In Roman Catholic baptized and reared Sarah Palin, Southern Baptists will find a strong ally; and she will in them, too

As the presumptive Vice-Presidential nominee of the Republican Party, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, who was baptized a Roman Catholic but now attends Assemblies of God churches, will illustrate how much the nation's largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, has changed over the past 50 years.

Forty-eight years ago when the Democratic Party nominated John Fitzgerald Kennedy for President of the United States, Southern Baptist pastors and leaders recoiled at the nominee because of his Roman Catholic background. Ignoring Kennedy's impressive credentials and bright mind, the Baptists argued forcefully in sermons, church newsletters and every forum they could find that the election of Kennedy would de facto turn the country over to the pope in Rome.

Weeks before the election Kennedy recognized the seriousness of the situation and met with key Baptist pastors and leaders on the second floor of the Rice Hotel in downtown Houston. There he pledged his loyalty and fidelity to the American concept of the separation of church and state. After that the Baptists and their cohorts in other denominations calmed down and stopped fighting against him. (Many actually even voted for him!) 

During that same time period, Southern Baptists pastors and leaders declined to interact with Assemblies of God pastors and churches, because they rejected their neo-Pentecostal theology. SBC churches or pastors in that day that leaned Pentecostal soon found themselves ostracized or even evicted from the SBC fold.

Nearly a half-century later, much has changed in the country and among Southern Baptists.

For one thing, in 1960 when the brouhaha over Kennedy's Catholicism occurred, Southern Baptist pastors and leaders mostly were affiliated with the Democratic Party. Southern Baptists' disaffection for Kennedy threatened a serious schism in that party. 

Today, a significant majority of Southern Baptists and Evangelicals register as Republicans. That means they will be mostly loyal to their party's nominee, John McCain, even when they have some reservations about him.

Beyond party affiliation, however, another factor will trump many things in this election. Back when Southern Baptists fought against Kennedy, they and the Democractic Party were not at odds over one of the major social issues of our day—abortion. Until the early 1980s, Southern Baptists were mostly either benign toward or mildly supportive of abortion. The key escape-hatch phrase for the Southern Baptists back then was "abortion for the mental health of the mother". The Democratic Party then as well as now was comfortable with a pro-abortion stance. It became even more so after the Roe v Wade decision in 1973.

Today, Southern Baptists, Roman Catholics, and Assemblies of God are more united in their opposition to abortion than they are divided on many theological points.

Sarah Palin's strong pro-life stand—including her living personal testimony in favor of it—no doubt will grab the attention of a large majority of Southern Baptists as well as other Evangelicals. It will override any concern they might otherwise have about her Roman Catholic roots and her current Assemblies of God affiliation.

Many Evangelicals already have expressed dismay at John McCain's lukewarm opposition to abortion, while they express horror at Barack Obama's wholehearted support of it. Illustrating this attitude, the SBC's Richard Land recently likened McCain to a "third-rate fireman" and Obama to a "first-rate arsonist".  Land left no doubt about his concern about both candidates' positions on abortion, but his comments also left no doubt McCain would get the nod—though a weak one—over Obama.

Some Southern Baptists even have considered boycotting the election altogether because of McCain's tepid approach to the pro-life movement.

Now enters Sarah Palin, the pro-life Roman Catholic-turned Assemblies and relatively unknown governor of Alaska. While Obama-oriented political writers at CNN, Yahoo and other media outlets roast McCain for choosing a relatively inexperienced Vice-Presidential running mate, they completely fail to note how much support Palin instantly will draw for her pro-life stand. Many voters will prefer a candidate with the right (and very strong!) stand on pro-life to a candidate with a tepid approach to pro-life issues but with many years in political life in Washington! 

When Kennedy was running in 1960, many political commentators ignored and even laughed at those Southern Baptists preachers who were up in arms over Kennedy's Catholicism. Kennedy didn't laugh. He took the matter seriously. Had he not done so, he probably wouldn't have occupied the Oval Office, given his tiny margin of victory in the general election.

Today, some news commentators are laughing at Palin's limited credentials (ignoring, of course, how even Hillary Clinton not long ago poked fun at Obama's lack of experience, too). On election day, those same commentators may find that in Sarah Palin's nomination McCain pulled off a John F. Kennedy-like move that won him the election.

