. We will be holding signs and banners so people driving in and out from the event can see our message-- Jesus saves."

People driving in and out of the event should hold up signs too: "Jesus made wine."

The Gospel of John, Chapter 2:
6. And there were set there six waterpots of stone, after the manner of the purifying of the Jews, containing two or three firkins apiece.

7. Jesus saith unto them, Fill the waterpots with water. And they filled them up to the brim.

8. And he saith unto them, Draw out now, and bear unto the governor of the feast. And they bare it.

9. When the ruler of the feast had tasted the water that was made wine, and knew not whence it was: (but the servants which drew the water knew;) the governor of the feast called the bridegroom,

10. And saith unto him, Every man at the beginning doth set forth good wine; and when men have well drunk , then that which is worse: but thou hast kept the good wine until now.

11. This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana of Galilee, and manifested forth his glory; and his disciples believed on him.

Being a well-dunked Southern Baptist, and a graduate of a West Texas Baptist college to boot, my ears always vibrate a little when the Southern Baptists make the news (HT: James at BlueNC).

Would-Be Book-Burner Threatened with Fine for Polluting the Air

Update on Rev. Marc Grizzard of Amazing Grace Baptist Church in Bethel, N.C., and his announced plans to burn a whole bunch of Bibles that aren't King James versions and other literature similarly inspired by the devil, including tomes written by Christian mullahs like James Dobson, and so-called Christian music by the likes of Amy Grant et al.

Previously.

Today's development.