Did a Revolution Just Hit the Southern Baptist Convention?

New SBC president J.D. Greear

Perhaps its due to my Catholic background where Southern Baptists were often viewed with suspicion or perhaps its a result of having followed "family values" groups - whose stock in trade is generally hate and division - that often have ties to the Southern Baptist Convention ("SBC"), but I have always viewed Southern Baptists with distrust and thought hypocrisy was the most common attribute of the SBC.  In the late 1960's and early 1970's Paige Patterson and Texas Judge Paul Pressler engineered at take over of the SBC by reactionaries and Christofascists that caused the denomination to become increasingly anti-woman, anti-non-whites, and anti-gay and to conflate religion with the Republican Party.  Now, a revolt of younger generations appears to be occurring.  Better yet - as seems to be the norm with the most strident Christofascists - Pressler and Paige have been exposed as sexual molesters and/or misogynists.  This from The Atlantic:

A lawsuit filed against Pressler alleging decades of sexual molestation, beginning while the plaintiff was just 14, included two additional affidavits from individuals alleging that Pressler had committed sexual misconduct against them while they were young men. And Patterson has drawn criticism for encouraging abused women to submit to their violent husbands. He was dismissed from his post as president of Southwestern Seminary after being accused of failing to properly report at least two allegations of rape. More than 3,000 Southern Baptist women signed a petition calling for his resignation.

The Atlantic further reports on the unprecedented events at the annual convention of the Southern Baptist Convention that saw the reactionary old guard go down to defeat. Part of the changed agenda is a distancing of the SBC from the GOP.  Here are additional excerpts:  

It was immediately clear that change was afoot in Dallas. I’ve attended the annual gatherings of the Southern Baptist Convention dozens of times, but walking around the convention center this week, I was struck by how unfamiliar it all felt. . . . While the older, more traditionalist crowd was still present in Dallas, the younger, fresh-faced attendees now predominated. 

“The generational shift happening in the SBC has thrust the group into the middle of an identity crisis,” says Barry Hankins, chair of the department of history at Baylor University and co-author of Baptists in America: A History. “The younger generation thinks differently than the old guard Christian right about culture and politics, and they are demanding change.”

To enact this change, young Baptists nominated 45-year old pastor J.D. Greear from North Carolina to be president of the denomination. . . . Refusing to cede power without a fight, fundamentalist Baptists nominated Ken Hemphill as an opposition candidate. But Greear won with nearly 70 percent of the vote, becoming the youngest SBC president in 37 years.

Greear has promised to lead the denomination down a different path, which, he has said, must include efforts both to repent of a “failure to listen to and honor women and racial minorities” and “to include them in proportionate measures in top leadership roles.” If the meeting in Dallas is any indication, his vision is resonating with a large number of the next wave of Baptist leaders.

In 1967, at New Orleans’s historic Café du Monde, a young seminary student named Paige Patterson and Texas Judge Paul Pressler met over a plate of beignets to hatch a plan to unite conservative Southern Baptists and take over America’s largest Protestant denomination.

The two men successfully executed their strategy in the subsequent decades, a movement they labeled the “Conservative Resurgence” and their opponents dubbed the “Fundamentalist Takeover.” Whatever one calls it, the result was a purging of moderates from among denominational ranks, the codifying of literal interpretations of the Bible, and the transformation of the Southern Baptist Convention into a powerful ally of the Republican Party.

Central to the Patterson-Pressler revolution were teachings that barred women from the pastorate and urged wives to “lovingly submit” to their husbands. At this year’s meeting, however, the convention wrestled with its patriarchal positions. This included resolutions that condemned the abuse of women, affirmed the importance of women’s contributions to churches, and offered a confession that Baptists have often "wronged women, abused women, silenced women, objectified women." . . . .[S]everal leaders publicly suggested that women must be included in top levels of leadership. Multiple prominent leaders even insinuated that it may be time to elect a woman as SBC president, a notion that would have been considered unthinkable, if not heretical, even a decade ago.

In addition to the elevation of women, the second Southern Baptist revolution is committed to fostering greater diversity throughout the denomination.

This year’s event, however, included a noticeable increase of people of color—not just in the crowd, but on the platform. The SBC pastor’s conference, which takes place on the first days of the gathering, was led by a black pastor and six out of 12 speakers were people of color. Three sources within the denomination, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss confidential deliberations, also told me that it is seriously considering a black candidate to become the CEO of the Executive Committee, which oversees the denomination’s day-to-day operations at its headquarters in Nashville.

The inclusion of more minority voices in Baptist life will only hasten the changes already underway, said Bill Leonard, Dunn professor of Baptist Studies and Church History at Wake Forest University and author of The Challenge of Being Baptist. “This predominately white denomination knows that it must reach out to Baptists of color, but if it takes Baptists of color’s concerns seriously, it is going to have to change in other ways, including politically,” he said.

