The Southern Baptist Convention, Far Past The Age Of Accountability

Photo by The Baptist Press (released for Creative Commons Usage)

The Southern Baptist Convention is meeting this week in Nashville. 16,000 “messengers” will converge to vote on the message for the forthcoming year, amendments and statements, and elect leadership. The gathering, “Annual Meeting” in the SBC nomenclature, happens every year that isn’t a pandemic, but this year you are going to see plenty of mainstream news coverage of the event. Think of it as an Robert’s Rules of Order, wrapped in a trade convention, but with sermons and singing, while functioning as the world’s largest church business meeting.

But that isn’t why the secular press is all over the SBC meeting this year. The mainstream coverage of America’s largest Christian denomination is going to be focused on one subject seemingly everyone is talking about, one topic nobody seems to want to talk about, and a planned invasion of pirates.

Yes, I said pirates. I wish I was joking. This is a bit of a long rip from David French’s Sunday newsletter but it condenses a lot of what is going on with the SBC well:

With revelation piling on revelation, on Friday, the SBC Executive Committee announced that it had engaged a respected, independent firm called Guidepost Solutions to “review recent allegations against the SBC Executive Committee of mishandling sexual abuse allegations and mistreating sexual abuse victims” and to review “allegations of a pattern of intimidation.”

All this barely scratches the surface of the sex-abuse issue, which is troubling and complicated enough to fill out a convention’s worth of debate on its own. But then there’s also the roiling controversy over Critical Race Theory. In fact, just as decisive opposition to CRT is becoming a litmus test for Republicans, so it is becoming a litmus test for the most conservative wing of the SBC.

The convention will feature an effort to effectively void 2019’s Resolution 9, a resolution on Critical Race Theory and intersectionality that said CRT could serve as a useful “analytical tool” so long as it was “subordinate to scripture.” Even though the resolution specifically repudiated “the misuse of insights gained from critical race theory [and] intersectionality” especially when “absolutized as a worldview,” critics still deem it too “woke.”

The end result is that thousands of messengers will flock to Nashville, some under a pirate flag, vowing to “take the ship” and repudiate “wokeness” at exactly the time when two of the SBC’s most prominent members, Russell Moore and Beth Moore (no relation to each other), have been chased from the denomination under a hail of hatred from the far-right, including from outright racists in the SBC itself.

Thus it is no surprise that there are now black Southern Baptists who vow to leave the denomination if the SBC completely disavows CRT. Especially since, as Baptist pastor Dwight McKissic notes, the “National African American Fellowship of the SBC [is] unanimously opposed to denouncing CRT in its entirety.”

And to compound the challenges facing the SBC, it’s in the midst of a long-term membership decline. It’s lost 2.3 million members since 2006, including more than 435,000 last year alone.

All these issues will be framed in the vernacular Southern Baptist use: It’s about Biblical standards, it’s about focusing on ministry, it’s about spreading the Word, it’s about what’s best for everyone, it’s about following Scripture, it’s about maintaining the Southern Baptist Convention. At least there is honesty in that last one. I’ve studied theology for 20 years and more now, both academically and just because I like it, so I can bust out the library and theological terms if they really want too. But none of that is needed here.

All that is needed is some honesty.

One of the oldest debates in religion, which the Southern Baptists have participated in as well, is the debate over the age of accountability. The age a child becomes self-aware, able to understand things like right and wrong, sin and salvation, God and man. The heady stuff of human existence which would make them personally responsible for their own actions and capable of spiritual understanding.

When it comes to abuse within their own ranks and racial issues, The Southern Baptist Convention is far beyond the age of accountability.

