One week after the Southern Baptist Convention made national headlines for a variety of its actions, a smaller Baptist group will meet for its annual General Assembly that’s not likely to make headlines anywhere but here at BNG. And that’s…
70 years ago today, ‘under God’ was added to the Pledge of Allegiance
George Docherty was a progressive Presbyterian minister serving in the nation’s capital. In 1965, he marched with Martin Luther King Jr. across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., in a civil rights demonstration after Bloody Sunday. Docherty later criticized the Vietnam…
Here’s what you need to know to understand that SBC resolution opposing IVF
The Southern Baptist Convention has not always opposed abortion, and Southern Baptists have not always opposed in vitro fertilization. This week’s adoption of an anti-IVF resolution by messengers to the SBC annual meeting represents yet another rightward shift in the…
Don’t be lulled by the failure of the Law Amendment
The narrow failure of the Law Amendment to receive two-thirds affirmation at the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting should not give anyone a sense that women in ministry are welcome in the SBC. Nor should this vote — or any…
Chair of SBC abuse task force explains why it is hard to get anything done
Because of the massive size of the Southern Baptist Convention, it is nearly impossible to bring about internal change. Nowhere is that more evident than in the failure of two consecutive sexual abuse reform task forces to bring meaningful change….
Breaking news: SBC will vote on three explosive motions Wednesday morning
Three new and potentially explosive issues will come up for a vote by messengers to the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting Wednesday, June 12. That will happen before the convention considers another highly controversial matter carried over from last year…
The Law Amendment may not be the most important action taken at next week’s SBC annual meeting
The Southern Baptist Convention has been at war with itself for more than 40 years, with each new battle promising uniformity that never materializes for long. This year’s SBC annual meeting, happening next week in Indianapolis, represents another major front…
Notes from the abused at Kamp Kanakuk: ‘You know what Satan is doing, but you still let him in’
Editor’s note: Names of some survivors are omitted to respect their privacy. Since the exposure of sex abuser Pete Newman at Kanakuk Kamps in 2009, a growing community of child sex abuse survivors and justice advocates has formed. In interviews…
The Law Amendment is one more SBC backlash against women
Next week, the Southern Baptist Convention will hold its annual meeting in Indianapolis and vote on the second reading of what has come to be known as the Law Amendment. A proposed amendment to the SBC’s Constitution, named after the…
Rosaria Butterfield is not a model for becoming un-gay
Growing up as an independent fundamentalist Baptist, I was taught that loosening any standards meant you were getting on the slippery slope toward becoming gay. If I grew my hair out over my ears, I might eventually reject God and…
Making sense of denominational decline and church shifting
Evangelical Protestantism continues to be a growing force in American Christianity, as Mainline Protestant denominations continue to decline, but where are these converts coming from? There is very little data showing where Christians go when they convert away from a…
The NRA is a (mostly) changed organization, but the American public must not look away
In 2018, I did something most people wouldn’t dare do. While making a play about guns in America, I took a group of high school students to the NRA annual meeting in our hometown of Dallas. What we saw and…