Southern Baptists double down on decline
“No one could accuse the Baptists of excessive cheeriness,” David Siders begins in his Politico report from the Southern Baptist Convention conclave in New Orleans:
“We are living in dark and perilous times in America,” read the billing for a night with former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, “as our culture descends into a spiritual abyss …”
It is a stark change of mood for hundreds of pastors and church members from their Trump-years triumphalism. The U.S. has been both steadily secularizing and religiously diversifying for decades. This leaves Southern Baptists, once dominant in a region of churches on every streetcorner, unsettled at their declining ability to dictate local culture. Evangelicals of whom Southern Baptists are a fraction, saw Trump, the “thrice-married former casino owner” with his “two Corinthians” pandering as an imperfect champion. At least he was pandering. “Great again” for them meant more than white dominance. He represented renewal of their religious and cultural dominance.
Since then, Siders explains, all seems to have gone to Hell.
The midterm elections had not produced the sweeping conservative victories Republicans promised. The overturning of Roe v. Wade, the signature accomplishment of the religious right, had become a major liability for the GOP, contributing to losses in a series of elections. In December, the Democratic president, Joe Biden, signed legislation codifying same-sex marriage into law — with the support of 39 Republicans in the House and 12 in the Senate.
There was the transgender rights movement, which pastor after pastor complained they saw seeping into their pews. A panel conversation one afternoon entitled “Re-Forming Gen Z: Sexuality, Technology and Human Formation” drew such a large crowd that organizers turned away late-comers and a moderator was forced to combine what he called “a lot of questions related to gender and sexuality” into a few. They included how best to respond to a teenager who insists on a preferred pronoun and how to “navigate conversations with a teen who believes in God but also thinks that same-sex attraction is OK.”
And then there was the temerity of some Southern Baptist churches to allow women to serve as pastors, which had been the focus of feuding within the denomination.
The shrinking denomination doubled down by expelling the Saddleback Church, a megachurch in Orange County, Calif., (and another in North Carolina) for having a female pastor, something other mainline Protestant churches now allow.
The group is now left “trying to hold the line,” one attendee lamented outside.
“It’s almost like Christianity’s being attacked,” said Angela Mathews, a retired high school history and English teacher from Murphy, Texas.
“When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression,” as the expression goes.
Siders has much more on trends within the church that parallel strains within the Republican Party. Particularly, that changing demographics are working against the group’s once-undisputed dominance across the South.
Something these pieces never seems to detect is the interplay between cultural drift and fringe-right activists’ need to “organize discontent.” Culture-war entrepreneurs like Christopher Rufo mine Page 15 stories about critical race theory, gender-affirming care or drag queen story hour, and gin them up into threats of apocalyptic proportions. Thus are Evangelicals already sensitized to their declining influence manipulated by titular allies for political gain. Any accelerant to keep the rubes inflamed, voting, and donating. Conservative politicos make bank on catalyzed discontent. So do the churches.
Moderating a panel before a keynote by [Mike] Pompeo, Trump’s former secretary of state, Ryan Helfenbein*, executive director of Liberty University’s Standing for Freedom Center, acknowledged the decline of what he called a “biblical world view” in America. But he also said millions of people who regularly attend church do not vote. Those people, perhaps, are reachable.
Reachable not in the come-to-Jesus sense. They already go to church. Reachable in the vote for conservative authoritarians sense.
Toxic codependency is why Siders finds a dearth of “excessive cheeriness” in these circles.
*We last saw Helfenbein referencing Hitler.