Dear Southern Baptist Convention: Welcome to Indianapolis!
We Baptists — at least, the “normal” kind, whose pastoral leaders possess no desires of grandeur to elevate themselves to “bishop,” or “prophet,” or “apostle” — frequently joke about who might be bishop if we were of the monarchical bishop tradition. It is in the spirit of that joke that I say I might be the closest thing to one of the Baptist bishops of Indianapolis — this great city, not in the south, I observe — to which you have come for your 2024 annual meeting.
Because I am no bishop, I speak for myself, not my organization; and as a mere Christian, I am moved to write this plea to you: Let my people go! Although the biblical premise I use for this plea opens the door to some uncomfortable, even confrontational-sounding postures, I do not seek to be hostile.
Michael Friday
SBC, let my sisters go! Our recent Pentecost celebrations reminded us that God’s unlimiting Spirit enables and gifts male and female alike to prophesy — to preach and lead. Yet, you deny our sisters this God-given gift and ministry. You effectively enslave our sisters, daughters and mothers in living room, kitchen, bedroom and pew. You deny their freedom in the pulpit. SBC, let my sisters go! Liberate them to prophesy and lead. Stop quenching the Spirit.
SBC, let my “brothers” go! The ideological DNA that formed you in 1845 still prevents you from fulsomely championing the cause of Black and colored people in America today. As Pharaoh created the system that brutalized the Israelites, there are U.S. senators and representatives in your churches stealing Black and colored folks’ votes through chicanery and corrupt laws, making policies that continue to rob Black people of their fair share of community, housing, health care, the market and their franchise.
The Senate minority leader — a member of a Southern Baptist church — behaves like a pharaoh, imprisoning the votes and will of Black people. With malice toward all, aforethought and with forked tongue, he stole a seat on the Supreme Court of the United States and deceitfully grabbed a second, from a Black president. You never condemned this wickedness; you welcomed it with rejoicing. And now, this vagabond of a corrupted court’s many judgments are busily crushing and endangering Black women, Black men, Black students and Black opportunity, rolling back their rights and protections.
You watch our brothers languish in prisons, in morbidly disproportionate numbers to our white sons and daughters, or worse, executed for crimes they did not commit on the watch of pharaoh-senators, congressmen and governors, who sit in your SBC pews. You say these “brothers” need salvation; yet you watch in silence while some among you create policies that perpetuate a wicked, corrupt, oppressive and sinful system that engulfs these brothers and their families in various kinds of hell in America.
You dishonor your Black members with your do-nothing deafening silence while blue-uniformed Caesar kills people for walking, driving, breathing, answering their own doorbell or sleeping in their own bed, while Black. SBC, let my “brothers” go!
SBC, let my faithful go! Restore their soul freedom to them. Release them from your ascetic, cabal-built, theologically flawed prisons. You have the name of being Baptist but you are a caricature of a rogue episcopate.
“Your ancestors fled Europe precisely to escape the burden you now place upon your people — my people.”
Baptists have no creed. We sign no statement at the peril of dismissal. We do not dismiss churches for exercising their competence to recognize divine gifting and to call their own pastors, otherwise known as autonomy. Your ancestors fled Europe precisely to escape the burden you now place upon your people — my people. It is the Spirit who should control them, not you, not church, not pharaoh. Let my people go!
SBC, let my children go! One among you sends shoe boxes to poor children abroad, presumably in the name of love. But neither he nor you ever said a mumblin’ word when poor refugee children arrived on our southern border, were separated from parents and placed in “shoe boxes” for weeks.
Let our children go! They can handle the truth. They need no “alternative” account of the Holocaust or slavery. They need no silence from you while ultra-far-right saboteurs corrupt school boards and mangle syllabi. They need no “alternative” truth from those who say you know Jesus, “full of grace and truth.”
Raise your prophetic voice against every wickedness that attempts to maliciously redact history in their classrooms! Stop erasing sins rather than pursuing repentance, restoration, reparations and righteousness in the land. It is, still, only the truth that sets us free!
