Southern Baptist battle goes full MAGA: Far right seeks to purge CRT and "Race Marxism"

[marmar]

Southern Baptist battle goes full MAGA: Far right seeks to purge CRT and "Race Marxism"
America's largest Protestant denomination is dominated by the far right — but still fears creeping "wokeism"

By KATHRYN JOYCE
PUBLISHED JUNE 15, 2022 7:00AM


(Salon) Just weeks after the Southern Baptist Convention was rocked by a report documenting sweeping mishandling of sexual abuse, the nation's largest Protestant denomination is gathering in Southern California for its annual meeting, where delegates known as "messengers" will elect a new SBC president. What happens in the SBC, with its deep connections to the Republican Party and the anti-aborion movement, inevitably affects U.S. politics more broadly. But this year, the reverse is true as well: The fight for the SBC presidency doesn't just track the nation's wider political divides but seems largely driven by them.

As Michelle Boorstein reports at the Washington Post, this year's meeting began Sunday with a pugilistic tone, at an opening event hosted by the Conservative Baptist Network, part of the denomination's most right-wing faction. At the event, neo-Calivinist megachurch pastor John MacArthur inveighed against progressive positions on race and women's roles in the church by declaring, "You don't advance the kingdom of God by lining up with the kingdom of Satan" — the latter apparently exemplified by the threat of "women preachers, social justice, then racism, then CRT, then victimization."

The SBC is no stranger to intense internal politics. In the late 1970s and '80s, the denomination underwent a conservative revolution — or, in SBC parlance, a "conservative resurgence" — led by right-wing leaders like Paige Patterson and Paul Pressler who sought to transform the previously moderate church into one oriented around staunchly conservative positions on both theology and social issues. (Although the SBC was originally founded to defend slavery, the first Southern Baptist to become president, after all, was Jimmy Carter.) Conservatives were appointed throughout SBC leadership positions and seminaries amid a purge of liberals and moderates, and the new leadership went on to institute a more literal approach to theology, which in turn helped cement conservative positions on social issues like gender roles. One of the most consequential changes was a new article added to the Southern Baptist statement of faith, affirming the idea of complementary gender roles, under which wives must graciously submit to the authority of their husbands. In response, Carter left the denomination, along with nearly 2,000 SBC churches.

As historian of Christianity Diana Butler Bass wrote recently at Religion Dispatches, what was long cast as an SBC "myth about saving their church from liberalism" was in fact "always about exerting control — especially about controlling women." And as Mark Wingfield wrote at Baptist News Global this March, "After running off all the left wing and most of the moderate wing of the SBC, the convention was left with a national body that sits even further right on the American political and theological spectrum than it did before." .............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2022/06/15/southern-baptist-battle-goes-full-maga-far-right-seeks-to-purge-crt-and-race-marxism/

[CurtEastPoint]

1. Irony alert: Sou Bappies meeting in CALIFORNIA?

[lees1975]

2. Yesterday, Southern Baptists turned back the Conservative Baptist Network

https://signalpress.blogspot.com/2022/06/southern-baptists-make-progress-on.html

The key officer election for Southern Baptists is the president. Yesterday, the Conservative Baptist Network's endorsed candidate lost to a non-aligned candidate by a 60-40 margin. On Monday, the executive committee of the denomination defeated the two CBN candidates for officer positions and elected officers who have been openly opposed to CBN's influence. The pastor's conference also turned back a CBN-endorsed candidate who was a vocal opponent of CRT.

Don't start thinking that Southern Baptists are becoming progressive. But, the conservative faction had taken a strident, pro-Trump stance, and was using rhetoric and tactics that resembled the lack of ethics and principle shown by Trumpism, and it was known to have been motivated by trying to remove Russell Moore from his position at their lobbying commission because he was a never-trumper. Southern Baptists will always be a very conservative denomination, far to the right of mainline Protestants, but they are resisting being dragged down the hole of heresy with the fundamentalists, dominionists, white Christian nationalists and other extremists to which CBN would have opened the door.

And yes, they are holding their annual meeting in Anaheim, California in the convention center right across the street from Disneyland. They also regularly go to Orlando. But they've met in California before. Outside of the south, the largest number of Southern Baptists in any state is in California, about half a million members.

[lees1975]

3. Does Turning back a Pro-MAGA faction mean Trumpism is waning on the religious right?

So, the analysis in the Salon piece is interesting. If what the SBC does is affected by national politics, and they have just turned back an openly Pro-MAGA faction's agenda, do we say that the influence of Trumpism is waning?

[Caliman73]

10. No. That only works when one progressive candidate is defeated.

Then all progressive action must stop and America needs to take notice and stop agitating for more than just the status quo.

Doesn't work on the right. Just means that they weren't strong enough in their agitation.

[scarletlib]

4. A number Baptist affiliated colleges also withdrew from the SBC

[Lars39]

5. That's good to hear!

I have a niece who unfortunately goes to Union University. They are full-tilt whatever the worst of the SBC decrees.

[BComplex]

6. The Baptist church is a CULT. They have only gotten worse through the years since

the 70's and 80's. They turned hard right and crashed.

[Jilly_in_VA]

7. I predict

that the SBC is going to split big time, and it will be a lot more public and much, much uglier than the Cooperative Baptist (Jimmy Carter's church) withdrawal. This one will be big time fireworks, kind of like the Methodist Church is having now. (FWIW, even though I have UMC friends and relatives and once had a cordial relationship with that denomination, that's out the window.)

[Initech]

8. Someone's been watching too much Tucker Carlson lately.

[ck4829]

9. Well, kids might find out *why* the Southern Baptist Convention was formed

And they definitely would not want that.