Taking Back Their Church
Shiflett, Dave
TAKING BACK THER Conservative Southern Baptists have spent two decades fighting relativism, liberalism, and modernity in general—which makes them not quite so conservative after all. DAVE...
...He is especially keen on kicking theological liberals, who are guilty of taking mainline Protestantism on a "march to the sea...
...Neocons are off the wall" because they believe "if they can get the right people in positions of civil authority, they can affect change from the top down...
...The conservatives won every presidential election...
...After signing on to the ecumenical movement known as Evangelicals and Catholics Together, whose chief advocates are Baptist layman Charles Colson and Catholic priest Richard John Neuhaus, Land faced a phalanx of hugely agitated Baptists...
...The SBC returned the compliment by calling on Clinton to depart office in shame and ignominy, its ire no doubt fueled by revelations that he had succumbed to his thonged Bathsheba on Easter Sunday...
...Its leadership attributes this growth to its defeat of theological liberalism...
...These tales kept the insurgents' torches burning...
...I really believe it...
...Well, at least we got their attention...
...As it is written, the talking snake has come home to roost, and he won't be leaving any time soon...
...from the pages of the Baptist Bugle, but instead has carried the message to "6o Minutes," "The News Hour with Jim Lehrer," "Nightline," and quite often to Congress...
...The Jesus invented by the Jesus Seminar is a Palestinian smart aleck who sounds like a cynical and sarcastic intellectual...
...Patterson is now the president of the SBC...
...Earlier this year, the SBC stunned the modern world by announcing that wives should "graciously submit" to their husbands...
...The SBC favors all possible restrictions on tobacco use, bans on tobacco and alcohol advertising, and the "strictest drinking and driving standards we can get," which in the last congressional session was represented by the attempt to establish a .o8 blood alcohol content as a national drunk-driving level, a move opposed by brewers, distillers, and restaurant/bar trade associations as an attack on social drinkers...
...I believe the hope of America is in Judeo-Christian ethics...
...The New York Times put the story on the front page...
...He beat the rap...
...They might as well have flown the Episcopal flag...
...They anticipate no appointments from their political party to any posts...
...I believe that the bellwether of evangelical Christianity is the Southern Baptist Convention...
...We must be prepared to answer their withering criticism and call it what it is—anti-religious bigotry that seeks to censor us and keep us from being involved in the public square...
...The curse of liberalism has sapped the strength of their message and their witness to the Lord Jesus Christ...
...And in a literal body He's coming again...
...Success would come by electing conservative SBC presidents, who in turn could name conservative trustees, who could change the personnel in the executive committees and at the seminaries...
...Them's fighting words, and Mohler has plenty of others...
...If he sounds like a pundit, that's because he is...
...A DECADE OF WAR In 1978, a Texas judge named Paul Pressler, a Biblical scholar named Paige Patterson, and Bill Powell, a Baptist journalist, decided the time had come to send the ruling moderates into deep exile...
...Also available are guides to getting out of debt, stopping smoking, and losing weight...
...A current bestseller by Michael Farris titled Anonymous Tip tells the travails of a family falsely accused of child abuse...
...As for himself, Land believes that "Roman Catholicism is an errant form of Christianity...
...Darwinism is the cosmic myth of the modern age," he says...
...He fled to Harvard, where he became a Unitarian...
...They were not overcome by the hordes that invaded Rome during the Dark Ages...
...45 In the '70's, seminary professors routinely gave lectures designed to be "fundamentalist busters...
...Nor does he believe the changes to the Southern Baptist Convention are set in stone...
...Rogers was the sort of fellow who could make a moderate believe in talking snakes, though not necessarily of the theological type...
...When put to the inerrancy test, this time about how Noah got all those animals—and insects—onto his ark, Mohler patiently if warily responds: "Scripture is true in all that it affirms...
