I found this fascinating and illuminating.
From the New Yorker
Fight for the Heart of the Southern Baptist Convention
How the Convention’s battle over race reveals an emerging evangelical schism.
By Eliza Griswold
June 10, 2021
Dwight McKissic is one of a growing number of Southern Baptist pastors of color who may leave the denomination, owing to allegations that the group won’t acknowledge the realities of systemic racism.Photographs by Zerb Mellish for The New Yorker
On a recent Friday afternoon, Dwight McKissic sat at a folding table in his three-car garage, on a cul-de-sac in Arlington, Texas, discussing the role that race plays in a growing divide among American evangelicals. McKissic is sixty-four, with a trim white goatee and an imposing stature. For the past thirty-eight years, he has served as the lead pastor of Cornerstone Baptist Church, which he grew from a few dozen people to roughly four thousand congregants. In the process, he has become a prominent member of the Southern Baptist Convention, which, with more than fourteen million members, is the largest Protestant denomination in the United States. But McKissic is also one of a growing number of pastors of color who may leave the S.B.C. next week, amid allegations that the organization won’t collectively acknowledge the realities of systemic racism. “I’m hanging on by a thread,” he told me. “Dozens of other pastors have already called me to ask what I’m going to do.”
Across the driveway, beyond a stack of ruined mattresses, sat McKissic’s house, ringed with pink roses. During the storms that struck Texas this past winter, his pipes had frozen and burst, flooding the building. For the past three months, McKissic and his wife had been living at the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, one of the denomination’s six major academic institutions. He had served as a trustee of the seminary and had recently donated twenty-four thousand dollars, which included funds to pay tuition for students in need. A few days before I visited, McKissic and his wife had returned to live in an apartment attached to his garage. A pair of Southern Baptist volunteers hovered around the garage, unpacking a case of bottled water for him. McKissic was grateful for the hospitality of the seminary. Nevertheless, he was increasingly uncomfortable remaining among the Southern Baptists.
McKissic thought that it would be hard for an outsider to understand why he’d joined the S.B.C., which has a long and painful history around race. But he’d also seen the organization do a lot of good. He was raised in a Black Baptist church, and, when he started Cornerstone, in 1983, the S.B.C. had helped out with funding. “The Lord told me to start my church in a garage,” he said. “Hardly anybody will lend you three hundred and thirty thousand dollars to start a church in your garage. We were birthed through the mission heart of the S.B.C.” Over the years, McKissic benefitted from the organization’s strategic advice, and attended its fishing outings and trips to Bible schools. The S.B.C. also provided a kind of moral support that was more difficult to quantify. “They were rooting for us,” he told me.
Until recently, much of the racism that he’d encountered in the S.B.C. was “passive,” McKissic said. But after the election of Donald Trump, in 2016, he felt that the racist rhetoric became more overt. McKissic was also unsettled by what he saw as a growing antipathy toward allowing women to serve in leadership roles in the church. The tensions came to a head over the teachings of critical race theory, a loose set of academic tools used to identify systemic racism. C.R.T. emerged in legal scholarship in the seventies, as a method of examining how the law perpetuates racial injustice. Recently, though, it has become a kind of bogeyman for the right: last year, Trump tweeted that critical race theory was “a sickness that cannot be allowed to continue. Please report any sightings so we can quickly extinguish!” His Administration also issued a memo ordering federal anti-racism training programs to stop using the theory.
For the past few years, prominent members of the S.B.C., including Albert Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, the denomination’s oldest academic institution, have demonized C.R.T., calling it, among other things, Marxist and anti-Biblical. Critics have frightened S.B.C. members with the prospect that the theory could soon be used in public schools to indoctrinate children against conservative values. During the organization’s yearly conference in 2019, the resolutions committee attempted to address the tensions over C.R.T., putting forth a statement that acknowledged incompatibilities between Biblical teachings and the academic theory, yet upheld the reality of structural racism.
Within a week, hard-line conservatives within the S.B.C. seized upon the resolution and cast it as a threat from the left. Throughout 2020, state chapters passed resolutions rejecting critical race theory. Then, last November, on the heels of the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd, the presidents of S.B.C.’s six seminaries issued an incendiary statement calling C.R.T. “incompatible with the Baptist Faith & Message.” This outraged many pastors of color; none had suggested applying the teachings of C.R.T to the church, but they felt that its blanket rejection was being used by white leaders to dismiss the realities of racism. “Y’all are arguing over a theory that is just trying to accurately describe the reality I live in,” John Onwuchekwa, a Nigerian-American pastor in Atlanta who left the S.B.C. last July, told me. “It’s like someone is bleeding out on the floor and these guys are fighting over how many pints of blood a person can lose.”
In Texas, McKissic read the statement with dismay. “It’s putting lipstick on racism,” he told me. As he saw it, the fight over C.R.T. was also the fight for the future of the S.B.C. A cabal of reactionary, aging white men was trying to maintain control of the organization, and, in order to hold on to power, those men were stoking people’s fears of creeping liberalism. (A spokesperson for the S.B.C. said that it was a sprawling organization whose members held a wide range of viewpoints.) In January, 2021, McKissic wrote an article titled “We Are Getting Off The Bus,” denouncing the rejection of C.R.T. in the November statement and explaining that he was leaving a Texas chapter of the S.B.C. “I am not willing to allow them to dictate what the belief systems, definitions and authoritative binding, academic and ecclesiastical decisions [are] regarding how race is to be communicated in the local church,” he wrote.
McKissic’s decision took place alongside a larger campaign called #LeaveLOUD, which is led by the Witness, a Black Christian collective urging Christians of color to abandon white churches that continue to condone systemic racism. For decades, people of color have been quietly leaving conservative, majority-white churches and faith-based communities; the Witness hopes to prompt change by encouraging people to make more noise. No denomination is immune to the scourge of racism, but congregants of color say that the problem is particularly visible in the S.B.C. “I have had endless meetings, one-on-one conversations, meetings with the elders, letters to the church, pleading for the barest minimum of dignity and respect when it came to church practices,” Jemar Tisby, the author of “The Color of Compromise” and a leader of the #LeaveLOUD campaign, told me. “And I have been met with gaslighting, denial, minimization, ostracization.”
On Twitter, the backlash to McKissic’s announcement was severe. Several days after he spoke out, he received a letter in the mail from a former S.B.C. member named John Rutledge, saying that Black people had “invaded the church” and that the issues were “beyond the Negroes’ intellectual capacities.” The letter said, of Black people, “Like two-year-olds, they know only how to whine and throw tantrums. The SBC should bid them goodbye and good riddance!” (S.B.C. leaders condemned the letter. Rutledge could not be reached for comment.) McKissic told me that, when he read it, “I was shocked”; he posted it on Facebook “as an example of a real live racist.” Still, McKissic found the letter instructive. “What I appreciated about Mr. Rutledge is that he had the nerve to stick his name to what a small group of people feels in the S.B.C.,” McKissic told me. “To a certain extent, that’s what the anti-C.R.T. crowd reflects, and it’s on those grounds I can’t stay.”
