In an email conversation last week with discerning friends, I read this:
“Fundamentalists were right back in the ‘80s when they warned us about a slippery slope that would take us somewhere awful. Only—it’s tilted to the right.”
I remember those “slippery slope” alarms. They were announced with a mixture of anger and anxiety by preachers who feared the Southern Baptist Convention was becoming too progressive, too tolerant of feminine voices, too attentive to racial injustice, too eager to engage in dialogue, too everything that projected a loss of control by the white southern men who dominated the Convention.
The “slippery slope” image suggested that if the Convention allowed the slightest freedom to think, imagine, teach, or dissent it would soon slide on down into outright unbelief or at least liberalism (which were essentially the same, it was thought).
I know.
I was there, a student at the epicenter of this out-of-control freedom writing a dissertation of the inerrancy of scripture in the Southern Baptist Convention. I remember, and many of us remember, the fearmongering focused on an imagined future, how the Convention would lose it lofty place of preeminence in the Protestant world, would slide uncontrollably into irrelevance and unbelief, would exchange its grand gospel inheritance for a mess of unholy pottage (see Genesis 25:29-34).
I didn’t believe it, this “slippery slope” stuff; but I was wrong, in a way. My friends are right—there was a slippery slope to be feared, just not a slide into liberalism and irrelevance but a plunge headlong off the other side of the mountain: into fundamentalism, fanaticism, Trumpism.
Which is where the Convention is right now!
Decisions made forty years ago to reject some ideas and embrace others, to repudiate some leaders and elect others, to shut down some operations and expand others—those decisions set in motion trends that have led inexorably to this sad and gloomy day in Baptist land in the South.
In three weeks, thousands of these bible-thumping, god-fearing Trumpsters will gather in Nashville to assess their situation and struggle to find a way back up the slope. Four candidates are vying for the office of president, each falling back-ass backwards to be more conservative, more restrictive, more reactionary, yes, more Trumpian than the other. Along the way they have tossed aside legitimate concerns about rampant sexual misconduct, deep-seated racism, political favoritism, declining sales, and discouraging statistics, especially baptisms, buildings, and budgets.
Southern Baptists are sliding down, down, down. They have not yet hit the bottom. Nobody knows where the bottom is or what it will feel like when that cadre of white men stand knee deep in the mud of their own making and bemoan the indifference of the world to the distorted gospel they proclaim.
I don’t care either, except for two things.
First, I was raised in the Southern Baptist ways of being Christian. In many ways, it was good: taught me to love Jesus, the Bible, and the Church—all good things. But it also taught me (often by silent indifference) to practice segregation, ignore the women, and embrace a denominational triumphalism that turned out to be a self-righteousness of the worst sort.
And second, what happens in America’s largest denomination matters. When Southern Baptists distribute meals, visit prisons, welcome strangers, and clean up after storms, it makes me proud—and they have a history of doing lots of all that. But when they rebuke the women, ignore their racist culture, and dominate states that rank at the bottom of every measure of social wellbeing, it makes me sad…and it compromises their witness to the Risen Lord and God’s purposes in the world.
I left Southern Baptists thirty years ago, one of many on the other side of the slope that their leaders feared were threatening the gospel vitality of that Christian communion. But without the open, progressive population to balance the native conservatism, Southern Baptists slid steadily down that slope into the cesspool of political distraction and gospel distortion.
Southern Baptists are in a mess. It has been a steady slide down that slippery slope. It makes me sad but not a bit surprised.
(May 2021)