Indeed, disentangling the SBC from the GOP is central to the denomination’s makeover. . . . . Vice President Mike Pence addressed the convention this year, which may seem like the same old song to outsiders. But there was widespread resistance to Pence’s participation. A motion to disinvite the vice president was proposed and debated, but was ultimately voted down. During his address, which hit some notes more typical of a campaign speech, a few Southern Baptists left the room out of protest.

Though most Southern Baptists remain politically conservative, it seems that some are now less willing to have their denomination serve as a handmaiden to the GOP, especially in the current political moment. They appear to recognize that tethering themselves to Donald Trump—a thrice-married man who has bragged about committing adultery, lies with impunity, allegedly paid hush money to a porn star with whom he had an affair, and says he has never asked God for forgiveness—places the moral credibility of the Southern Baptist Convention at risk.

By elevating women and distancing themselves from partisan engagement, the members of the SBC appear to be signaling their determination to head in a different direction, out of a mix of pragmatism and principle.

For more than a decade, the denomination has been experiencing precipitous decline by almost every metric. Baptisms are at a 70-year low, and Sunday attendance is at a 20-year low. Southern Baptist churches lost almost 80,000 members from 2016 to 2017 and they have hemorrhaged a whopping one million members since 2003.

“Southern Baptists thought that if they became more conservative, their growth would continue unabated. But they couldn’t outrun the demographics and hold the decline at bay,” said Leonard. “Classic fundamentalist old-guard churches are either dead or dying, and the younger generation is realizing that the old way of articulating the gospel is turning away more people than it is attracting. “

Regardless of their motivations, this shift away from a more culturally strident and politically partisan stance is significant. . . . In Trump’s America, where the religious right wields outsized influence, the shifts among Southern Baptists could be a harbinger of broader change among evangelicals.

Reality Check: Young People Are Not the Problem

If one listens to right wing Catholics - e.g., delusional sites like "Church Militant which wants to return to the days of the Spanish Inquisition - the woes of the Church in today's world lies with the younger generations who are accused of moral and intellectual failings.  Any and every excuse and scapegoat is preferable to acknowledging that most of the Catholic Church hierarchy is a moral cesspool.  (A similar denial of reality afflicts the leadership of the Republican Party.)  If right wing Catholics and members of the hierarchy want to understand why younger generations are fleeing Catholicism like passengers fleeing a sinking ship, they need to look in the mirror.  Ditto for the Republican Party.   A piece in the National Catholic Reporter responds to the self-delusion of the Catholic right.  Here are excerpts:

If the recent conference at the University of Notre Dame — where speakers postulated reasons for young people's disassociation from the Catholic Church — represents the approach going into the upcoming Synod of Bishops on young people, we would beg church officials to postpone the gathering.

What we heard was a familiar litany, placing blame for missing young people on:

·        Technology — specifically youths' obsession with smartphones — which supposedly robs them of the contemplative mind and makes them "suckers for irrelevancy."
·        An aversion to "orthodoxy," a term the user brandished with the certainty that his strain of orthodoxy is the immutable version of the truth.
·        The "dumbing down of our faith."
·        The pervasiveness of pornography and relativism, of course.
·        And a new danger — the "bland toleration" of diversity, a curious addition.

According to this analysis, it is the young people, not the church, who are in crisis.

It isn't that healthy young people might be repulsed by the way that church leaders mishandled the sex abuse crisis for decades. Nor is it the money scandals or callousness toward gay and lesbian Catholics or the bishop-driven one-issue politics that has reduced religion and faith to a bumper sticker in the culture wars.

No, they say, the problem lies with young people who have acquired culturally influenced defects.

The cultural critique has value, of course, and the disaffection of young people from all manner of institutional involvement — from the local symphony orchestra to the Rotary Club — needs continued examination to figure out how institutions can be relevant to young people.

Before becoming too convinced that the reason for the disaffection lies with everything and everyone else, church leaders need to seriously examine how their own shortcomings and failures have contributed to young people leaving the church.

It is reasonable to understand that teens and young adults, living in a civil culture that increasingly accepts their LGBT friends and family members, find unacceptable the intolerance and outright discrimination of some Catholic officials and organizations.

It is understandable that a young person would rather not be part of an institution that preaches God's mercy but shows little mercy toward divorced and remarried parents.

Young people, especially young women, who know how their mothers and grandmothers struggled to gain equality in the wider culture, don't care to become involved in an institution where women are marginalized.

Isn't it also reasonable, speaking of vocations to the priesthood, that parents might hesitate to encourage their sons to join a clerical culture that has been depleted not only in numbers, but also in credibility and moral standing?

Unless church leaders at the highest levels thoroughly examine how our community became so distorted — corrupt like a white sepulcher — a synod about attracting younger members will ultimately prove a waste of time and effort.

