Is this a New Beginning for them? Or is it the Beginning of the End for America’s largest Protestant Denomination?
In recent years, especially with the ‘Progressive’ Left trying to help Society regress to all the social excesses once seen in First Century Greece, the church has often found itself siding with Republicans.
With the Left’s antagonism toward traditional Christian values (demonizing believers over their positions on preserving traditional marriage, and opposing abortion-as-birth control, for example), and the preservation of other traditional American values, the political right became a natural ally to conservative-minded Christian Churches.
For anyone who’s taken a look at the DNC platform, including that infamous booing of God in their convention and their well-established 0-for-10 score on the Ten Commandments, that shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone.
But times they are a-changing.
There was a vote for new leadership among the Southern Baptists. Younger voters had a different view of the world than the ‘old guard’. Were they going to stay the course and continue engaging the culture, or were they going to chart a new direction?
They voted for the new direction.
“The generational shift happening in the SBC has thrust the group into the middle of an identity crisis,” says Barry Hankins, the chair of the department of history at Baylor University and co-author of Baptists in America: A History. “The younger generation thinks differently than the old-guard Christian right about culture and politics, and they are demanding change.”
To enact this change, young Baptists nominated 45-year-old pastor J.D. Greear from North Carolina to be president of the denomination. In a campaign video, Greear called for “a new culture and a new posture in the Southern Baptist Convention.”
Refusing to cede power without a fight, fundamentalist Baptists nominated Ken Hemphill as an opposition candidate. But Greear won with nearly 70 percent of the vote, becoming the youngest SBC president in 37 years.
Greear has promised to lead the denomination down a different path, which, he has said, must include efforts both to repent of a “failure to listen to and honor women and racial minorities” and “to include them in proportionate measures in top leadership roles.” If the meeting in Dallas is any indication, his vision is resonating with a large number of the next wave of Baptist leaders.
Women and racial minorities. Is the church adopting the language of the perpetually-aggrieved envy politics of the Left? Adopting same language and ideology that is putting Universities into a moral tailspin? Here’s one Professor’s warning about that thinking: Dear Mom & Dad: Dangerous People Are Teaching Your Kids – This Video Will Wake You Up … and his concerns have nothing to do with traditional biblical morality.
The column continues to lay out some reasons that the denomination is shifting away from it’s traditionally GOP-friendly stance, and is charting a more ‘independent’ course.
Will that mean they are becoming an ‘apolitical’ voice to challenge sin where it’s found in both parties?
Or will this be yet another example of the Trojan Horse tactic of the Political Left? Have the Southern Baptists now fallen to the Left’s tried-and-true tactic of infiltrating organizations it disagrees with, and corrupting it from the inside?
We shall soon see. Which do you think is happening here?
What's your read on this Southern Baptist vote?
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