Time will tell.

Instead of fighting against Pew Forum poll results, see it as a "wake up" call

So why have Southern Baptists seemed more jumpy than other religious groups have about the Pew Forum's recent poll on prevailing religious opinions?

One could argue that Baptists simply are trying to hold the pollsters accountable for their conclusions.

Or one might conclude that their public-relations folks have seen a "great news angle" and jumped in once again to get the denomination's name before the public.

I would contend that no other people—with the possible exception of the Mormons—stands to lose more than do the Southern Baptists if the recent Pew poll is correct and Americans are becoming increasingly universalistic in their approach to religion. Consequently, America's largest Protestant denomination has pounced with all fours on research by the Pew Forum that seems to affirm that a liberalizing approach to faith is under way in this country and even among their own members.

Southern Baptists represent America's leading Evangelical denomination. They represent the biggest, wealthiest, and most politically astute among the church groups that preach a you-must-be saved-to-go-to-heaven doctrine. Southern Baptists got to their bigger-than-thou status because of their approach to evangelism. Universalism undermines this basic doctrine on which the Southern Baptist populace was built.

If many correct paths exist to salvation, then no one belief is better than the others. 

If many correct paths exist to God, then why bother to raise and to spend hundreds of millions of dollars annually to send more than 5,000 missionaries to every corner of the globe with the Good News of salvation available through Jesus Christ? 

If many correct paths exist to  salvation, then why bother to concern themselves with Jesus' words, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father except by Me" (John 14:6). 

If many paths exist to God, then why bother to teach correct doctrine to their children or other church members? 

The seeds of universalism have been planted in the American soil for the past four decades by the rapid rise and growth of so many non-Judeo-Christian religions here and the continuing secularization of our culture. Southern Baptists and other Evangelical groups have led the fight (somewhat unsuccessfully) against secularism; they've mostly ignored  the greater threat of these alternative faiths literally sprouting like Kudzu under their noses. 

Instead of trying to shout down the results of the Pew Forum's findings, Southern Baptists and other Evangelicals would be better served to use it as a wake-up call to the reality that is emerging in their own backyards.

 The reality is, America's religious landscape is changing dramatically; it's spilling over into our churches—regardless whether denominational leaders are willing to face it squarely or not. Quibbling over a few percentage points or some wording in a poll only clouds the real issues. Encountering the real issue headon and deciding what strategy to follow is a much better approach. 

Pew poll raises issue: Which religion are we talking about anyway?

Last Tuesday the Dallas Morning News reported in a headline on its front page (the banner story), "Most say there is more than one path to eternal life, poll finds". The headline was drawn from findings in new research by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. 

On that same day other newspapers across the country also carried the story with similar headlines.

Two days later, Baptist Press reported "A new Pew Research Center poll result showing evangelicals holding universalistic beliefs regarding salvation may have been skewed at least somewhat because of how the question was worded." 

Two days after that—on Saturday when it almost never publishes—Baptist Press took the unusual step of distributing what it termed "Breaking News", stating, "Study adds doubt about Pew poll 'universalism' claim".

Citing a soon-to-be released LifeWay study, the Baptist news service reported "The LifeWay Research finding adds quantifiable data to growing criticisms that the Pew survey was flawed in how it asked its question and that poor wording was the cause of Pew's counterintuitive conclusions about evangelicals' beliefs regarding the exclusivity of Christ for salvation."

Baptist Press quoted my friend, Scripps-Howard religion columnist Terry Mattingly, as saying, "I am being a bit picky here, but I suspect that if you asked a lot of people that Pew Forum question today, they would think of the great world religions. But many Christians would think more narrowly than that. Not all. Not many, perhaps. But some. What is your religion? I'm a Baptist, a Nazarene, an Episcopalian, a Catholic. Can people outside of your religion be saved? Of course. This is not the same thing, for many, as saying that they believe that salvation is found outside faith in Jesus Christ." 

So, what's going on here? And what's all the hysteria about?

Several trends are at play all at the same time.