Perhaps the breathless pursuit of young people in its embarrassing obviousness should be set aside to give church leaders time for deep reflection on what it means to be authentically humble. Replace fanciful answers to questions few are asking with a simple sign, containing one line, in each bishop's office: "You may be the problem."

A similar analysis needs to be undertaken by Republicans: there is a reason a super majority of Millennials vote Democrat.

The Catholic Church's Hypocrisy on Women

Having been raised Roman Catholic I am all too well acquainted with the subordinate position into which the Church seeks to force women.  In some U.S. dioceses, altar servers must be male, nus are subservient to priests, women are told to remain in horrific marriages, and woman cannot be ordained in any capacity.  It is patriarchy run amok and there is little sign that changes is in the offing.  Thus, the irony - can we say hypocrisy - of Pope Francis condemning wage inequality.  If Francis thinks women deserve equal treatment and opportunity, a great place to begin would be in the Church itself.  A column in the New York Times takes on the Church's hypocrisy.  Here are excerpts:

[N]either Pope Francis nor any other top official in the bastion of male entitlement known as the Vatican can credibly assert concern about parity between the sexes. Their own kitchen is much too messy for them to call out the ketchup smudges in anybody else’s.

Francis actually went beyond concern. He vented outrage, calling it a “pure scandal” that women didn’t receive equal pay for equal work.

He left out the part about women in the Roman Catholic Church not even getting a shot at equal work. Pay isn’t the primary issue when you’re barred from certain positions and profoundly underrepresented in others.

Pay isn’t the primary issue when the symbolism, rituals and vocabulary of an institution exalt men over women and when challenges to that imbalance are met with the insistence that what was must always be — that habit trumps enlightenment and good sense.

Let’s be clear. For all the remarkable service that the Catholic Church performs, it is one of the world’s dominant and most unshakable patriarchies, with tenets that don’t abet equality.

For women to get a fair shake in the work force, they need at least some measure of reproductive freedom. But Catholic bishops in the United States lobbied strenuously against the Obamacare requirement that employers such as religiously affiliated schools and hospitals include contraception in workers’ health insurance.

And how does their vilification of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, an organization that represents 80 percent of American nuns, square with women’s equality? In 2012 the group was denounced by the Vatican and put under the control of three bishops charged with cleansing it of its “radical feminist” inclinations, including more attention to the poor than to sexual mores.

[T]he church’s refusal to follow some other Christian denominations and ordain women undermines any progress toward equality that it trumpets or tries. Sexism is embedded in its structure, its flow chart.

Men but not women get to preside at Mass. Men but never women wear the cassock of a cardinal, the vestments of a pope. Male clergy are typically called “father,” which connotes authority. Women in religious orders are usually called “sister,” which doesn’t.

Isn’t it more important that there be enough priests to bring the Eucharist to Catholics than that all those priests be men?

Can the church afford to alienate a generation of young women mystified by its intransigence?  They’ve grown up in a world where all doors have been open to them,” said Kathleen Sprows Cummings, director of the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame. “And it just strikes a disconnect when they see the church with no female leadership — at least they’re not the ones at the altar.”

Francis hasn’t sanctioned any discussion of putting them there. When pressed about that by an Italian reporter last year, he reminded her that “women were taken from a rib.” . . . the metaphor remains, and it casts women as offshoots, even afterthoughts.

Pope Francis, Breeding Bunnies and Ideological Colonization

In numerous posts I have slammed Pope Francis for his anti-gay batshitery while praising his pronouncements on wealth disparity and climate change.  The man, in short, confounds me, and it seems many others.  A piece in Religion Dispatches voices the same frustrations that I have and continue to experience.  Here are highlights:

Pope Francis confounds me. How can a man who is so eloquent and obviously heartfelt when he talks about global poverty and injustice and income inequality start spouting such a collection of reheated papal clichés and utter nonsense when he starts talking about women and sex?

His just-concluded trip to the Philippines was a virtual festival of such comments, some planned and some obviously off-the-cuff–and some even directly contradictory–but most just downright confounding.

In one of the impromptu inflight press conferences for which he has become famous, Francis told reporters in one breath that “[s]ome think that … in order to be good Catholics we have to be like rabbits” but that Catholics should practice “responsible parenthood.”

Some saw this as a breath of fresh air or a major breakthrough for the Vatican. But who in the twenty-first century thinks Catholics “breed like rabbits”? That’s an offensive stereotype of Catholics that went out of date in the 1950s, when most Catholic women got on board with contraception—which the Catholic Church bans.

And he made his comments after saying Catholics shouldn’t use birth control and while criticizing a woman who was pregnant for the eighth time and facing a cesarean section: “Does she want to leave the seven orphans?,” he said, adding, “That is an irresponsibility."