...REPENT, BILL While a moderate convention would have no doubt held its tongue regarding the president's sex life, and perhaps even have entered into contemplations as to whether oral sex constitutes adultery, the conservative SBC has been guided by a different spirit...
...An ordained Baptist minister who can chuckle and slice in the same breath, Land quickly points out while he and Bill Clinton both attended Oxford, "I graduated...
...and giving churches the option to earmark contributions for agencies whose programs they could in "good conscience" approve of...
...An amendment to that effect failed narrowly, though the convention did urge Congress to nullify the order...
...At the same time, Mohler is quick to denounce, in no uncertain terms, many of secularism's core beliefs...
...Criswell: We have not only lost our nation to the liberal, the secularist, and the humanist, but in great areas of our Baptist life we have lost our...
...Industry officials complain that when it comes to this issue, the Baptists are hardly inerrant One commission anti-drinking tract, whose cover features a glass of wine perched atop a leg-hold trap, claims that "some 6o,000 people will die in the United States this year from accidents caused by drinking drivers...
...Nancy Ammerman, a moderate whose book Baptist Battles is generally respected by both sides to the dispute, writes that 46 November 19 9 8 • The American Spectator the SBC's seminaries were actually divided in half along theological lines...
...He also hosts a daily call-in radio show, "For Faith and Family," produced in a studio on Nashville's Music Row...
...Meanwhile, 90 percent of American adults believe in heaven and 79 percent believe in miracles...
...Humans were not derivatives from pre-humans...
...Pragmatism and postmodernism both stalk Southern Baptists, and the gains of the last two decades can be wiped away in less than a generation...
...As more and more conservative trustees were appointed, the moderates saw the writing on the wall...
...The 45 to 48 percent who support the defeated candidate do not expect half or, for that matter, any of the seats on the president's cabinet...
...Indeed, he is a firm believer in the Talking Snake...
...He is also quite a distance from the cheerful, Reaganite conservatives who live and prosper in that fabled City on the Hill...
...How about that talking snake...
...The Baptists have been on the president's case for several years...
...Yet Gallup also found that many mainline Protestants have abandoned key orthodox beliefs, including a belief in moral absolutes...
...While deposed SBC officials like Stan Hastey of the Alliance For Baptists advocate modernist creeds such as gay marriage and female ordination, Land has worked on Capitol Hill against gambling, Internet pornography—"we helped pass the Communications Decency Act, which was struck down by the Supreme Court"—and religious persecution legislation, "which was struck down by big business...
...A Southern Seminary student said: "I was shocked in class when a professor clearly communicated that he did not believe the John 11 account that Lazarus was really dead, but that he had only fainted...
...Around 84 percent of Americans subscribe to some form of Christianity...
...James Dunn, director of the Joint Baptist Committee on Public Affairs—and a member of People for the American Way— thundered that "We do not need a sort of happy-face, we're number one orgy of Americanism, with God as the national mascot...
...Mohler is a firm supporter of Charles Colson's restatement, in First Things magazine, of the "resident alien" concept, in which religious believers find themselves separated from America's leadership "regime," especially its courts...
...We need to understand that when we challenge their secular, relativist hegemony over American society they will react with outrage and incredulity...
...There are," he acknowledges, "still significant numbers of Southern Baptists who find it difficult to conceive that a person can be Roman Catholic and still a Christian...
...I believe that the backbone of that Judeo-Christian ethic is evangelical Christianity...
...Land, it happens, shows few signs of having been driven out of the public square...
...Abandoning literalism was not only wrong, the insurgents argued, but would lead to the disintegration of the convention, a point made by Dallas conservative W.A...
...Rot was everywhere...
...Merrell's eyebrows rise...
...This acceptance, he argues, "is happening at a breathtaking speed...
...If one needs an arresting quote on organized gays, feminists, education bureaucrats, social services officials, actors, actresses, directors, rock stars, sheep doners, professors, and of course lecherous politicians, the fiery44 November 1998 • The American Spectator tongued Baptists are only a phone call away...
