As the Southern Baptist Convention in its recent annual meeting has proved itself unreliably Baptist, it gives me pause to think about how quickly the transmogrification of this Baptist denomination into its ecclesiastical opposite has happened.
Baptist folk often have named the moment in history when Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire “The Fall of the Church,” but the church has been falling for this temptation all along.
Stephen Shoemaker
I was talking with my “baptist” preacher friend Kyle the other day — I like James McClendon’s suggestion that baptist should be spelled with a lower case “b” so better to represent its minority and dissenting faith character — and asked him, “Do you know of a time in Christian history when a denomination or major religious body has so completely changed its spiritual character?”
Calling all church historians! He remembered hearing James Forbes quote a political philosopher who said, “Pay attention to what changes when an organization gets power.”
“Pay attention to what changes when an organization gets power.”
I have a functional definition of a sacrament: What the church does not allow women to do. Again and over again in the last 40 years, the SBC has demonstrated its chief sacrament is power. Only males need apply to lead.
But our attraction to power goes farther back to when we became the dominant religion of the South. We began to enjoy our cultural power — and then our political power. In 1996, the president, vice president, Senate president pro tem and Speaker of the House all were Southern Baptists. That they were Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Strom Thurmond and Newt Gingrich demonstrated the broken homogeneity of Southern Baptist religion.
What was happening in those days was, as Republican political strategist Kevin Phillips observed, “evangelical, fundamentalist and Pentecostal denominations” taking on “juggernaut status” as the new plurality in American religion. The Republican Party was shrewd to enlist them in its surge to power.
It may be true that the SBC in its lust for power has become more a part of that religio-political juggernaut than Baptist. That Al Mohler would recently be on a podcast with Doug Wilson, the fundamentalist preacher most in favor with the present administration, is a case in point.
Kevin Phillips was a key political strategist who helped flip the South from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party. In his 2006 book, American Theocracy, he laments what has happened to the Republican Party, that it has become “The First American Religious Party.” And he uses the religious and political takeover of the SBC as a case study.
The incipient Republican theocracy now has become reality.
When the Massachusetts Bay Colony banished Baptists from the colony, the 1644 law described us as “incendiaries of the commonwealth, and infectors of persons in main matters of religion, and troublers of churches in all places.” Urian Oakes, president of Harvard College at the time, said of Baptists, “Anabaptism we shall find hath ever been lookt at by the Godly Leaders of this people as a Scab to be contended against.”
There was a TIME magazine issue in 2005 featuring “The 25 Most Influential Evangelicals.” A good number of them bragged about their relationship with the White House. They used to talk about their relationship with Jesus. In a time when the formerly Baptist SBC hankers after cultural and political power, perhaps there are Baptists who are still willing to be, to use Elton Trueblood’s phrase, “an incendiary fellowship”.
A good starting place would be a close observation and following of Jesus of Nazareth.
Stephen Shoemaker most recently served as pastor of Grace Baptist Church in Statesville, N.C. He previously served as pastor of Myers Park Baptist in Charlotte, N.C.; Broadway Baptist in Fort Worth, Texas; and Crescent Hill Baptist in Louisville, Ky.