So she’s irresponsible for getting pregnant eight times because she not using the contraception that you say she can’t use? . . . . Francis doesn’t seem to have the foggiest notion that the reason most people don’t use natural family planning is that it’s not reliable. It’s how you end up pregnant eight times.

In case this sounds familiar, it was a favorite theme of Pope John Paul II, who blasted efforts to expand access to family planning for women in the developing world as “contraceptive imperialism.” During the run-up to the historic 1994 Cairo Conference on Population and Development, which John Paul bitterly objected to for its emphasis on reproductive health care, all the Catholic cardinals met at the Vatican to denounce the conference as “cultural imperialism.”

The irony here is that the Philippines recently liberalized access to contraception that had been blocked by the Catholic bishops of the country in concert with the Aquino administration for more than a decade. The Reproductive Health law that restored government-financed family planning services was popularly supported by Filipinos but stymied for years by the politically powerful Catholic bishops. Who exactly was doing the colonizing here?

Women do have a lot of things to say in today’s society–like they want to use birth control to plan their families responsibly. To bad Pope Francis can’t hear them.

DUH! Catholic Church Celibacy Rule Fueled Sex Abuse

Anyone living in the real world who was raised Catholic ought to realize that the requirement of priestly celibacy played a huge role in the worldwide sex abuse scandal that has wracked the Roman Catholic Church.  Between the Church hierarchy's neurotic obsession with sex and all things sexual and the role celibacy played in offering a safe hiding place for the psycho-sexually disturbed products of the Church's teaching on sex, the formula for sexual abuse of children and youths should have been foreseen.  Nonetheless, for over a decade, the Vatican has denied that celibacy had any role in the incidence of sexual abuse.  Now, an investigation in Australia talks about the elephant in the room. As The Guardian reports, the Church is finally conceding that just maybe, celibacy was the fuse that caused the explosion of abuse.  Here are highlights:

Celibacy could have contributed to the instances of child sexual abuse in the Catholic church, a report by the church’s Truth, Justice and Healing Council in Australia has found.

The report, released on Friday as a response to the royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse, said “obligatory celibacy” for Catholic priests “may … have contributed to abuse in some circumstances”, and recommended priests undergo “psycho-sexual development” training.

Council CEO Francis Sullivan told Guardian Australia that priests needed to undergo “education” to develop emotional and sexual awareness, “like what you and I do as adults”.

Sullivan said the group was not suggesting abolishing the vow of celibacy, but rather addressing how priests can “keep the integrity of their vows”.

“It’s about learning the risks of blurring the boundaries. Knowing the risks that intimacy can bring,” he said. “We are not talking about lifting the vow of celibacy.”

The report said the church’s response to child sex abuse had been shaped by its culture and “clericalism”, which it defined as an “ordained ministry geared to power over others, not service to others”.

“Church institutions and their leaders, over many decades, seemed to turn a blind eye, either instinctively or deliberately, to the abuse happening within their diocese or religious order, protecting the institution rather than caring for the child,” the report said.

It said the selection process for priests may have contributed to a culture that ignored abuse.
The report also said the council would support a national statutory compensation scheme for victims of child sexual abuse above providing compensation directly to victims.

“The church should no longer investigate itself. It does not have the trust of victims,” Sullivan said.

As for the recommended "education" and "psycho-sexual" education, what we are really talking about if it is to be effective is years of therapy for priests screwed up by the Church's sexual teachings.

Quote of the Day: Catholic Church Neurosis on Sexual Issues

The New York Times in its opinion section has a debate going on the Catholic Church and marriage that includes allowing gay marriage and ending priestly celibacy.  One of the position statements made is by Daniel Maguire,  a professor of moral theology at Marquette University who was ordained a priest in 1956 but left the priesthood and later married and now has two children and seven grandchildren. He is the author, most recently, of "Christianity Without God: Moving Beyond the Dogmas and Retrieving the Epic Moral Narrative."  Here's the pertinent quote:

Peter, whom some consider to have been the first pope, was a married man according to the Bible. Had popes and priests followed his lead who could doubt that we would have a different church today?

Christianity strayed from the healthy sexual joy that Judaism offered in its poetic Song of Songs. Instead, influential neurotics like Augustine, who binged on sex in his youth, cast the negative shadow of his penis-obsession on the subsequent Christian view of human sexuality. The result? Women were a threat to the officially celibate male leaders; this poisoned the hierarchical attitude toward women. This is not the whole story of Catholic sexism, but it is a part.

The more one reads about the Church's 13th century "natural law" and  its obsession with all things sexual, the more one discovers that some of the "leading Church fathers" were seriously mentally ill.  Augustine is but one of the cavalcade of neurotics.   These psychologically disturbed men would have gotten along well with nutcases like tortured, self-loathing closet  cases Rick Santorum and Ken Cuccinelli.