For now, McKissic has remained a member of the national Southern Baptist Convention. Next week, at the group’s 2021 conference, in Nashville, its members will vote on the Convention’s next president. The choice likely lies between the three most viable candidates. One candidate is Mohler, the seminary president who was the face of the charge against C.R.T. He told me recently that C.R.T. goes against “both Christianity and modern political, classical liberty.” Another contender is Mike Stone, a pastor from South Georgia who is even more conservative than Mohler; when we spoke, he called C.R.T. a “weapon of division.” The third is Ed Litton, a soft-spoken pastor who has been involved in racial-reconciliation efforts in Mobile, Alabama, and who believes that the fight over C.R.T. has become a way to avoid talking about the need for structural change in the Southern Baptist Convention. “We have to exercise the muscle of Biblical truth, and also extend compassion to those who have suffered injustice,” Litton told me. If either of the two hard-liners wins, McKissic will leave the S.B.C. “The trajectory of the S.B.C. will have proved to be anti-woman, and hostile to race in a way that can’t be justified by the Bible,” he said. “I just can’t, in good conscience, remain a part of a fellowship like that.”
The Southern Baptist Convention was founded, in 1845, to safeguard the institution of slavery. Northern Baptists had recently ruled that men who owned slaves were no longer permitted to serve as missionaries, and slaveholding Baptists decided to form their own group in protest. Founders of the new organization claimed that, according to the Bible, slavery was “an institution of heaven.” They pushed the idea that Black people were descended from the Biblical figure Ham, Noah’s cursed son, and that their subjugation was therefore divinely ordained. “They were one bad marketing meeting away from calling themselves the ‘Confederate Baptist Convention,’ ” Onwuchekwa, the pastor in Atlanta, told me. In 1863, the Southern Baptists pledged to support the Confederacy in the Civil War. According to a 2018 report put out by the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, on the role that slavery played within the organization, one early leader believed that “slavery was no mere necessary evil, but rather a God-ordained institution to be perpetuated.”
In the twentieth century, the S.B.C. went through a period of relative opening, allowing for wide-ranging readings of scripture and letting its academic institutions flourish. In the twenties, for example, at the time of the Scopes trial and the attendant controversy over the teaching of evolution in schools, the organization left room for its members to accept the conclusions of science. In 1971, the S.B.C. went so far as to say that women should be allowed some measure of choice regarding abortion. But, in the late seventies, there was a backlash within the organization that came to be known as the conservative resurgence. Hard-liners took over the S.B.C., and, in the name of returning it to the teachings of the Bible, pushed back on several social issues. They fought efforts to diversify the leadership and pressed for stricter scriptural interpretations, arguing, for example, that women must submit to the will of men. Before the conservative resurgence, some women were ordained as pastors in the S.B.C.; afterward, that practice largely ended, and hard-liners argued that women also shouldn’t teach Sunday-school classes or even work outside the home.
In a letter from 2012, Paige Patterson, an influential Southern Baptist leader who helped orchestrate the resurgence, argued that the election of Fred Luter, the Convention’s first Black president, would lead the S.B.C. to “slide a long way back toward where we once were, and that would be devastating.” (A lawyer for Patterson said that “color had nothing to do” with his statement.) Patterson sometimes sexualized young girls in his sermons, saying of one “young co-ed,” that “she wasn’t more than about sixteen but mmmmph . . . she was nice.” (The lawyer denied that the statement was demeaning, and noted, “Sometimes Dr. Patterson’s humor is misunderstood.”) According to Religion News Service, Russell Moore, the former president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the public-policy arm of the S.B.C., claimed, in a recently leaked letter, that, at one point, Patterson questioned his decision to hire Trillia Newbell, a woman of color, calling her “that black girl.” (The lawyer declined to comment on this incident, but added, “I do know without a doubt that Dr. Patterson is not racist. . . . He has many very close friends of color.”)
After Trump’s election, these divisions intensified. Some Convention members were shocked at what they saw as Trump’s openly xenophobic, racist, and sexist rhetoric, but those who criticized him faced swift backlash. Mohler, the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president, initially spoke out against Trump. He came under significant pressure as a result, and, last year, he embraced Trump. In recent years, a few hard-line leaders have also been embroiled in scandals. Patterson was accused of mishandling a rape case and an assault case at two seminaries, and was fired from a leadership position in the S.B.C., in 2018. (Patterson insisted, through the lawyer, that he had handled the cases correctly and that this was not the basis of his termination.) Paul Pressler, a former Texas judge and fellow hard-liner, stands accused of sexually abusing a young man for years. (Pressler denies the allegations.)
Taken together, these events have sparked a renewed resistance within the Convention. A group of theological conservatives have increasingly argued that, though they agree that the Bible is infallible, they don’t believe that scripture should be used to justify all aspects of cultural conservatism. Some prominent Southern Baptists have returned to tenets that were held before the hard-liners took over, in the seventies and eighties. Last month, Saddleback, a megachurch in California co-founded by Rick Warren, ordained three women. This spring, Beth Moore, a hugely popular speaker and author, stepped away from the S.B.C. because of what she saw as its continued racism and sexism, telling Religion News Service that she is “no longer a Southern Baptist.” Russell Moore also recently left the organization. Other Southern Baptists have stayed, hoping to effect change from within. “We’re trying to figure out what the future is,” Keith Whitfield, a theology professor at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, told me. “We’ve understood since 1995 that we have to open the doors for other people to come in if we’re going to remain viable for the future—if not, the effectiveness of our gospel witness will be compromised.”
Whitfield told me that he believes the roiling of the S.B.C. is a sign of a broader crisis within American Christianity. “The S.B.C. is a mirror for what’s happening in American evangelicalism, and the culture writ large,” he said. Ed Stetzer, a Southern Baptist and the executive director of the Wheaton College Billy Graham Center, told me that churches have become increasingly politicized. “What’s happened is that people are now sorting themselves into churches that align more with their political ideology than their theology,” he said. “They want the sermons they hear on Sundays to align with what they hear on cable news all week.” Some evangelicals are pushing back against the rightward political tilt of their churches. Karen Swallow Prior, a professor at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, told me, “These tensions reflect an emerging schism in what it means to be an evangelical. Theological conservatives are reclaiming the moral authority of following Jesus without blindly following the old battle lines of the culture wars.” Stetzer has called the moment an “evangelical reckoning.”
