By David Gushee
In this column, I go where angels fear to tread: I want to muse over the future of moderate Baptists. My thoughts will be especially informed by my recent years of service with students at Mercer University.
As the years slip by, it becomes clear that the Southern Baptist Convention’s denominational conflict of 1979-1991 (with aftershocks) has less and less salience for anyone who did not live through it. Certainly, the 22-25-year-old student cohort at McAfee School of Theology does not wake up each morning thinking about the titanic clash between white fundamentalists and white moderates over the direction of the SBC. They were in preschool in 1991. They care about the future of the church as a whole, not the past of the SBC. They feel bewildered by — and maybe even a little sorry for — those who can’t stop talking about the past.
The paradox for moderate Baptists is that there is not really an existing theological or denominational paradigm that really works as a way forward. Those who might like to go back to the status quo ante, to Louisville or Wake Forest circa 1975, find that you really can’t go home again. History moves forward, rather than backward. That world is gone, and nostalgia doesn’t fill pews or seminary classrooms.
Many of the older moderate ex-Southern Baptist generation as well as some of our young students are attracted to the models and institutions of mainline Protestantism. They resonate more with The Christian Century than with Christianity Today, more with First Presbyterian than Saddleback Community.
As a contributor to the Century and one with extensive mainline experience, I deeply appreciate that part of the Christian landscape. But here and around the world, with the brute force of undeniable raw numbers, the mainline is fading precipitously. Does it really make sense to try to tag along?
Any study of the emerging Christianity of the Global South (e.g., the work done by Philip Jenkins) clearly shows that where Christian vitality is to be found is with evangelicalism, and especially in its charismatic-Pentecostal form. The same is true in the United States, though here vitality means basically holding steady numerically in a context of general decline for Christianity. Catholicism is also hanging in there numerically.
So Catholicism and demonstrative, passionate evangelicalism appear to be the forms of Christianity that will have strength as of 2040, if current trends continue — but moderate Baptists aren’t too high on either. They’ve never really warmed too much to Catholicism, which they consider as authoritarian and (especially in recent decades) politically reactionary.
Meanwhile, “evangelicalism” is, for many, a dirty word. This is one of the great residues of the denominational conflict. I am reminded regularly: Moderates are not to be understood as evangelicals. Why? I can think of four reasons, three more legitimate than the fourth.
The first is because the historical trajectory of moderate ex-Southern Baptists and northern evangelicals is not the same. This is an honest and justifiable stance. The second is that self-identified evangelicals generally have a more conservative view of biblical inspiration than (some) moderate scholars and pastors. This would need further study. The third is that the demonstrative passion of many evangelical Christians sits poorly with the more formal preferences of many moderates, who prefer robes, hymns and candles.
But I think that at a more visceral level, for some veterans of the denominational wars evangelicalism equals fundamentalism, which equals the SBC takeover, which equals suffering and wrongdoing. This equation of evangelicalism and fundamentalism/SBC takeover would be a surprise to, say, Tony Campolo, who has always identified himself as a (progressive) evangelical and is a favorite among moderate Baptists. But the identification is immovable among many moderate Baptists.
So if moderates can’t go back to the past, and really shouldn’t cast their lot with the mainline, and don’t want to join with the evangelicals, where will they go?
Some of us who witnessed the miracle of interracial community at the New Baptist Covenant meeting in 2008 thought that maybe there we caught a glimpse of the future — an interracial beloved community of Baptists who, for a few days, overcame the 400-year old scars of racism and slavery and followed Christ together. I get something of the same feeling when I congregate with the Baptists who meet at the Baptist World Alliance annual gathering each summer.
Maybe that’s the future — a people who are forward-looking, post-Western, post-American, post-white-South, post-Baptist/Christian cultural hegemony; an inclusive, interracial, gender-equal global community of Baptists (and others!) who strive to love Jesus, each other, and a hurting world with intelligence and passion.
But we’ve never done that before, and it will require both great leadership among us and the powerful winds of God’s Spirit to even imagine nearing that dream in our lifetimes.