...Nor does he lust for a pat on the head from his cultural adversaries, as reflected in remarks at a 1996 seminar called "Christians in the Public Square: Faith in Practice...
...Polling supports some of these fears...
...Those moderates who thought inerrancy was the stuff of fantasy were to soon discover the Snake had teeth...
...Bill Leonard, a moderate Baptist and respected church historian, has pointed out that there are seven or so schools of inerrancy within the Baptist ranks, some holding the very words of the Bible inerrant, some focusing more on the "faith message" these words convey...
...Mohler is also refreshing in the sense that, unlike many pundits and cultural warriors who write as if the mob is solidly behind them, Mohler firmly embraces the designation of outcast...
...Do you know why...
...For example, the American people have a right to vote for a president...
...So I believe in a sense, that as the Southern Baptist Convention goes, so goes the world...
...It is certainly realistic, however, that there are Roman Catholics who are fellow Christians...
...The Goldwater branch has lots of fat cats, lots of chiefs, but we have all the Indians...
...Merrell is of the same school, and not only regarding the New Testament...
...They added: "You should know that our concern is felt very deeply, as evidenced by the fact that this is the only time in the 150-year history of our denomination that such a letter has been sent to a United States President...
...In 1879, Professor Crawford H. Toy was asked to leave Southern Seminary after broadcasting his belief that the Great Flood "was borrowed from the Assyrians or Babylonians during or shortly before the exile...
...How can they expect the political process to be healthier than the culture...
...Coincidence...
...One of our goals is to make alcohol consumption as socially uncool as tobacco consumption...
...LCR circulates around 9 million units of Sunday School curriculum each quarter, and the new proprietors would make sure there would be no more abominations such as the 1985 adult Bible study in which Satan was pronounced an agent of God who visited Job as a sort of "heavenly inspector...
...But it turned out to be a leg with a lot of kick...
...But a more accepted figure is 40,000 deaths a year due to all traffic accidents, says a representative from the American Beverage Institute, "of which around 17,50o are attributed in some way to alcohol...
...Nobody's going to mistake these folks for Methodists...
...For one thing, he is not hesitant to lash the general public, and is quite let down with Homo americanus, a strange creature which simultaneously holds religious beliefs while making rich cultural icons who hold these beliefs in contempt...
...They maintained they merely wanted hiring parity for literalists...
...There was a time when the SBC was known as the Squishy Baptist Convention, a champion of the warm spit theology that drips through the veins of contemporary mainline churches...
...Nor is this type of Baptist keen on dancing, Catholics, libertarians, and the wily neo-conservative...
...Mohler sends his "Fidelitas Fax" to a couple hundred friends, admirers, and media types, and writes a regular column for World magazine and the Religion News Service...
...This is going to sound almost like megalomania," he once said, "but I believe that the hope of the world lies in the West...
...A former SBC president named Jerry Vines may have best explained the concept the denomination now favors: "I'll tell you what I believe...
...The attempt backfired," according to Nancy Ammerman, "and this mailing probably lost more votes than it gained...
...The insurgents were especially alarmed by the goings-on at Southern, Southeastern, and Midwestern, which "had almost no one willing to identify themselves as fundamentalist, and only 16 percent agreed with fundamentalist beliefs...
...A culture that casually accepts the murder of its newborn children is probably past the point of moral return," he told "Fidelitas Fax" readers...
...Brown University, McMasters University, Chicago University, there's not one that remains...
...All of the Christian schools called Baptist have been lost, all of them...
...LCR's one-million square foot warehouse is at the heart of the Baptists' parallel culture, employing 3,000 writers for its various projects, including magazines Home Life (circulation 500,000), Mature Living (345,000), Journey (a devotional guide for women...
...We should plan on seeing them a great deal more in the national passion play we call the Culture Wars...