For many pastors of color, the Southern Baptist Convention’s future rests on what happens during the election in Nashville. Some have already begun to leave. Onwuchekwa, the pastor in Atlanta, was among the first to go. Soon after the death of George Floyd, he gathered about two hundred members of his congregation on Zoom to vote on abandoning the S.B.C. Onwuchekwa listed the costs and benefits of departure: the Southern Baptists had given the church around twenty thousand dollars to get started, and, by remaining, he and his congregants had access to relationships and to funding that could help them continue to feed hungry people in their neighborhood. But leaving was a principled decision: How could they represent an entity that was increasingly hostile to the needs they were addressing on the street? “The S.B.C. is going backwards,” he said. Voting by Zoom poll, ninety-seven per cent of his congregation decided that the church should leave the Convention. “It was an overwhelming affirmation to go,” Onwuchekwa said. Soon after leaving, he tweeted, “Frankly, we should’ve done it sooner.”
In December, several more prominent pastors of color followed suit, including Charlie Dates, of Chicago’s Progressive Baptist Church, and Ralph West, who leads the Church Without Walls, a church with nine thousand members in Houston, Texas. West, like others, grew troubled by the aggressive tone that the S.B.C. adopted while Trump was in office. “With their invective and rhetoric, they were providing theological cover for the extreme right,” he said. Still, he was disturbed by the November statement decrying C.R.T. “As I read it, I lost my equilibrium,” he told me. “There were murders on TV and protest after protest, and I couldn’t believe that six grown men could sit down and write this without any compassion.” He knew immediately that it was time to depart. “I said to myself, Ralph West, you carry too much gravitas to stay.” West penned an op-ed and told his church that he was leaving. “The only response I got from them was gratitude: ‘Thank you for standing up and saying what you did.’ ”
For smaller churches, with fewer resources, leaving the network is more difficult. Still, West has received calls from dozens of pastors considering departure, whatever the cost. “All of them are waiting to see what happens in Nashville,” he said. Seth Martin, the pastor of a small church with about a hundred members, located an eight-minute walk from the site where George Floyd was murdered, left in December. After Floyd was killed, Martin had tried to mobilize white Southern Baptist pastors to join the protests, hosting several at his home, but they resisted taking up the cause. “To lose the whiteness of their religion and pick up what it really means to be a follower of Jesus was too hard for them,” he told me. Disheartened, Martin tried to muddle forward. Then came the November statement, in which leaders in the Convention drew “a line in the sand.” Martin was waiting to see what would happen in Nashville. “People are going to be forced to make a decision,” he told me.
Dwight McKissic, the pastor in Arlington, Texas, is going to make the decision about whether to leave the S.B.C. from his garage. If Litton, the pastor from Alabama, is elected, “it would be a wonderful blessing,” McKissic said. If not, he quoted a Biblical proverb: “As a dog returns to its vomit, so a fool repeats his folly.” For decades now, McKissic said, there had been folly within the S.B.C.—and, if the group were to elect Mohler or Stone, “the Southern Baptist Convention would be returning to its own vomit.” Still, he had hope that the organization would turn around. During the S.B.C. conference in 2017, with Trump recently in office, McKissic put forward a resolution condemning alt-right white supremacy. Two rounds of votes failed. “I almost left then,” he told me. But then a group of supporters, including Ed Stetzer, the Wheaton professor, rallied around him to pass it. “There were all these young people who’d adopted interracial children,” he told me. “Fearing for their own kids had made them see racism in a new way.” This year, race is certain to be a source of debate at the conference: already, various groups have put forth duelling proposals on the issue. McKissic still has hope for the Convention. “I do believe that God is behind all of this disruption,” McKissic said. “Breaking us down in order to recast us in a wonderful future.”
Race inside the SBC
Re: Race inside the SBC
So did I, Barney, thank-you!I found this fascinating and illuminating.
"Just as a dog returns to its vomit..."
How appropriate.
No wonder church attendance in America is dropping precipitously. We are now down to less than 50%.
We used to be unified around going to church on Sundays. For example, singers used to be able to come to New York City after graduation, get a job in a synagogue on Saturdays and a church on Sundays to support themselves and be free to audition during the week.
Not any more. Even going to church has become polarized.
God save our country.
All this because of one man's bottomless needy insanity.
Never forget.
Re: Race inside the SBC
Southern Baptists Narrowly Head Off Ultraconservative Takeover
Ed Litton, a moderate pastor from Alabama, won a high-stakes presidential election with the potential to reshape the future of the country’s largest Protestant denomination.
Ed Litton, an Alabama pastor, spoke after being elected president of the Southern Baptist Convention on Tuesday. Credit...Mark Humphrey/Associated Press
By Ruth Graham
June 15, 2021
NASHVILLE — In a dramatic showdown on Tuesday, Southern Baptists elected a moderate pastor from Alabama as their next president, narrowly heading off an attempted takeover by the denomination’s insurgent right wing.
The election of the pastor, Ed Litton, was the result of what was effectively a three-way standoff for the leadership of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. In the first round of voting on Tuesday afternoon, Southern Baptists rejected a prominent mainstream candidate and onetime favorite for the presidency, Al Mohler Jr., who received 26 percent of some 14,000 votes.
The race then headed for an immediate runoff vote that pitted an ultraconservative pastor from Georgia, Mike Stone, against Mr. Litton, who has largely avoided the culture wars. When officials announced the results from the stage — Mr. Litton bested Mr. Stone by just 556 votes, or four percentage points — the floor erupted in a mixture of cheers and boos.
At a news conference after his victory, the soft-spoken Mr. Litton emphasized the need for healing. “We are a family,” Mr. Litton said. “At time it seems we’re incredibly dysfunctional, but we love each other.”
Going forward, he said, “My goal is to build bridges and not walls.”
Some had warned that the stakes for the denomination, which often serves as a bellwether for white American evangelicalism, have never been higher.
A newly empowered ultraconservative faction in the already conservative denomination is pushing back against a national leadership they describe as out-of-touch elitists who have drifted too far to the left on social issues. Mainstream Baptist churches and those on the far right agree that the convention’s results will serve as a referendum about the denomination’s priorities and could accelerate the fracturing of an already shrinking institution.
Delegates called “messengers” were voting in Nashville on a new president as well as a series of hot-button cultural issues. Some on both sides have threatened to leave depending on the final results.
Pastors and activists had spent months drumming up attendance for the convention from churches large and small across the country.
Conservatives, especially, had made an unusual effort to boost turnout. The Conservative Baptist Network, an increasingly influential group founded last year, released a video last week featuring images of an empty motorboat slipping loose from a pier and floating into the middle of a lake under cloudy skies. “On June 15, Southern Baptists can stop the drift,” the network’s spokesman, Brad Jurkovich, intoned.
In Nashville, tempers were running high. Irate messengers confronted at least two high-profile leaders in the halls of the convention center, accusing them of fomenting liberalism. Some leaders were provided with extra security.
“We are at a defining moment for our convention,” J.D. Greear, the departing president, told the assembly in a fiery speech hours before they would elect his successor. He excoriated the “Pharisees” within the denomination who placed ideological purity over its evangelistic mission, alienating Black and Latino pastors, sexual abuse survivors and others in their zeal.
“Are we primarily a cultural and political affinity group, or do we see our primary calling as being a gospel witness?” Mr. Greear asked. “What’s the more important part of our name: Southern or Baptist?”