1. Forty years ago most Southern Baptists, Roman Catholics and other members of widely differing Christian groups looked on each other as "not saved". Before Vatican Council II, Roman Catholics, for instance, thought all Protestants were going to hell. Most Southern Baptists as well as some other groups thought the same thing of Roman Catholics as well as members of some other Protestant bodies. 

2. Back then America was basically a Judeo-Christian country.  That means most people who espoused a religion were either Jewish, Roman Catholic, or Protestant.  The furthest thing from anybody's mind then was the possibility of America's becoming populated with Muslim mosques, Hindu temples, and Buddhist pagodas as well as an assortment of other houses of worship. The whole idea was just too far-fetched for most Americans in the 1960s to comprehend. When someone like me tried to say in the 1970s that in four or five decades U.S. Muslims would outnumber U.S. Jews, or U.S. Hindus would be inching alongside Episcopalians numerically, people would respond in disbelief.

That was then. This is now.

1. Today, Roman Catholics officially refer to Protestants as the "departed brethren", a major acknowledgement that Protestants are no longer according to official Catholic theology "going to hell".  Roman Catholics are engaged in dialogue with other Christian groups on a varying scale, depending on how receptive various groups are to dialogue and recognition of Roman Catholics. Meanwhile, some Roman Catholics, including church leaders, and some in the more liberal Protestant denominations are starting to say Muslims worship the same God as Christians and Jews do, only they call him Allah instead of Jehovah (Yahweh and all the other names Christians give to God).

2. During the past 40 years Protestants have experienced the most incredible "member swapping" imaginable. Former Southern Baptists populate the Mormon church in surprising numbers. Former Roman Catholics can be found in significant numbers in  Southern Baptist churches throughout the country. Presbyterians have jumped ship to join the United Methodists; Episopalians have become Roman Catholics.  Got the picture? Churches have become more like chicken stew than separate dishes of pure chicken, pure tomatoes, pure potatoes, and so forth. Very few denominations remain "pure" Lutheran, Presbyterian, Baptist, Catholic, whatever. That mixture has lessened the ability to say "all Roman Catholics believe this, all Southern Baptists believe that, and "all members of the Churches of Christ believe this.". . . and so forth.

2. Today, Muslims are fast catching up in numbers with the U.S. Jewish population. U.S. Hindus really could soon numerically equal the Episcopalians; Buddhists are becoming almost as numerous as Presbyterians.

So, in the midst of this changing landscape, the Pew Forum steps in and asks a question about whether Christians believe others outside their faith will be going to heaven some day.  No wonder confusion reigns! 

The question itself is most legitimate, especially given the changes in American religious life that have been under way for nearly four decades. However, in the context of today's religious world, the question needs to be asked very precisely. Whose faith are we talking about anyway—Christian branches such as Episcopalians, Southern Baptists, United Methodist, and Roman Catholics? Or Christians generically along with Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus as well as others? 

A summa cum laude seminary degree is not necessary to know that within Christianity, individual Christians—including Roman Catholic, Southern Baptist, United Pentecostal, United Methodist, etc.—are more accepting toward each other than in previous generations. How widespread this tolerance is needs to be determined by some really precise, skilled researchers.

At the same time, on the cutting edge is the issue involving how accepting Christians are of non-Christians. Granted, some Christians today believe Jews will go to heaven; some even believe Muslims will be there, too. But what about Hindus, Buddhists, and so forth? Again, more research is needed into exactly what is believed by whom about what.

Unfortunately, the Pew Forum needed to use a shotgun instead of a rifle in its research on these two issues. It needed to determine the answers to a lot of questions before drawing any generalized conclusion about the bigger issue of how tolerant Christians are today about the faith of others.  In the chicken stew of today's religious environment, one lone question wasn't enough to get at the bigger picture. Regrettably, it only muddied the waters.

So, why are Southern Baptists in a snit about Pew's finding? More on that next time.

Yes, I coined the phrase Baptistdom

You won't find the word in your Webster's Dictionary, but you will find it in my new book, Witness to the Truth. You'll also find the word many times on this blog, "Louis Moore on Religion". 

