Anti-Muslim remarks by a Missouri Baptist executive have made their way onto Al-Jazeerah, the pre-eminent news network in the Arab world.
In an Oct. 30 speech to the Missouri Baptist Convention, Executive Director David Clippard said: “Today, Islam has a strategic plan to defeat and occupy America. They are after your sons and daughters …. Your freedom is on the floor with their foot on it, with their sword raised, and if you don't convert, your head comes off.”
The crowd of 1,200 Baptists reportedly cheered.
“They have a plan to take over,” Clippard said, claiming the Saudi Arabian government paid for 15,000 Muslim college students to come to North America to study—with the intention, he claimed, of taking the continent for Islam.
Clippard's comments were picked up by American newspapers, then by Al-Jazeerah and other media in the Muslim world. Christian missionary leaders warned the speech could spark violent reactions and endanger American missionaries in Arab countries.
A daily English-language email news bulletin from Al-Jazeerah posted an editorial that appeared Nov. 8 in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and quoted Clippard. The editorial noted, “It is irresponsible for a religious leader to use the pulpit to inflame religious and ethnic tensions at such a volatile time in the nation's history. Mr. Clippard's demagogy is inexcusable. … It also is inexcusable to reward intolerance with cheers, applause or, for that matter, silence. A nation that enshrines freedom, equality and fairness should practice what it preaches.”
Al-Jazeerah quoted the editorial without comment.
Clippard declined to elaborate or explain his comments, instead referring reporters to a number of books in which the allegations are made.
Meanwhile, some of Clippard's conservative Missouri Baptist constituents are calling for his resignation. In an email to fellow Baptists, Bob Garringer called for Missouri Baptists to distance themselves from Clippard's “wild-eyed fanatical words.”
“It's imperative that the [Missouri Baptist Convention] and [Southern Baptist Convention] firmly and humbly renounce his comments and declare that his statements do not reflect our position,” wrote Garringer, a Missouri pastor. “Members of the executive board must also seek his immediate resignation. Otherwise, we will have made a Tom-Foley-like breach of ethics, and our renunciation will be rightly regarded as hypocritical.”