Mr. Greear praised an earlier generation of conservatives who had kept the denomination true to its theological principles. But he warned of a new threat to Southern Baptists in the 21st century. “The danger of liberalism is real but the danger of Phariseeism is also,” he said.
Tuesday’s vote capped months of angry debate over race, gender and other cultural divides, as the denomination’s leaders and insurgents wrestled over whether their future hinged on wrenching the church even further to the right or broadening its reach.
Last summer’s annual meeting was canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic, and attendance — and tension — has not been this high since the mid-1990s, when conservatives completed a sweeping takeover that some now say did not go far enough.
The day’s most anticipated moment was the election of a new president.
But messengers also tackled a slate of resolutions on racial issues, abortion and the Equality Act, a sweeping piece of legislation in Congress that would extend civil rights protections on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity while eroding some religious liberty protections. A resolution on “Christian citizenship” included a denunciation of “the Capitol insurrection of January 6, 2021.”
The most contentious topic heading into the meeting was critical race theory, an academic lens for analyzing racism in society and institutions that has swept the imagination of American conservatives. Republican-controlled state legislatures have passed measures against the perceived influence of C.R.T. in public schools.
On Tuesday afternoon, messengers passed a resolution that the denomination, which was founded before the Civil War in defense of slavery, reaffirm its 1995 apology for systemic racism but also reject “any theory or worldview” that denies that racial discrimination is rooted in sin. At its 2019 annual meeting in Birmingham, Ala., messengers affirmed that critical race theory could be used by faithful Baptists, a moment that many conservatives in Nashville characterized as galvanizing.
The months leading up to the convention have seen a series of high-profile departures and unusually poisonous clashes by an organization that prides itself on unity in the essentials of the faith.
Russell Moore, the denomination’s head of ethics and public policy, left on June 1. In two letters that leaked after his departure, he accused the denomination’s executive committee of a pattern of intimidation against sexual abuse survivors and “spiritual and psychological abuse.”Many Baptists hoped that after months of savage sniping online, the act of gathering in the same room would have a soothing effect. But the meeting in Nashville has included several moments of unusually direct confrontations.
On Monday afternoon, Mr. Mohler was accosted inside the convention center by a young messenger who loudly accused him of allowing critical race theory into the seminary he leads. Mr. Mohler, arguably the most well-known face within the denomination, was holding his young grandchild in his arms when the angry man approached him. He left the scene “more than a little shaken,” he said later.
Mr. Greear’s office confirmed a similar confrontation a few days ago, with a messenger confronting the denomination’s president in the convention center and urging him to “repent.”
The convention was riveted on Monday by conflicting accounts of an impromptu encounter between Mr. Stone and Hannah-Kate Williams, a victim of sexual abuse who has advocated reform in the denomination. Ms. Williams was in an atrium of the convention center handing out copies of a statement signed by several victims who are calling for an outside audit of patterns of abuse. Mr. Stone approached her and introduced himself, seemingly without knowing about her advocacy.
The encounter soon turned ugly, in Ms. Williams’s account.
“He said I’m causing more harm to the Southern Baptist Convention than good, and I’m not doing right by survivors,” she recalled tearfully on Monday evening. “And he said the Southern Baptist Convention is bigger than my problems.”
Mr. Stone characterized the conversation as “polite” in a statement posted to Twitter: “At no time was I unkind.”
At the news conference after his victory, Mr. Litton called for an independent investigation into the convention’s handling of abuse, and said the denomination needed to be “pastoral” in its approach to victims.
The divide in the convention was apparent in the run-up to Tuesday’s voting.
At a standing-room-only breakfast hosted by the Conservative Baptist Network on Tuesday morning, Rod Martin, a member of the denomination’s powerful executive committee, exhorted attendees to not grow discouraged if the day did not go as they hoped.
“If we do not prevail today, we will come back next year and the next year and the next year,” he told the enthusiastic crowd. Most of Jesus’ apostles, he pointed out, were eventually martyred. “We are here to the death!” he added. “We will not stop.”
Ruth Graham is a national correspondent covering religion, faith and values. She previously reported on religion for Slate.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/15/us/s ... e=Homepage
Ed Litton, a moderate pastor from Alabama, won a high-stakes presidential election with the potential to reshape the future of the country’s largest Protestant denomination.
Ed Litton, an Alabama pastor, spoke after being elected president of the Southern Baptist Convention on Tuesday. Credit...Mark Humphrey/Associated Press
By Ruth Graham
June 15, 2021
NASHVILLE — In a dramatic showdown on Tuesday, Southern Baptists elected a moderate pastor from Alabama as their next president, narrowly heading off an attempted takeover by the denomination’s insurgent right wing.
The election of the pastor, Ed Litton, was the result of what was effectively a three-way standoff for the leadership of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. In the first round of voting on Tuesday afternoon, Southern Baptists rejected a prominent mainstream candidate and onetime favorite for the presidency, Al Mohler Jr., who received 26 percent of some 14,000 votes.
The race then headed for an immediate runoff vote that pitted an ultraconservative pastor from Georgia, Mike Stone, against Mr. Litton, who has largely avoided the culture wars. When officials announced the results from the stage — Mr. Litton bested Mr. Stone by just 556 votes, or four percentage points — the floor erupted in a mixture of cheers and boos.
At a news conference after his victory, the soft-spoken Mr. Litton emphasized the need for healing. “We are a family,” Mr. Litton said. “At time it seems we’re incredibly dysfunctional, but we love each other.”
Going forward, he said, “My goal is to build bridges and not walls.”
Some had warned that the stakes for the denomination, which often serves as a bellwether for white American evangelicalism, have never been higher.
A newly empowered ultraconservative faction in the already conservative denomination is pushing back against a national leadership they describe as out-of-touch elitists who have drifted too far to the left on social issues. Mainstream Baptist churches and those on the far right agree that the convention’s results will serve as a referendum about the denomination’s priorities and could accelerate the fracturing of an already shrinking institution.
Delegates called “messengers” were voting in Nashville on a new president as well as a series of hot-button cultural issues. Some on both sides have threatened to leave depending on the final results.
Pastors and activists had spent months drumming up attendance for the convention from churches large and small across the country.
Conservatives, especially, had made an unusual effort to boost turnout. The Conservative Baptist Network, an increasingly influential group founded last year, released a video last week featuring images of an empty motorboat slipping loose from a pier and floating into the middle of a lake under cloudy skies. “On June 15, Southern Baptists can stop the drift,” the network’s spokesman, Brad Jurkovich, intoned.
In Nashville, tempers were running high. Irate messengers confronted at least two high-profile leaders in the halls of the convention center, accusing them of fomenting liberalism. Some leaders were provided with extra security.
“We are at a defining moment for our convention,” J.D. Greear, the departing president, told the assembly in a fiery speech hours before they would elect his successor. He excoriated the “Pharisees” within the denomination who placed ideological purity over its evangelistic mission, alienating Black and Latino pastors, sexual abuse survivors and others in their zeal.