Stop disparaging Critical Race Theory while you say nothing about the entrenched white supremacy it addresses. Denounce the lie that Critical Race Theory is taught in classrooms. SBC, let my children go!
SBC, let my voters go! Diffuse the lie you know prevails among your people, who say no Democrat, or any person who votes Democratic, could be Christian. Get spiritual surgical severance from your Siamese twin — the current iteration of the Republican Party that even honorable Republicans view as corrupt, bankrupt and un-American.
Your loud voice — if you would only add to it the truth and stop your dangerous dalliance with the “Whore of Babylon” — may save America and the church from retribution, rape and demolition “she” promises, should “she” be given a second chance.
Is there no balm in Gilead, no SBC voice in America, to denounce multiplied abuses of power, people and resources, by numerous powerful national figures who are SBC, which make our land barren? The speaker of the House of Representatives — a member of an SBC church — acted like, and on behalf of, a pharaoh, when he manipulated and abused the law to attempt to steal the 2020 elections for his party, while lying that the other side stole it. He and other SBC public figures sow distrust in our elections and division in the nation. You consent with silence.
Where is your prophetic witness in the tradition of Micah, Amos, Joel, Isaiah, Jeremiah and the others?
Where is your prophetic witness in the tradition of Micah, Amos, Joel, Isaiah, Jeremiah and the others? Is your famed evangelism devoid of justice, rendering it bad news? Is your version of salvation so inadequate as never to liberate the dispossessed, never denounce judges who take bribes, merchants who rob people, employers who withhold employees’ pay, and the powerful who take advantage of the poor?
Who has bewitched you, O SBC, who once viewed abortion with a sense of balance, justice, personal and professional responsibility in the 1970s; but today, gaslight it, not from serious, responsible, thoughtful, theological, medical or communal reflection or conviction, but with a matchstick of careless, callous and capricious desire for sheer power and sinister control?
You demonize women suffering already from pregnancy issues, for abortions that frequently save their lives; you sentence them to pregnancies which themselves are frequently the product of abuse, and to the perpetual abuse to follow for which you care nothing the moment the baby is born; and you consign preteen girls to bear the seed of their rapists.
You ridicule, otherize and diminish our LGBTQ siblings, while you struggle publicly with stubborn heterosexual abuse scandals and homosexual abuse scandals that appall decent people. You raise no prophetic voice in Nashville, Louisville, Fort Worth or Dallas against a philandering, sexual-abusing, name-calling, other-demeaning, race-baiting, violence-fomenting, Nazi-encouraging, adulterer, fraud, demagogue, insurrectionist, incorrigibly mendacious liar, and now, multiple-convicted felon, who promises to be a dictator and eight of whose cabinet, White House and campaign operatives are now convicted criminals or felons.
Where are your Nathans? Where are your watchmen? If you fail in your calling to speak truth to power and to America, then you — along with any other American Christian leader who similarly fails — are false prophets, lying to the people like Hananiah did even while Judah was slipping away into exile before their very eyes.
SBC, come forth from your 2024 meeting with a resolution that denounces racism, deception, insurrection, electoral distrust, legislative wickedness, judicial corruption, white supremacy, demagoguery, female subordination (which is the portal to female abuses of all kinds), right-wing populism that has delivered many of your people into a cult, and the patently antichrist “Christian” nationalism that has spawned it.
Emerge with an unequivocal rebuke and repudiation of convict Donald Trump as a national leader, icon, role model for your children, or a friend of the church; he is a corrupter of the faith and faithful.
Repent! You and every national figure among your ranks, repent! Be Baptist once more! Be Christian once more! SBC, let my people go!
Michael Friday serves as executive minister of the American Baptist Churches of Greater Indianapolis. He is the author of And Lead Us Not into Dysfunction: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Church Institutions and Their Leaders. He has served Baptists in Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica and the USA.