The Southern Baptist Convention appears to be returning to its deeply oppressive and problematic roots. This past week, the new president of the SBC, Willy Rice, in an interview with Fox News, encouraged people to go out and vote. And although he didn’t directly say to vote for Donald Trump and the Republican Party, he made it pretty clear by stating Southern Baptists should vote on issues like abortion, gender identity and immigration.
The immigration issue is interesting because he made sure to qualify that quickly. Although he quickly threw out that we should care for the “least of these,” he went on not so subtly to defend the Trump administration’s harsh immigration tactics in the name of security and sovereignty, which, of course, were not issues Jesus seemed to focus on in his ministry (and which are not antithetical to having a humane immigration system).
Will McCorkle
Specifically, he stated, “Some people in power (are) trying to manipulate Christians by saying, ‘Since you must demonstrate compassion, therefore you must embrace open immigration, or you must not insist on enforcement of the immigration law.’… But when you think about it, that is very, very manipulative. No one would say that because you love people or care for people, you should leave the doors of your house unlocked or you should open up the jail cells in your own community. That’s not in any way logical.”
He went on to state: “A person can love people and care for people and want humans of all kinds and races to flourish but also believe that a nation has not just the right but the responsibility to have laws to protect its own citizens and to regulate who comes in a country for all kinds of reasons.”
The analogy itself is tired and misguided. Immigrants are not coming just to live off our charity or to “take over your house,” but are actually the ones often holding our economy up and doing jobs others will not do. This is a non sequitur used to deflect from the massive human rights abuses of the Trump administration and how he has been persecuting immigrants in the United States and shutting down legal immigration at every turn. Ironically, many of these immigrant families who are being torn apart are in Rice’s own denomination.
Presenting a binary of Trump’s cruelty versus “open immigration” is a false choice.
“The modern SBC is, unfortunately, going to be viewed in history as we have viewed other groups that have aligned themselves with a dictatorship.”
This type of justification of oppression aligns, unfortunately, with the history of the SBC in the 1800s, as the denomination was formed with the defense of slavery as a central platform. Now, when we have our own forms of white Christian nationalism, such as only letting in white South Africans as refugees, deporting people to countries they’ve never been to, and having children as young as 3 years old testify in their own asylum cases, you would hope the SBC president could maybe find a little bit more of a prophetic voice.
Instead, he appears to quickly find reasons we really don’t need to care for the “least of these,” so there is no discomfort with the congregants continuing to overwhelmingly support Trump.
The modern SBC is, unfortunately, going to be viewed in history as we have viewed other groups that have aligned themselves with a dictatorship, whether that was the Catholic Church under Franco, the evangelicals under the military dictatorship in Guatemala, or much of the Protestant and Catholic Church in 1930s Germany. It’s a sad position.
It shows how far the Southern Baptists have fallen — or rather returned to their roots. It shows why white evangelicals are one of the only groups still holding on to Trump — because of exactly this type of leadership.
In a time when we need courage, and at a time when we need the confessing church, the Southern Baptists have not spoken out but have run further into the hands of Trump’s inhumane and unconstitutional policies while the rest of the country and world looks on in dismay.
History will not be kind to these type of alliances, and Jesus weeps as his children are treated as expendable in a church that wants to do foreign missions but seems fine as Trump sets up concentration camps around the nation for those same people.
Will McCorkle serves as an education professor in Charleston, S.C., and is a board member with Practice Mercy Border Ministries. He writes on the topics of immigration, peace and faith.