“Are we primarily a cultural and political affinity group, or do we see our primary calling as being a gospel witness?” Mr. Greear asked. “What’s the more important part of our name: Southern or Baptist?”
Mr. Greear praised an earlier generation of conservatives who had kept the denomination true to its theological principles. But he warned of a new threat to Southern Baptists in the 21st century. “The danger of liberalism is real but the danger of Phariseeism is also,” he said.
Tuesday’s vote capped months of angry debate over race, gender and other cultural divides, as the denomination’s leaders and insurgents wrestled over whether their future hinged on wrenching the church even further to the right or broadening its reach.
Last summer’s annual meeting was canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic, and attendance — and tension — has not been this high since the mid-1990s, when conservatives completed a sweeping takeover that some now say did not go far enough.
The day’s most anticipated moment was the election of a new president.
But messengers also tackled a slate of resolutions on racial issues, abortion and the Equality Act, a sweeping piece of legislation in Congress that would extend civil rights protections on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity while eroding some religious liberty protections. A resolution on “Christian citizenship” included a denunciation of “the Capitol insurrection of January 6, 2021.”
The most contentious topic heading into the meeting was critical race theory, an academic lens for analyzing racism in society and institutions that has swept the imagination of American conservatives. Republican-controlled state legislatures have passed measures against the perceived influence of C.R.T. in public schools.
On Tuesday afternoon, messengers passed a resolution that the denomination, which was founded before the Civil War in defense of slavery, reaffirm its 1995 apology for systemic racism but also reject “any theory or worldview” that denies that racial discrimination is rooted in sin. At its 2019 annual meeting in Birmingham, Ala., messengers affirmed that critical race theory could be used by faithful Baptists, a moment that many conservatives in Nashville characterized as galvanizing.
The months leading up to the convention have seen a series of high-profile departures and unusually poisonous clashes by an organization that prides itself on unity in the essentials of the faith.
Russell Moore, the denomination’s head of ethics and public policy, left on June 1. In two letters that leaked after his departure, he accused the denomination’s executive committee of a pattern of intimidation against sexual abuse survivors and “spiritual and psychological abuse.”Many Baptists hoped that after months of savage sniping online, the act of gathering in the same room would have a soothing effect. But the meeting in Nashville has included several moments of unusually direct confrontations.
On Monday afternoon, Mr. Mohler was accosted inside the convention center by a young messenger who loudly accused him of allowing critical race theory into the seminary he leads. Mr. Mohler, arguably the most well-known face within the denomination, was holding his young grandchild in his arms when the angry man approached him. He left the scene “more than a little shaken,” he said later.
Mr. Greear’s office confirmed a similar confrontation a few days ago, with a messenger confronting the denomination’s president in the convention center and urging him to “repent.”
The convention was riveted on Monday by conflicting accounts of an impromptu encounter between Mr. Stone and Hannah-Kate Williams, a victim of sexual abuse who has advocated reform in the denomination. Ms. Williams was in an atrium of the convention center handing out copies of a statement signed by several victims who are calling for an outside audit of patterns of abuse. Mr. Stone approached her and introduced himself, seemingly without knowing about her advocacy.
The encounter soon turned ugly, in Ms. Williams’s account.
“He said I’m causing more harm to the Southern Baptist Convention than good, and I’m not doing right by survivors,” she recalled tearfully on Monday evening. “And he said the Southern Baptist Convention is bigger than my problems.”
Mr. Stone characterized the conversation as “polite” in a statement posted to Twitter: “At no time was I unkind.”
At the news conference after his victory, Mr. Litton called for an independent investigation into the convention’s handling of abuse, and said the denomination needed to be “pastoral” in its approach to victims.
The divide in the convention was apparent in the run-up to Tuesday’s voting.
At a standing-room-only breakfast hosted by the Conservative Baptist Network on Tuesday morning, Rod Martin, a member of the denomination’s powerful executive committee, exhorted attendees to not grow discouraged if the day did not go as they hoped.
“If we do not prevail today, we will come back next year and the next year and the next year,” he told the enthusiastic crowd. Most of Jesus’ apostles, he pointed out, were eventually martyred. “We are here to the death!” he added. “We will not stop.”
Ruth Graham is a national correspondent covering religion, faith and values. She previously reported on religion for Slate.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/15/us/s ... e=Homepage
Re: Race inside the SBC
Yes, fascinating, thanks Brian. I think the SBC is in a lot of trouble. It's a lens into the issues confronting the US, and other places too. Still, it seems the black churches will hold the line for now. Stone would have been a disaster.
Re: Race inside the SBC
Will Christian America Withstand the Pull of QAnon?
June 18, 2021
By Peter Wehner
Mr. Wehner, who served in various roles in the three Republican administrations before the Trump administration, is a contributing Opinion writer. He attends McLean Presbyterian Church in McLean, Va.
The scandals, jagged-edged judgmentalism and culture war mentality that have enveloped significant parts of American Christendom over the last several years, including the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, have conditioned many of us to expect the worst. Which is why the annual meeting of the convention this week was such a pleasant surprise.
The convention’s newly elected president, the Rev. Ed Litton, barely defeated the Rev. Mike Stone, the choice of the denomination’s insurgent right. Mr. Litton, a soft-spoken pastor in Alabama who is very conservative theologically, has made racial reconciliation a hallmark of his ministry and has said that he will make institutional accountability and care for survivors of sexual abuse priorities during his two-year term.
“My goal is to build bridges and not walls,” Mr. Litton said at a news conference after his victory, pointedly setting himself apart from his main challenger. But those bridges won’t be easy to build.
Tensions in the convention are as high as they’ve been in decades; it is a deeply fractured denomination marked by fierce infighting. The Conservative Baptist Network, which Mr. Stone is part of, was formed in 2020 to stop what it considers the convention’s drift toward liberalism on matters of culture and theology.
Ruth Graham and Elizabeth Dias of The Times describe the individuals in the Conservative Baptist Network as “part of an ultraconservative populist uprising of pastors” who want to “take the ship.” They are zealous, inflamed, uncompromising and eager for a fight. They nearly succeeded this time. And they’re not going away anytime soon.
They view as a temporary setback the defeat of Mr. Stone, who came within an eyelash of winning even after allegations by the Rev. Russell Moore, the former head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s public policy arm, that Mr. Stone blocked investigations of sexual abuse at Southern Baptist churches and engaged in a broader campaign of intimidation. (Mr. Stone has denied the charges.)
True to this moment, the issues dividing the convention are more political than theological. What preoccupies the denomination’s right wing right now is critical race theory, whose intellectual origins go back several decades, and which contends that racism is not simply a product of individual bigotry but embedded throughout American society. As The Times put it, “the concept argues that historical patterns of racism are ingrained in law and other modern institutions, and that the legacies of slavery, segregation and Jim Crow still create an uneven playing field for Black people and other people of color.”