...Closer to home, Land and company target businesses and activities quite dear to conservative hearts—if not their livers and lungs...
...Some have expressed the feel-(Continued on page 50) 47 The SBC favors all possible restrictions on tobacco and alcohol...
...Those who go forth from his seminary will not, if he can help it anyway, infect their flocks with the bug of modernity...
...Also coming under firm conservative control were the various church agencies, including the denomination's huge publishing arm, formerly known as the Sunday School Board and now called Lifeway Christian Resources...
...The recent demand for resignation was not a bolt from the blue...
...This last battle, while a defeat, is a source of some pride within the ethics commission, for it reminded the world that Baptists do not bow before big business, says Dwayne Hastings, Land's assistant at the commission...
...The rank and file agreed...
...Be very afraid...
...He was sacked...
...The SBC has ridden the Snake to a position of prominence in our era of mainline Protestant decline, offering perhaps the best American example of the power of fundamenThe American Spectator • November 19 9 8 talism...
...Fifty-six percent of the Lutherans and 49 percent of the Methodists also believe in UFOs...
...They also wanted him to enter a public forum, perhaps a prayer breakfast, and "express publicly your personal regret at having made such a decision in the first place...
...On the issue of the virgin birth, Ammerman explains, 96 percent of diploma students believed fully in the event, but that number dropped to 55 percent among the master of divinity students, and fell to the low thirties among the masters and doctors of theology...
...One of our goals," Land says, "is to make alcohol consumption as socially uncool as tobacco consumption...
...In fact, Genesis has been tripping up Baptist moderates for at least a century...
...He, and the vast majority of Southern Baptists,he insists, firmly believe all aspects of the Genesis account...
...non-fiction books such as Kids Who Kill, by Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, himself a former Southern Baptist pastor, and the fiction of Marilyn Quayle...
...a requirement that denomination employees would "publicly, clearly, and unambiguously" state what they believe about the Bible...
...Yet if this cultural warring has won the Southern Baptists many supporters, especially among conservatives, their outside fans may be stunned by the full expanse of SBC beliefs and advocacy...
...If the Republican Party has a future," he says, "it's with the Reagan wing, not the Goldwater wing...
...Moderates were under the strong impression that the insurgents were allied to the political conservatives who were taking over the federal government, and Rogers did little to dissuade them...
...And they point their fingers and say, "You funny-dam-mentalists are the reason...
...No shortage of hope there...
...DAVE SHIFLETT is a writer living in Midlothian, Virginia...
...Albert Gore, the current vice president, himself a Southern Baptist...
...Television pundits, newspaper columnists and cartoonists brayed in unison...
...These are true gurkhas in the culture wars, and while many conservatives are glad to have them as allies, others may be somewhat spooked...
...Church publications even celebrated the undertakings of Helen Caldecott and Sen...
...We believe the Bible as it is written," explains Bill Merrell, a longtime preacher and now the executive committee's Vice Presidentfor Convention Relations...
...R. Albert Mohler, Jr., president of Southeastern Seminary in Louisville...
...Once again, the Baptists were on center stage, where they have spent much time as of late...
...The poor fools don't realize, of course, that they are being led away from their religious heritage...
...During this year's convention, a messenger (which is what Baptists call representatives from member churches that support the convention) rose to suggest that Clinton's home church be urged to punish him for an executive order on gay rights in government agencies...
...The SBC is growing, even as mainline Protestantism increasingly resembles the Heaven's Gate cult...
...And in an all-but-direct slap, the convention formally resolved to "implore our government leaders to live by the highest standards of morality both in their private actions and in their public duties, and thereby serve as models of moral excellence...
...Scripture clearly affirms the special creation of human beings...
...Gallup reports that 86 percent of teenagers believe Jesus Christ is God or the Son of God...
...An MSNBC commentator even felt obliged to apologize to Henry J. Lyons, a disgraced churchman, after mistakenly calling Lyons a Southern Baptist...