As the coverage unfolds, you can cut through the language and look at the actions to figure out what is really going on with the Southern Baptist Convention. If the answer to “This is what we are going to do to stop abuse in our churches and covering it up by our leaders” is anything other than “Whatever it takes” it doesn’t matter how many Bible verses, appeals to authority Biblical or otherwise, or flowery theological terms encase the wickedness of doing not enough; it is still not doing enough. If the answer to racial issues is anything other than “There is a problem both historically and in present day with how we handle racism and discrimination in our churches and by our leadership” is anything other than “Whatever it takes, it stops” then all the hollering about “wokeness” both as the hot topic to keep the masses fired up and an excuse to make worse what was already a problem, it is still not doing enough. That there was no rhetoric about “take the ship” or thinly-veiled “going to war, spiritually or otherwise” metaphors over the crimes of abuse and the wickedness of discrimination but there is over the socio-political buzzword of the moment is a screaming, glaring damnation of obvious priorities.

These sorts of issues inside an organization like the Southern Baptist Convention are not about theology or faith at all for the leadership, but about power and money. Lots of money, which means lots of power for those who wield the influence over the 14 million members of the Southern Baptist Convention. So the framing for the folks in the pews of the issues at hand is one that is most likely to keep the status quo intact for those that enjoy the benefits thereof. The SBC is a multimillion dollar business in addition to being a church, complete with merchandizing, branding, and a political action component. The latter of which, officially titled the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, was the ember that lit this particular fire over abuse and racial discrimination in the ranks. Its leader, Dr. Russell Moore, resigned his post and left the SBC while two leaked letters from him made the rounds, painting a dismal picture of the Executive Committee and leadership of the SBC covering up, ignoring, and being aggressively defensive over issues of abuse and race. Far from such lofty theological concerns such as hamartiology¹ and ecclesiology², or even the ideals of their own traditional Baptist Faith & Message, the Southern Baptist Convention is rushing towards affirming the much more secular — but undefeated — Hoffer Principle³

I recently talked on my podcast with Jennifer Greenberg who is a survivor and advocate for the abused. She knows Russell Moore and spoke at a conference he put together to try and deal with the issue of abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention. She had this to say about his and other’s efforts to address the abuse issues and the vitriolic pushback those that speak up are getting:

It was really encouraging to me…to have people who are looked up too, who are influential, who have a built up ministry where they are influencing the church, where they are helping people…they know exactly how I feel because they’ve been through this too. So I know I can be believed, I know that I can speak, even when I’m being told to be quiet. I can tell the truth and not fear that good and righteous people are going to believe me because a lot of them have gone through the same thing…I really feel like these cultures of abuse, these systems that, I don’t want to say the system itself is necessarily abusive but what it is is abusive people get into the system, and they start leveraging the system for abuse. It’s like anything, you can use it different ways. You can use a knife to cut a sandwich or you can use a knife to stab someone in the back. The same goes for church governments…

A striking analogy, since Russell Moore’s leaked letters make it abundantly clear that while he and others where attempting to work up some sanctified sandwiches to feed the wounded and hurting rank and file the knives were out from powerful leaders against their rocking of the boat.

There is going to be a lot of language ranging from flowery to fiery coming out of the Southern Baptist Convention in the next few days, but the words mean very little unless there is discernible action showing that the SBC not only know the right things to do, but are willing to do them regardless of cost. Words, like the Scripture says about it’s own words, are like a two-edged sword. While we mortals might not be able to judge the heart like the Almighty can, we can judge behaviors, and believe what those behaviors are telling us. If the Southern Baptist Convention wants to insist on hiding behind their words, while their actions tell the world that abuse and racial issues will be excused, enabled, and covered up in Southern Baptist Churches to keep the Southern Baptist Convention flush with members and money via tickling the ears and indulging the emotions of their members politics, whatever cuts they get are going to be self-inflicted wounds. And those wounds are liable to be very, very deep.

The SBC can say whatever they want, with whatever nomenclature of spiritual-sounding words they want. They know better. The Southern Baptist Convention corporately and the leadership that helms them are far beyond their age of accountability. We should judge them accordingly. God and history surely will.

1. the study of sin in Christian systematic theology including origins, effects, and mankind’s responsibility
2. the study in Christian systematic theology applied to the nature and structure of the Christian Church
3. “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” – Eric Hoffer, The Temper of Our Time