What upset many members of the Conservative Baptist Network was a nonbinding 2019 resolution approved at the convention’s annual meeting stating that critical race theory and intersectionality could be employed as “analytical tools” — all the while acknowledging that their insights could be subject to misuse and only on the condition that they be “subordinate to Scripture” and don’t serve as “transcendent ideological frameworks.”
Late last year, the Rev. J.D. Greear, who preceded Mr. Litton as president, tweeted that while critical race theory as an ideological framework is incompatible with the Bible, “some in our ranks inappropriately use the label of ‘CRT!’ to avoid legitimate questions or as a cudgel to dismiss any discussion of discrimination. Many cannot even define what C.R.T. is. If we in the S.B.C. had shown as much sorrow for the painful legacy that sin has left as we show passion to decry C.R.T., we probably wouldn’t be in this mess.” (The Southern Baptist Convention was created as a result of a split with northern Baptists over slavery. In 1995, the convention voted to “repent of racism of which we have been guilty.”)
In his farewell address as president last week, Mr. Greear warned against “an S.B.C. that spends more energy decrying things like C.R.T. than they have of the devastating consequences of racial discrimination.” And another former president of the convention, the Rev. James Merritt, said, “I want to say this bluntly and plainly: if some people were as passionate about the Gospel as they were critical race theory, we’d win this world for Christ tomorrow.”
Even if you believe, as I do, that some interpretations of critical race theory have problematic, illiberal elements to them, it is hardly in danger of taking hold in the 47,000-plus congregations in the convention, which is more theologically and politically conservative than most denominations. What is ripping through many Southern Baptist churches these days — and it’s not confined to Southern Baptist churches — is a topic that went unmentioned at the annual convention last week: QAnon conspiracy theories.
Dr. Moore, who was an influential figure in the Southern Baptist Convention until he split with the denomination just a few weeks ago, told Axios, “I’m talking literally every day to pastors, of virtually every denomination, who are exhausted by these theories blowing through their churches or communities.” He said that for many, QAnon is “taking on all the characteristics of a cult.”
Bill Haslam, the former two-term Republican governor of Tennessee, a Presbyterian and the author of “Faithful Presence: The Promise and the Peril of Faith in the Public Square,” put it this way in a recent interview with The Atlantic:
I have heard enough pastors who are saying they cannot believe the growth of the QAnon theory in their churches. Their churches had become battlegrounds over things that they never thought they would be. It’s not so much the pastors preaching that from pulpits — although I’m certain there’s some of that — but more people in the congregation who have become convinced that theories are reflective of their Christian faith.
According to a recent poll by the conservative American Enterprise Institute, nearly a third of white evangelical Christian Republicans — 31 percent — believe in the accuracy of the QAnon claim that “Donald Trump has been secretly fighting a group of child sex traffickers that include prominent Democrats and Hollywood elites.” White evangelicals are far more likely to embrace conspiracy theories than nonwhite evangelicals. Yet there have been no statements or resolutions by the Southern Baptist Convention calling QAnon “incompatible with the Baptist Faith & Message,” which six S.B.C. seminary presidents said about critical race theory and “any version of critical theory” late last year. Too many Southern Baptist leaders, facing all sorts of internal problems and dangers, would rather divert attention and judgment to the world outside their walls. This is not quite what Jesus had in mind.
The drama playing out within the convention is representative of the wider struggle within American Christianity. None of us can fully escape the downsides and the dark sides of our communities and our culture. The question is whether those who profess to be followers of Jesus show more of a capacity than they have recently to rise above them, to be self-critical instead of simply critical of others, to shine light into our own dark corners, even to add touches of grace and empathy in harsh and angry times.
That happens now and then, here and there, and when it does, it can be an incandescent witness. But the painful truth is it doesn’t happen nearly enough, and in fact the Christian faith has far too often become a weapon in the arsenal of those who worship at the altar of politics.
Rather than standing up for the victims of sexual abuse, their reflex has been to defend the institutions that cover up the abuse. Countless people who profess to be Christians are having their moral sensibilities shaped more by Tucker Carlson’s nightly monologues than by Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.
Perhaps without quite knowing it, many of those who most loudly proclaim the “pre-eminence of Christ” have turned him into a means to an end, a cruel, ugly and unforgiving end. And this, too, is not quite what Jesus had in mind.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/18/opin ... e=Homepage
June 18, 2021
By Peter Wehner
Mr. Wehner, who served in various roles in the three Republican administrations before the Trump administration, is a contributing Opinion writer. He attends McLean Presbyterian Church in McLean, Va.
The scandals, jagged-edged judgmentalism and culture war mentality that have enveloped significant parts of American Christendom over the last several years, including the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, have conditioned many of us to expect the worst. Which is why the annual meeting of the convention this week was such a pleasant surprise.
The convention’s newly elected president, the Rev. Ed Litton, barely defeated the Rev. Mike Stone, the choice of the denomination’s insurgent right. Mr. Litton, a soft-spoken pastor in Alabama who is very conservative theologically, has made racial reconciliation a hallmark of his ministry and has said that he will make institutional accountability and care for survivors of sexual abuse priorities during his two-year term.
“My goal is to build bridges and not walls,” Mr. Litton said at a news conference after his victory, pointedly setting himself apart from his main challenger. But those bridges won’t be easy to build.
Tensions in the convention are as high as they’ve been in decades; it is a deeply fractured denomination marked by fierce infighting. The Conservative Baptist Network, which Mr. Stone is part of, was formed in 2020 to stop what it considers the convention’s drift toward liberalism on matters of culture and theology.
Ruth Graham and Elizabeth Dias of The Times describe the individuals in the Conservative Baptist Network as “part of an ultraconservative populist uprising of pastors” who want to “take the ship.” They are zealous, inflamed, uncompromising and eager for a fight. They nearly succeeded this time. And they’re not going away anytime soon.
They view as a temporary setback the defeat of Mr. Stone, who came within an eyelash of winning even after allegations by the Rev. Russell Moore, the former head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s public policy arm, that Mr. Stone blocked investigations of sexual abuse at Southern Baptist churches and engaged in a broader campaign of intimidation. (Mr. Stone has denied the charges.)
True to this moment, the issues dividing the convention are more political than theological. What preoccupies the denomination’s right wing right now is critical race theory, whose intellectual origins go back several decades, and which contends that racism is not simply a product of individual bigotry but embedded throughout American society. As The Times put it, “the concept argues that historical patterns of racism are ingrained in law and other modern institutions, and that the legacies of slavery, segregation and Jim Crow still create an uneven playing field for Black people and other people of color.”
What upset many members of the Conservative Baptist Network was a nonbinding 2019 resolution approved at the convention’s annual meeting stating that critical race theory and intersectionality could be employed as “analytical tools” — all the while acknowledging that their insights could be subject to misuse and only on the condition that they be “subordinate to Scripture” and don’t serve as “transcendent ideological frameworks.”