...Merrell, who is called upon to explain the convention's position on boycotts, boozing, and dancing (which can lead participants down a dark path or two, he advises) is speaking in his spacious book-lined Nashville office, a slim volume entitled Satan perched just above his right shoulder...
...He rejects some of the core beliefs of the current scientific outlook...
...While Baptists and Catholics agree on many social issues, Land explains, there remains a very strong anti-Catholic animus among many in the rank and file...
...Unlike Mohler, Land is not in the "resident alien" camp...
...In one salvo of mud, Patterson was charged with links to the Unification Church and the Reconstructionist Movement, the latter described in a mailing as a group "which wants to do away with the United States Constitution and base our society on Old Testament law, enforce the death penalty for at least 15 crimes including adultery and blasphemy, enforce the death penalty for a rebellious child, replace our present form of currency with gold and silver, limit all debts to six years, [and] abolish all government-run schools...
...By the time the conservatives got around to revolting, Merrell says, Biblical literalism was on its last leg, especially in the convention's six seminaries...
...Like other social conservatives such as Gary Bauer, Land is strongly at odds with major elements in the GOP...
...The rank and file has been getting in its own licks...
...While conservatives would be encouraged if the present employment picture actually reflected this idea, democracies do not function quite that way...
...And its tongues of fire also got around to licking at the loins of the nation's most prominent Baptist, Bill Clinton, of Little Rock's Immanuel Baptist Church...
...TO HELL WITH DARWIN R. Albert Mohler is young in appearance—he arrived at Southeastern five years ago, at age 33—but is clearly animated by things ancient...
...an assurance that students who believe in inerrancy would not be ridiculed in the classroom...
...Only about half of Lutherans, Methodists, and Presbyterians believe in the devil,which is about the same number as believe in extra sensory perception...
...The longer a student remained in seminary, the less orthodox he became...
...DAVE SHIFLETT hen the president decided to seek clerical assistance in the struggle to subdue his raging flesh, he did not tap a preacher from the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), the denomination to which he has long belonged both as a pew snoozer and choirboy...
...He is certainly not waging his battle against the Times, et al...
...If these fellows with their television cameras had been on that mountain that day they would have seen Jesus leave from a literal mountain, on a literal cloud, through a literal sky, in a literal body, going back to a literal heaven, to sit down on a literal throne...
...The conservatives tasted success quickly, electing their first president, Memphis pastor Adrian Rogers, in 1979...
...I am not required to attempt a scientific explanation" for such doctrines...
...Not surprisingly, Mohler states that "I am a paleocon...
...I believe the hope of the West lies in America...
...But it was the professors that riled them most...
...One told an audience that "we may have to do as they did in Rome, when they survived the Dark Ages by creating pockets of civility, intelligence, and morality...
...In 1963, a professor at the Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary wrote a critical interpretation of the Genesis account...
...The American Spectator • November 19 98 Once the war began, it assumed the nobility of the typical political catfight...
...She also found that some professors "routinely delivered lectures designed to be 'fundamentalist busters...
...And while church resolutions, like newspaper editorials, don't get much done in the real world, the SBC has other weapons in its arsenal, including Richard Land of the Institute for Religious Freedom, headquartered in Nashville, and Dr...
...While the Episcopal Church, for example, has lost over a third of its members in the past three decades, SBC membership as of last year had grown to 40,887 churches, up from 36,979 in 1985...
...Indeed, they have seen the spotlight, and appear to be well pleased...
...In June 1996, the SBC's current president and ten previous presidents sent an open letter appealing to Clinton "to repent of your veto" of the Partial-birth Abortion Ban Act...
...It attacked the full litany of social ills...
...The SBC executive leadership, which supposedly does the bidding of the member churches, would not support the pro-life and school prayer positions popular among the rank-and-file, and it also sent money to the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs, an institution which aroused among conservative Baptists the sort of revulsion cold warriors once felt toward the Institute for Policy Studies...
