Do not be fooled by the new Calvinists among the Southern Baptists who are stirring fears of liberals in the denomination. Lies are being told about liberal influences in one of the most conservative denominations in the nation.
And the preachers of this ilk probably know they are lying.
There weren’t many liberals in the Southern Baptist Convention in 1979, at the time the last purge began. Today, there are not enough liberals in the SBC to have a decent Sunday school class.
Rodney Kennedy
Those who warn of “woke” liberals everywhere clothe a blatantly political agenda — authoritarianism — in pious biblical rhetoric and peddle it as gospel. Calvinists preachers find authority more essential than their predestination theology.
The neo-Calvinists among the Southern Baptists are an alien branch somehow attached to the Baptist tree. They are authoritarians and deconstructionists of the worst kind, distorting truth, denominational unity, religious purity, their own denomination and the Baptist spirit of congregationalism.
Baptist life always has been premised on deliberation, pluralism and reciprocity. I speak here of the political realities of those thousands of local Baptist congregations that historically operated like free Greek city-states. Monthly church business meetings could turn into raucous disputes over matters as weighty as race or as silly as whether to sing “Happy Birthday” to church members during worship.
Deliberation was required to resolve disputes among Baptists when the issue wasn’t clearly defined in the Constitution or the bylaws — or that other magisterial document, the unwritten rules of tradition. When the meaning was not fixed or unitary, the door opened to fierce debate.
As a pastor, I loved the rough-and-tumble democracy of the Baptist church. The church operated in an atmosphere of contingency that covered the passive aggressive folks who just wanted everyone to get along to the folks who always thought we “take it to the Lord in prayer” as well as the leader who had strong-armed all his relatives and supporters to show up to help him win the vote. I learned early to count the votes before the meeting rather than during the meeting.
Being a Baptist pastor requires political savvy. I once told a church member complaining my sermon was too political, “Of course, it was political. I am a politician. How else do you think I survive in a congregation capable of dismissing me with a single vote in a Wednesday night business meeting?”
A preacher with political insight soon learned the real meetings took place in the parking lot after the deacons’ meeting — not during the actual meeting.
The beauty of congregational meetings came when hard-headed Baptists were soft-hearted enough to see the views of others. And nothing was more challenging and satisfying than helping a group divided by deeply held convictions about how the church should be operated become “one in the Spirit.”
“The authoritarian streak in some Baptist pastors is a perversion of the Baptist way.”
The outcome of a Baptist congregational meeting is never foreordained. In my experience, the only authority I had as a pastor was persuasion. Here was the thrill of my vocation: authority by persuasion, not by coercion.
The tendency to frame disagreements as a struggle between good and evil short-circuits the Baptist way of endless discussion, deliberation, multiple committee meetings and compromise between the various interests in the congregation. Preachers lacking ego integrity often are insecure enough to desire the armor of authoritarianism.
Yet the authoritarian streak in some Baptist pastors is a perversion of the Baptist way. It represents an outbreak of political polarization, marked by a rhetoric of biblical claims, demonization and feeding on spiritualized and idealized notions of the role of the pastor.
I understand the frustration of sustaining congregation rule in a climate as divisive as ours. A commitment to collective deliberation and decision-making, which is foundational to upholding the values of the Baptist way, can be hazardous for pastors.
Baptists have in the past, and in many cases still do, depend on a discourse of cooperation and discernment that promotes responsible debate of divisive issues. As messy and complex as this polity can be, it is still preferable to a discourse of illegal pastoral authority based on false biblical interpretation and manipulation that serves the narrow self-interest of authoritarian pastors.
Southern Baptists have lost the ability to name and evoke a new reality because literalism and authoritarianism combine to shut down these rich possibilities. Yet the evoking of new realities, discussion and possibilities is the definition of what a Baptist congregation is about. The give and take of argument enables a congregation to manage adversarial relations well enough to stick together, with minimal loss, for discerning the will of God.
Authoritarianism made its largest splash in the Southern Baptist river with the fundamentalist resurgence of the 1980s. The SBC turned away from good-faith participation in the theological process of discerning different meanings of Scripture. Instead of “Thus says the Lord,” the SBC retreated to “Thus says Paige Patterson” and now “Thus says Al Mohler.”
“The convention set a course toward authoritarianism that now threatens even the fundamentalist leadership of the SBC.”
As the moderate Southern Baptists relinquished leadership to the bomb-throwing, scare-mongering fundamentalists, the convention set a course toward authoritarianism that now threatens even the fundamentalist leadership of the SBC.
The new Calvinists, as usual, are not satisfied. In their view, the SBC still has too many liberals. The politics of polarization has been a constant mark of the Calvinists. They are even more authoritarian than the fundamentalists and over the course of the last 40 years they have been about the business of destroying the remnants of free will, deliberation, pluralism and reciprocity.
The role of the authoritarian pastor resembles a demagogue. The goal of a demagogue is not to advance deliberation and debate but to shut it down. The more authoritarian the pastor or the leader of a denomination, the more issues are no longer eligible for discussion.
And if someone with enough status forces a discussion, it is quickly and definitively shut down.
At this week’s SBC annual meeting in Indianapolis, messengers will vote for a second time on the Law Amendment, a constitutional prohibition of female pastors and preachers.
Recently, the First Baptist Church of Richmond, Va., voted to leave the SBC because of the Law Amendment.
Senior Pastor Jim Somerville put the matter exactly right: “We believe every Baptist church has the right to determine its own mission and ministry and to ordain whomever it perceives to be gifted for ministry, whether male or female. The Southern Baptist Convention can’t tell us what to do, but it can tell us that it doesn’t want to have anything to do with churches like ours, and it has.”
The peaceful, legitimate right of a Baptist congregation to determine its own policies is the keystone to the Baptist way, but an unmitigated push for pastoral authority by Calvinist pastors is pushing the SBC into a tighter and more restricted theological circle. Calvinists never have met a denomination they didn’t think they could strengthen by making it smaller and ridding it of pernicious liberal influence.
If the Calvinists break the will of Baptists to be a free people, capable of discerning the will of God in each congregation, then none of the institutions will work for long, and we will be at the mercy of the dictators of pastoral authority.
Rodney W. Kennedy is a pastor and writer who serves in New York state and Louisiana. He is the author of 10 books, including his latest, Good and Evil in the Garden of Democracy.
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