Late last year, the Rev. J.D. Greear, who preceded Mr. Litton as president, tweeted that while critical race theory as an ideological framework is incompatible with the Bible, “some in our ranks inappropriately use the label of ‘CRT!’ to avoid legitimate questions or as a cudgel to dismiss any discussion of discrimination. Many cannot even define what C.R.T. is. If we in the S.B.C. had shown as much sorrow for the painful legacy that sin has left as we show passion to decry C.R.T., we probably wouldn’t be in this mess.” (The Southern Baptist Convention was created as a result of a split with northern Baptists over slavery. In 1995, the convention voted to “repent of racism of which we have been guilty.”)
In his farewell address as president last week, Mr. Greear warned against “an S.B.C. that spends more energy decrying things like C.R.T. than they have of the devastating consequences of racial discrimination.” And another former president of the convention, the Rev. James Merritt, said, “I want to say this bluntly and plainly: if some people were as passionate about the Gospel as they were critical race theory, we’d win this world for Christ tomorrow.”
Even if you believe, as I do, that some interpretations of critical race theory have problematic, illiberal elements to them, it is hardly in danger of taking hold in the 47,000-plus congregations in the convention, which is more theologically and politically conservative than most denominations. What is ripping through many Southern Baptist churches these days — and it’s not confined to Southern Baptist churches — is a topic that went unmentioned at the annual convention last week: QAnon conspiracy theories.
Dr. Moore, who was an influential figure in the Southern Baptist Convention until he split with the denomination just a few weeks ago, told Axios, “I’m talking literally every day to pastors, of virtually every denomination, who are exhausted by these theories blowing through their churches or communities.” He said that for many, QAnon is “taking on all the characteristics of a cult.”
Bill Haslam, the former two-term Republican governor of Tennessee, a Presbyterian and the author of “Faithful Presence: The Promise and the Peril of Faith in the Public Square,” put it this way in a recent interview with The Atlantic:
I have heard enough pastors who are saying they cannot believe the growth of the QAnon theory in their churches. Their churches had become battlegrounds over things that they never thought they would be. It’s not so much the pastors preaching that from pulpits — although I’m certain there’s some of that — but more people in the congregation who have become convinced that theories are reflective of their Christian faith.
According to a recent poll by the conservative American Enterprise Institute, nearly a third of white evangelical Christian Republicans — 31 percent — believe in the accuracy of the QAnon claim that “Donald Trump has been secretly fighting a group of child sex traffickers that include prominent Democrats and Hollywood elites.” White evangelicals are far more likely to embrace conspiracy theories than nonwhite evangelicals. Yet there have been no statements or resolutions by the Southern Baptist Convention calling QAnon “incompatible with the Baptist Faith & Message,” which six S.B.C. seminary presidents said about critical race theory and “any version of critical theory” late last year. Too many Southern Baptist leaders, facing all sorts of internal problems and dangers, would rather divert attention and judgment to the world outside their walls. This is not quite what Jesus had in mind.
The drama playing out within the convention is representative of the wider struggle within American Christianity. None of us can fully escape the downsides and the dark sides of our communities and our culture. The question is whether those who profess to be followers of Jesus show more of a capacity than they have recently to rise above them, to be self-critical instead of simply critical of others, to shine light into our own dark corners, even to add touches of grace and empathy in harsh and angry times.
That happens now and then, here and there, and when it does, it can be an incandescent witness. But the painful truth is it doesn’t happen nearly enough, and in fact the Christian faith has far too often become a weapon in the arsenal of those who worship at the altar of politics.
Rather than standing up for the victims of sexual abuse, their reflex has been to defend the institutions that cover up the abuse. Countless people who profess to be Christians are having their moral sensibilities shaped more by Tucker Carlson’s nightly monologues than by Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.
Perhaps without quite knowing it, many of those who most loudly proclaim the “pre-eminence of Christ” have turned him into a means to an end, a cruel, ugly and unforgiving end. And this, too, is not quite what Jesus had in mind.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/18/opin ... e=Homepage
Re: Race inside the SBC
The Christian Right Is in Decline, and It’s Taking America With It
July 9, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET
By Michelle Goldberg
Opinion Columnist
The presidency of George W. Bush may have been the high point of the modern Christian right’s influence in America. White evangelicals were the largest religious faction in the country. “They had a president who claimed to be one of their own, he had a testimony, talked in evangelical terms,” said Robert P. Jones, chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute and author of the 2016 book “The End of White Christian America.”
Back then, much of the public sided with the religious right on the key culture war issue of gay marriage. “In 2004, if you had said, ‘We’re the majority, we oppose gay rights, we oppose marriage equality, and the majority of Americans is with us,’ that would have been true,” Jones told me. Youthful megachurches were thriving. It was common for conservatives to gloat that they were going to outbreed the left.
Activists imagined a glorious future. “Home-schoolers will be inordinately represented in the highest levels of leadership and power in the next generation,” Ned Ryun, a former Bush speechwriter, said at a 2005 Christian home-schooling convention. Ryun was the director of a group called Generation Joshua, which worked to get home-schooled kids into politics. The name came from the Old Testament. Moses had led the chosen people out of exile, but it was his successor, Joshua, who conquered the Holy Land.
But the evangelicals who thought they were about to take over America were destined for disappointment. On Thursday, P.R.R.I. released startling new polling data showing just how much ground the religious right has lost. P.R.R.I.’s 2020 Census of American Religion, based on a survey of nearly half a million people, shows a precipitous decline in the share of the population identifying as white evangelical, from 23 percent in 2006 to 14.5 percent last year. (As a category, “white evangelicals” isn’t a perfect proxy for the religious right, but the overlap is substantial.) In 2020, as in every year since 2013, the largest religious group in the United States was the religiously unaffiliated.
One of P.R.R.I.’s most surprising findings was that in 2020, there were more white mainline Protestants than white evangelicals. This doesn’t necessarily mean Christians are joining mainline congregations — the survey measures self-identification, not church affiliation. It is, nevertheless, a striking turnabout after years when mainline Protestantism was considered moribund and evangelical Christianity full of dynamism.
In addition to shrinking as a share of the population, white evangelicals were also the oldest religious group in the United States, with a median age of 56. “It’s not just that they are dying off, but it is that they’re losing younger members,” Jones told me. As the group has become older and smaller, Jones said, “a real visceral sense of loss of cultural dominance” has set in.
White evangelicals once saw themselves “as the owners of mainstream American culture and morality and values,” said Jones. Now they are just another subculture.
From this fact derives much of our country’s cultural conflict. It helps explain not just the rise of Donald Trump, but also the growth of QAnon and even the escalating conflagration over critical race theory. “It’s hard to overstate the strength of this feeling, among white evangelicals in particular, of America being a white Christian country,” said Jones. “This sense of ownership of America just runs so deep in white evangelical circles.” The feeling that it’s slipping away has created an atmosphere of rage, resentment and paranoia.