...He also recognizes that he is something of a stranger among his cultural allies...
...While the convention distributes millions of unkind words about television, drugs, and the wages of divorce, it also denounces, in equally powerful and sometimes misleading prose, drinking, smoking, gambling, and some expressions of capitalist exuberance...
...I am not a neocon...
...Mohler's role in the culture wars is primarily within the Baptist household...
...Continued from page 47) ing that since votes at the Southern Baptist Convention in recent years averaged a 55-45 percent differential that faculty and agency employment ought somehow to reflect that same split," Patterson said...
...Their organizational message was similar to the rallying cry of the political conservatives of the era: people are policy...
...Scoffing at literalism became commonplace in the teaching institutions...
...The American Spectator November 19 9 8 51 While his religion teaches him to be neither optimistic nor pessimistic, some of his writings sound pessimistic to the untrained ear...
...Taking the Baptist message to the wider world is largely in the hands of Richard Land, chief of the SBC's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (founded in 1913 as the Temperance and Social Service Commission...
...Because it is the second largest religious group in America (after Roman Catholics), and deeply involved in the culture wars, the SBC's beliefs and tactics are worth a closer look...
...The Garden of Eden was a real place, populated by Adam and Eve, who were Adam and Eve from the start, not as the result of a long evolutionary drama...
...This type of Reaganite rhetoric was too much for the moderates...
...Where on the right side of the political spectrum does Mohler place himself...
...Literally...
...Conservatives played what cards their opponents handed them, lashing Dunn for his PAW link and denouncing the president of the Southeastern Seminary for having offered a prayer at the opening ceremonies for a brewery, among other things...
...The spoils of victory were great Not only did the seminaries fall...
...52 November 19 98 • The American Spectator...
...Lyons, one-time president of the National Baptist Convention USA, may have been indicted by a federal grand jury on 56 counts of fraud, conspiracy, money laundering, and tax evasion, but at least he wasn't one of those...
...institutions, our colleges, our universities...
...By the end of the 1988-89 academic year, one-third of Southeastem's faculty—and its brewery-blessing president—were gone...
...All told, this was a big bunch of bloody shirts, and Patterson and Pressler went about the countryside waving them before the conservative troops...
...WITHOUT ERROR There are around fifty different types of Baptists, including those who handle vipers, congregations of messianic Jews, a smattering of earth worshippers, advocates of gay marriage, and other adherents to positions much more common among contemporary Presbyterians (once known as Baptists who learned to read...
...Hastings, who makes sure a visitor recognizes the SBC's advocacy against hunger and racism, is quick to denounce sneaker manufacturers and other businesses (including those owned by Disney) that he says exploit foreign workers...
...A man of calm and deep self-assurance, he holds firmly to the tenets of the "Baptist Faith and Message," the SBC's foundational document, which holds that the Bible is "truth without any mixture of error...
...Evangelist Bailey Smith, who made himself notorious for stating in 198o that "God doesn't hear the prayers of Jews," put it this way : "Folks, I don't like anything that puts a question mark over the Word of God...
...Over half (52 percent) of their graduates were to the left of center, and over one-third (34 percent) identified themselves as moderates (eight times the proportion found in any other group of clergy...
...It was on this rock that the moderates' back was broken, and it is inerrancy that animates the SBC's witness, both theological and political...
...You are belittling my religious beliefs," Merrell replies, though with all good grace...
...By officially returning to Biblical inerrancy, the SBC stands as an exception to the rule that institutions which are not self-consciously conservative eventually become liberal...
...He adds that the Christian has always been something of a resident alien...
...Well, it was a nice try...
...We might as well be from another planet, not just west of the Hudson...
...He gives as an example the growing, indeed forced, acceptance of homosexuality, which he calls "the most graphic rejection of the Christian world view...
...The seminaries had become generators of theological rot...
...The SBC became a strong pro-life advocate...
