You can’t tell a Baptist anything. This is one of the highest praises and damning criticisms of the group. They are a contrarian type of people. Willing at times to bite their noses off to spite their faces and bite…
A Baptist boy’s journey toward faith, freedom and authenticity
When I was 5 years old, I believed I could be nothing but a Southern Baptist. My friends were Southern Baptists, my family was Southern Baptist, and my Appalachian community likewise was Southern Baptist. We worshiped in a small brick…
57 years ago, student protesters were welcomed at SBC annual meeting
I can regularly count on late May and June as a time when news about the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention begins to circulate. This year was no exception. It seems this year dealing with charges of sexual…
Imagine this great cloud of Baptist witnesses around the Resolute Desk
Two images crowd into my mind. One is of President Donald Trump sitting at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, surrounded by a group of evangelical leaders. The other image is the cover artwork of Margaret M. Mitchell’s The…
Red Dawn: Baptists’ contradictory contributions to the rise and demise of America
In the 1980s, in the throes of the Cold War, huddled in a Baptist college dorm room with friends, I watched the original version of the movie Red Dawn. The film portrays a hypothetical invasion of the United States by…
Christian nationalism: A Baptist evaluation and response
Christian nationalism: Does such a thing exist? If it does, what is it and how did it emerge? Is it a threat? How should we respond to it? To answer these questions, I do not offer a political treatise representing…
New book makes a case for why conflict can be good for a church
Striving to avoid congregational conflict can backfire in churches where members feel unable to live and worship authentically within their own fellowships, according to the author of a new book on addressing divisions within Baptist churches. “What happens in many…
The Christian case for democracy
For most of my life, American Christians were cheerleaders for democracy. That’s when we were in charge of the democracy. Today, oddly, many conservative Christians no longer believe in or support democracy. They seem to favor a kind of theocracy…
Are our churches prepared for Christian autocracy?
A 1638 treatise titled A Discourse about Civil Government in a new Plantation whose design is Religion, written in response to the founding of New Haven, Conn., contained this definition of a properly Christianized government: Theocracy, or to make the…
‘I came to watch a great convention die’
I attended my first Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting in June 1987. Participation was part of my first class at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Bill Leonard’s J-Term study of the SBC. I was standing with Leonard, then and still our…
Doom-scrolling, sourdough starter and three kinds of kin
During a late-night doom-scrolling session on my phone, those all-knowing algorithms of social media converged and hacked up a hairball-like collection of my recent online search results. Cosmic Creepers, our jumpy black cat, a master of regurgitating all things grossly…
Defender of the Faith or Defender of Faith — a distinction informed by Baptist history
With the death of Queen Elizabeth II on Sept. 8, her heir, Charles, became King Charles III. Accompanied by grief and grateful tributes from around the world, Elizabeth II’s death marks the end of a lengthy era of British history…