The Bad News or the Good News?

I just saw this article in the Nashville Tennessean: Southern Baptists move closer to split 02/18/04.

This is not about splits within the US Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), although a number of congregations have broken with the SBC over the last decade because of the national group's insistence on a hardline fundamantalist theology and and a so-called "literalist" approach to Biblical interpretation.

This is about a move, which seems likely to succeed in the SBC, "toward severing ties with the Baptist World Alliance, a group of Baptist entities that it helped form 99 years ago." The SBC's doctrinaire position seems to go together with an increasingly authoritarian bent within the organization, which in many ways contradicts the Baptist emphasis on individual spiritual experience and local church autonomy. SBC critics of the international organization accuse it of "accepting liberal theologies, expressing anti-American sentiments and being openly hostile to Southern Baptist representatives and beliefs."

Denton Lotz, general secretary of the Baptist World Alliance ... said he did not understand why Southern Baptists were choosing to separate from Baptists who had experienced persecution in Russia, South Africa, India, Pakistan and other parts of the world.

That was one of the points made by Janet Hoffman, national president of the Women's Missionary Union and one of the committee members who voted against the recommendation.

To the extent that the SBC is embracing a rigid theology and marrying itself to conservative politics and social intolerance, it may be good news in more ways than one that they are taking the classic Protestant route of splitting off from the larger church organization.

On the other hand, the point Lotz and Hoffman make about the SBC seeming to withdraw its practical solidarity from Baptists in countries where they are actually persecuted is important. Because the Religious Right plays up the notion of Christians as being persecuted, in America (!!) and other countries. Lotz and Hoffman are saying to them: you claim concern about persecution of Christians abroad, but you're abandoning an important vehicle for combatting it.