As a born-again Southern Baptist who walked the aisle at twelve to the sounds of "Just As I Am," who lead youth groups, taught Sunday School, coached softball, and was only held out of the choir by the combined pleas of every single person within hearing range, I'm still aching over the course my church has taken the last three decades.
Though it's hard to imagine now, the Southern Baptist Convention that I grew up with was a more moderate organization, one that was much more tolerate of a variety of opinions. But through the 1980s and 90s, the Convention came increasingly under the control of hard-line conservatives. They not only began to enforce an extremely strict code on participating churches -- one that included biblical inerrancy and a rigid view of scripture -- they adopted conservative political positions as if they had been carted down from the top of Mt. Sinai.
Over that time, there's been a sort of Baptist diaspora as hundreds of churches and tens of thousands of members have left the Southern Baptist Convention. Not that the Convention mourned the losses. Marrying themselves to the hard right, they've supported the construction of mega-churches, often parked next door to those congregations that refused to bow to the new rules. In my own neighborhood, the new Southern Baptist church is not only the size of a small football stadium, the youth minister there is the leader of the local Young Republicans. Sometimes it's hard to tell which group is meeting, as prayers and songs mingle with praise for Bush and disdain for Democrats. Bush has addressed the the annual Convention meeting every year since 2002 and each year from 2002-2006 saw the Convention match his visit with a measure in support of the war.
If you listen to the news, you might think that these are the only Baptists. They're not.
For more than 150 years, Baptists in the United States have splintered along political, theological and racial lines. But this week, some of the country’s largest Baptist groups — representing about 20 million believers — will meet to try to mend the old fractures and, some leaders say, present a more diverse and moderate image of their faith than the one offered by the conservative Southern Baptist Convention.
Twenty million Baptists is more than all those in the Southern Baptist Convention. Many of the churches involved are former Souther Baptist churches that either left or were ousted when the Convention turned radical. Others are traditional black churches, or churches that split from the Convention before the Civil War. Who was able to span the economic, racial, and theological divides that have long separated these groups?
The three-day meeting of more than 30 groups — known as the New Baptist Covenant Celebration, which begins on Wednesday in Atlanta — is a result of efforts by former President Jimmy Carter to draw together long-divided Baptists.
And considering the course the Convention has taken, it shouldn't be surprising that some other Baptists were on hand at this gathering: Bill Clinton and Al Gore.
The hope is that this group will be able to form a "New Baptist Covenant," one that can provide an alternative to the Convention, not as a liberal force, but as a force that believes in diversity -- and in the separation of church and state that was long a core belief of the Southern Baptist church until conservatives found it convenient to ignore that tradition.
Leaders of the current Southern Baptist Convention are scornful of this gathering, but what men like Richard Land need to realize is that they are on the wrong side of history. Their moment has passed.
And for those Baptists who have scattered to other churches -- or to no church -- the opportunity to go home sure sounds good.