QAnon is essentially a millenarian movement, with Trump taking the place of Jesus. Adherents dream of the coming of what they call the storm, when the enemies of the MAGA movement will be rounded up and executed, and Trump restored to his rightful place of leadership
“It’s not unlike a belief in the second coming of Christ,” said Jones. “That at some point God will reorder society and set things right. I think that when a community feels itself in crisis, it does become more susceptible to conspiracy theories and other things that tell them that what they’re experiencing is not ultimately what’s going to happen.”
The fight over critical race theory seems, on the surface, further from theological concerns. There are, obviously, plenty of people who aren’t evangelical who are anti-C.R.T., as well as evangelicals who oppose C.R.T. bans. But the idea that public schools are corrupting children by leading them away from a providential understanding of American history has deep roots in white evangelical culture. And it was the Christian right that pioneered the tactic of trying to take over school boards in response to teachings seen as morally objectionable, whether that meant sex education, “secular humanism” or evolution.
Jones points out that last year, after Trump issued an executive order targeting critical race theory, the presidents of all six seminaries of the Southern Baptist Convention came together to declare C.R.T. “incompatible” with the Baptist faith. Jones, whose latest book is “White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity,” could recall no precedent for such a joint statement.
As Jones notes, the Southern Baptist Convention was formed in 1845 after splitting with abolitionist Northern Baptists. He described it as a “remarkable arc”: a denomination founded on the defense of slavery “denouncing a critical read of history that might put a spotlight on that story.”
Then again, white evangelicals probably aren’t wrong to fear that their children are getting away from them. As their numbers have shrunk and as they’ve grown more at odds with younger Americans, said Jones, “that has led to this bigger sense of being under attack, a kind of visceral defensive posture, that we saw President Trump really leveraging.”
I was frightened by the religious right in its triumphant phase. But it turns out that the movement is just as dangerous in decline. Maybe more so. It didn’t take long for the cocky optimism of Generation Joshua to give way to the nihilism of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists. If they can’t own the country, they’re ready to defile it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/09/opin ... e=Homepage
July 9, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET
By Michelle Goldberg
Opinion Columnist
The presidency of George W. Bush may have been the high point of the modern Christian right’s influence in America. White evangelicals were the largest religious faction in the country. “They had a president who claimed to be one of their own, he had a testimony, talked in evangelical terms,” said Robert P. Jones, chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute and author of the 2016 book “The End of White Christian America.”
Back then, much of the public sided with the religious right on the key culture war issue of gay marriage. “In 2004, if you had said, ‘We’re the majority, we oppose gay rights, we oppose marriage equality, and the majority of Americans is with us,’ that would have been true,” Jones told me. Youthful megachurches were thriving. It was common for conservatives to gloat that they were going to outbreed the left.
Activists imagined a glorious future. “Home-schoolers will be inordinately represented in the highest levels of leadership and power in the next generation,” Ned Ryun, a former Bush speechwriter, said at a 2005 Christian home-schooling convention. Ryun was the director of a group called Generation Joshua, which worked to get home-schooled kids into politics. The name came from the Old Testament. Moses had led the chosen people out of exile, but it was his successor, Joshua, who conquered the Holy Land.
But the evangelicals who thought they were about to take over America were destined for disappointment. On Thursday, P.R.R.I. released startling new polling data showing just how much ground the religious right has lost. P.R.R.I.’s 2020 Census of American Religion, based on a survey of nearly half a million people, shows a precipitous decline in the share of the population identifying as white evangelical, from 23 percent in 2006 to 14.5 percent last year. (As a category, “white evangelicals” isn’t a perfect proxy for the religious right, but the overlap is substantial.) In 2020, as in every year since 2013, the largest religious group in the United States was the religiously unaffiliated.
One of P.R.R.I.’s most surprising findings was that in 2020, there were more white mainline Protestants than white evangelicals. This doesn’t necessarily mean Christians are joining mainline congregations — the survey measures self-identification, not church affiliation. It is, nevertheless, a striking turnabout after years when mainline Protestantism was considered moribund and evangelical Christianity full of dynamism.
In addition to shrinking as a share of the population, white evangelicals were also the oldest religious group in the United States, with a median age of 56. “It’s not just that they are dying off, but it is that they’re losing younger members,” Jones told me. As the group has become older and smaller, Jones said, “a real visceral sense of loss of cultural dominance” has set in.
White evangelicals once saw themselves “as the owners of mainstream American culture and morality and values,” said Jones. Now they are just another subculture.
From this fact derives much of our country’s cultural conflict. It helps explain not just the rise of Donald Trump, but also the growth of QAnon and even the escalating conflagration over critical race theory. “It’s hard to overstate the strength of this feeling, among white evangelicals in particular, of America being a white Christian country,” said Jones. “This sense of ownership of America just runs so deep in white evangelical circles.” The feeling that it’s slipping away has created an atmosphere of rage, resentment and paranoia.
QAnon is essentially a millenarian movement, with Trump taking the place of Jesus. Adherents dream of the coming of what they call the storm, when the enemies of the MAGA movement will be rounded up and executed, and Trump restored to his rightful place of leadership
“It’s not unlike a belief in the second coming of Christ,” said Jones. “That at some point God will reorder society and set things right. I think that when a community feels itself in crisis, it does become more susceptible to conspiracy theories and other things that tell them that what they’re experiencing is not ultimately what’s going to happen.”
The fight over critical race theory seems, on the surface, further from theological concerns. There are, obviously, plenty of people who aren’t evangelical who are anti-C.R.T., as well as evangelicals who oppose C.R.T. bans. But the idea that public schools are corrupting children by leading them away from a providential understanding of American history has deep roots in white evangelical culture. And it was the Christian right that pioneered the tactic of trying to take over school boards in response to teachings seen as morally objectionable, whether that meant sex education, “secular humanism” or evolution.
Jones points out that last year, after Trump issued an executive order targeting critical race theory, the presidents of all six seminaries of the Southern Baptist Convention came together to declare C.R.T. “incompatible” with the Baptist faith. Jones, whose latest book is “White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity,” could recall no precedent for such a joint statement.
As Jones notes, the Southern Baptist Convention was formed in 1845 after splitting with abolitionist Northern Baptists. He described it as a “remarkable arc”: a denomination founded on the defense of slavery “denouncing a critical read of history that might put a spotlight on that story.”
Then again, white evangelicals probably aren’t wrong to fear that their children are getting away from them. As their numbers have shrunk and as they’ve grown more at odds with younger Americans, said Jones, “that has led to this bigger sense of being under attack, a kind of visceral defensive posture, that we saw President Trump really leveraging.”
I was frightened by the religious right in its triumphant phase. But it turns out that the movement is just as dangerous in decline. Maybe more so. It didn’t take long for the cocky optimism of Generation Joshua to give way to the nihilism of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists. If they can’t own the country, they’re ready to defile it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/09/opin ... e=Homepage
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