...I withdrew my signature after it became clear that a significant portion of Southern Baptists didn't want the impression left that an agency of the Southern Baptist Convention was involved in that type of interfaith dialogue," he says...
...It is here that some conservatives will recoil...
...Inerrancy, of course, can mean different things to different people...
...The New York Times has pronounced that public policy advocacy by conservative Christians constitutes "a far greater threat to democracy than was presented by communism...
...The new regime defunded Reagan-baiter Dunn and put aside all notions of hiring parity...
...Yet whatever its role in presidential elections, the SBC will continue to serve as a traditionalist spear-chucker in the culture wars, and as an example to other denominations as to the possibilities and perils of biblical orthodoxy...
...A third of the Methodists and 31 percent of the Presbyterians believe in astrology...
...Like any good propaganda minister, the journalist Powell was an adept at finding victims of such muggings and publishing their testimonies...
...But he has discovered that reaching out to religious groups here at home can land one in professional purgatory, even when the group has nearly identical political and cultural aims...
...they had wishy-washy politics as well...
...Because watered down penicillin never cured anybody...
...If you believe in a literal reading of the Bible," his visitor suggests, "then you are saying that every horror that has befallen humanity is the result of a woman being convinced to eat a forbidden fruit by a talking snake...
...This latter lesson was apparently not lost on Episcopalians in Third World countries, who are leading the resistance to their denomination's liberal views on homosexuality, to the grave despair of progressives such as Bishop William Spong...
...To the SBC, the only good drinker is an ex-drinker, or better yet, someone who never takes the first gulp...
...The old SBC regime was not so sure about inerrancy, especially when it came to various Old Testament accounts...
...Breaks from orthodoxy continued with regularity, leading the convention to pass a strong anti-evolutionary resolution in 1926 and require employees to pledge loyalty to that viewpoint...
...These days the alienation is merely more profound...
...I am a member of the cognitive minority," he says...
...Not only were the moderates off the theological straight and narrow...
...But he is no fool...
...I am thankful to be an American," he says, "but my first citizenship is Christian citizenship...
...Often his subject is popular culture, a pestilence much worse than frogs and locusts which is undermining moral and religious certainty at warp speed...
...It was not always thus...
...This places "far too much hope in the political process...
...But the predominant Baptist group these days, without question, is the Southern Baptist Convention, whose membership is closing in on 16 million...
...Mohler is not the typical cultural pundit, however...
...The SBC has also made headlines by continuing to target Jews for conversion and with its boycott of the Disney corporation for pro-gay policies...
...But the core complaint was theological...
...William Land, head of the SBC's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission and a former Baptist seminary student, recalls that "the daily topic of discussion was about what would happen if the constituency ever found out what was being taught in our seminaries...
...Be afraid...
...And because of the inroads of liberalism and secularism the Baptist witness in the north is very small....The mainline denominations of our nation have lost millions and millions these last few years....It is very apparent why the decline...
...The Jesus Seminar— a band of media-hungry scholars which insists that Jesus probably said little that is attributed to him — "tells us virtually nothing about Jesus, but a great deal about the liberal scholars who sit around with colored beads, creating a Jesus in 50 November 1 9 9 8 • The American Spectator their own image...
...Clinton didn't...
...In many ways, people who come from the world view presented by the editorial page of the New York Times look upon us as alien beings...
...145,000), Christian Single (65,000), ParentLife (115,000), and Stand Firm, a devotional guide for men, with 55,000 circulation...
...And social conservatives are not going to be Doled again," particularly on abortion...
...Any Southern Baptist is going to reject evolution as a world view...
...He went on to explain that he doubted other biblical miracles and said 'they must be understood in light of the existential and spiritual message of truth to the individual, whether or not the actual events are true.'" Another Southern student had written a thesis indicating that the longer a student remained in seminary, the less orthodox he became...
Vol. 31 • November 1998 • No. 11
