From WSJ-Opinion Journal:
Will “Nice Baptists” bring America together? Don’t bet on it.
by John Wilson
Feb. 2, 2007“Southern Baptists were the first Free Church movement to start a civilization. It’s called the South.” Don’t you wish you had quipped that? But credit goes to Duke University’s Curtis Freeman, who says he got it from his colleague Stanley Hauerwas, the noted theologian.
At any rate, that civilization has since been transformed almost beyond recognition and now exists only in fragments. One sizable chunk is the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S., with a membership exceeding 16 million souls. If former President Jimmy Carter has his way, however, soon there will be a formidable alternative.
The SBC has often been in the news in the past few years, following the ascendancy of hyperconservatives such as Paige Patterson, currently president of Southwestern Seminary in Fort Worth. A former theology professor at Southwestern recently told the Associated Press that she had been compelled to leave her job because the Bible prohibits women from teaching theology to men.
No wonder many Southern Baptists are restless. Some have started or reinvigorated Baptist seminaries that serve as alternatives to the ones dominated by hard-liners. Many have simply minded their own business, shaking their heads and doing their best to ignore the diktats of Mr. Patterson and his fellow commissars. Others–including President Carter–have left the denomination in protest.
Earlier this month, Mr. Carter went a step further. He announced the formation of a new coalition of “moderate” Baptists to counter the SBC image and to change the perception of Christians in public life. The Nice Baptists–let’s call them–are to include several historically African-American Baptist denominations and some smaller Baptist groups that are mostly white, together amounting to, it is claimed, more than 20 million members.
“We hope . . . to emphasize the common commitments that bind us together rather than to concentrate on the divisive issues that separate us,” the Washington Post quoted Mr. Carter as saying. “There’s too much of an image in the Baptist world, and among non-Christians, that the main, permeating characteristic of Christian groups is animosity toward one another, and an absence of ability to cooperate in a spirit of brotherhood and sisterhood.”At first glance it seems strange to cast this “moderate” Baptist initiative–which patently seeks to establish a rival to the SBC–as a rebuke to divisiveness. Perhaps Mr. Carter is seeking to deflect charges that the proposed new group will be a vehicle for Democratic Party politics. Former President Bill Clinton–also raised a Southern Baptist–did join Mr. Carter at the Jan. 9 coalition announcement, which promised a convention to promote a “New Baptist Covenant” early in 2008. No doubt politics–the SBC is a Republican stronghold, so the Nice Baptists can be a Democratic counterweight–is part of the picture.
Yet there is more than that underlying the rhetoric of Mr. Carter’s proposal. What’s on display here is a persistent fiction in public discourse, a phony account of our common experience. First comes an exaggerated emphasis on discord, then the promise that–at last!–someone is proposing to transcend division, to work for the good of us all.
You can find this same script, for example, in Bill Moyers’s manifesto “A New Story for America” in the Jan. 22 Nation magazine. There, we are given “the real political story, the one most politicians won’t even touch: the reality of the anonymous, disquieting daily struggle of ordinary people. . . . The leaders and thinkers and activists who honestly tell that story and speak passionately of the moral and religious values it puts in play will be the first political generation since the New Deal to win power back for the people.”
Really? A look at any newscast will remind us that we haven’t reached the Promised Land. Nevertheless, Americans of every stripe routinely work together for a dazzling array of common goods. And while Christians all too often fall short of the example set by the one whose life is supposed to be their model, still, every day and in every city Southern Baptists and Methodists and Willow Creekers and Pentecostals join hands with fellow believers–and with those who don’t share their faith–to feed the hungry, to shelter the homeless and to provide disaster relief all over the globe. Many, like my wife, volunteer for hospice organizations and spend some of their time each week with the dying.
None of this means that Americans agree across the board on matters of faith and politics, or on which team to root for in the Super Bowl. Some of our disagreements are trivial; many are not. But Mr. Carter’s suggestion that the Nice Baptists will lead their fellow Baptists (and, by implication, the rest of us) out of the wilderness is absurd. It grossly underestimates the extent to which Americans are already looking for common ground, and it grossly overestimates the impact of whatever new initiative or candidate is being hailed, be it the “New Baptist Covenant” or “A New Story for America” or the charisma of Barack Obama.
One of Mr. Carter’s fellow organizers, Mercer University president William Underwood, suggested that the new coalition will address global ills such as the resurgence of malaria and starvation in Africa. Wonderful! There’s no shortage of work to be done. But please, spare us the trumpets and zithers.
Also see: The Jimmy Carter Un-Presidential Library.
Mr. Wilson owes us Baptists an apology. He has based an opinion piece in a major national newspaper on erroneous information about the plans for a new Baptist Covenant. No one has proposed a new Baptist convention. No one “patently seeks to establish a rival to the SBC.” And no one involved thinks that a new Baptist Covenant can accomplish the things Mr. Wilson attributes to its desires.
The new Baptist covenant is an effort to reestablish cooperative efforts between Baptist groups which have been divided since before the Civil War. It is a call for existing conventions to cooperate on such global problems as poverty and hunger. It is an effort to heal divisions between Baptists north and south, black and white.
It was the press which substituted the word “convetion” for the word covenant. The planners neither used the word nor had the intention of estabilishing a new Baptist Convention. The press also has tried to cast this very noble effort as a political ploy. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton just happen to be the only two living ex-presidents who are Baptist. Are they to be prohibited from exercising statesmanship among their own fellow believers? Many Republicans as well as Democrats are involved.
Most sadly of all to me as a Baptist minister, is the fact that Mr. Wilson profoundly misunderstands Baptists. He does not understand how our polity works, what the issues are among us, or what it is we are trying to accomplish. He has simply allowed his political bias to shape his entire view of a noble effort to bring healing to a badly divided people.
David Sapp
David,
Perhaps you should read this: Carter, Clinton woo Baptists to new coalition
And the Southern Baptists could use a good house-cleaning anyway. The holier-than-thou hubris runs amok down thar!
I lived in NC awhile back. All the dry counties ran bootleg liquor. Every one of the main bootleggers I knew were leaders in the Baptist Congregations or ministers of Baptist churches. I couldn’t believe it. These guys controlled many small towns like Islamic imams do their brethren.
I also have many SBs in my family. Biggest hypocrites I ever knew. They’re elitists, and would have nothing to do with anybody not in their flock.
All this hubris is hilarious, coming from a bunch of ignorant hillbillies.
It made me decide NEVER to have anything to do with the SBC. Too damned corrupt and filled with false Christians.
ANY changes made in the SBC could only be good.