 

Yes, I coined the word. I have been using it for nearly 20 years now, ever since I first moved to Nashville, TN, almost 20 years ago to join the Southern Baptist bureaucracy.  Some of my friends still laugh when I use MY word; other friends have started to pick it up.

 

That word is BAPTISTDOM. It's a compilation of the word Christendom and Baptist. 

My definition of the word, however, is more akin to the word Curia. The word Curia refers to the bureaucracy of the Roman Catholic Church, centered at the Vatican in Rome. The Curia is notorious for its slippery, passive, courtly, overtly religious style.

 

Baptistdom is my label for the highly unusual Southern Baptist way of life we encountered in Nashville and later in Richmond. Baptistdom was like a peculiar and alien culture—something far, far different from "normal" life we had known in Houston and elsewhere. This wasn't because of Baptistdom's expressed faith in God nor because of its theological orientation so much as because of its unique small-town, Southern , bureaucratic, passive-aggressive style.  

 

Over the years I realized how much Baptistdom was like the notorious Roman Catholic Curia. Both are bureaucracies with their own social codes, political agendas, and unusual way of conducting business. Gossip and behind-your-back, cutting remarks seemed to be written into Baptistdom's genetic code; people often joked that the walls of the SBC's Sunday School Board building (now LifeWay) at 127 9th Avenue North, Nashville, would physically fall down if gossip in that structure ceased. I would suspect these characteristics are also written into the genetic code of the Catholic Curia as well.

 

Baptistdom is much, much larger than most people, including most Southern Baptists, ever begin to fathom. Part of that naivete is because early Southern Baptists tried to thwart the development of a Curia-like Catholic bureaucracy by locating various denominational services strategically throughout the South. Thus, Nashville got the publishing operation and the top executive offices, Atlanta got the North American missionary operation, Richmond got the foreign-missionary operation, Dallas got the retirement-funds center, Birmingham got the Woman's Missionary Union, and Louisville, Fort Worth, Kansas City, New Orleans,  Wake Forest, and (later) San Francisco each received one of the denomination's graduate schools in theology (called seminaries). Today, that diversity helps conceal the true size and wealth of Baptistdom. Diversifying to keep down a Curia-like bureaucracy worked fine until after World War II, when prosperity struck the SBC; its finances blossomed like its founding fathers never could have imagined.  Suddenly each of these tiny entities grew large and wealthy. Today, Baptistdom is more like a corporate-minded Fortune 500 company than poor church people struggling to pay the rent.

The massive size of Baptistdom does not even begin to count the staff and receipts of more than 40,000 individual congregations throughout the country. Nor does it count the large state and  associational staffs, nor the thousands employed by Southern Baptist-related colleges and university—and all of their budgets.

 

For more than a century, Southern Baptists have held to the myth that Roman Catholics are the large, bureaucratic denomination in America.  When they finally look honestly into the mirror, Southern Baptists will discover that they—not the Roman Catholics—are truly America's big-bureaucracy denomination.

 

Please feel free to adopt and use my word: Baptistdom. 

From the Darkness into the Light

Churches maintain they have much to offer—to teach—"the world".  And well they do. Jesus tells us Christians that we are to be "salt and light." in the world.  That means we are to preserve our world against the decay of sin and bring the light of Christ into the hearts of every man, woman and child of every tribe, people group, race, and so forth on the Earth.

 

But the world has some things it can teach churches as well. Or, put another way, Christians and churches can learn some things from the world, too.

 

My dear mentor, friend and hero Don Pickels, former managing editor of the Houston Chronicle and also prior to his death a very devout Episcopalian, helped to create an amazing legal legacy for the people of Texas. It was called the "open-meetings law". It was passed by the Texas Legislature under pressure from the Houston Chronicle management and others. It was adopted in the wake of the Sharpstown Scandal, which occurred in the early 1970s and rocked the State of Texas dramatically after evidence surfaced that public officials were meeting secretly and making financial decisions that should be made only publicly. 

I was reminded of this law two years ago when I was asked to serve on my home city's Plan Commission. As soon as I was officially elected by our City Council, our City Attorney called to tell me that I must spend about an hour watching a video created by the Texas Attorney General about the law.  He even cracked that the law had something to do with pressure from the Houston Chronicle. I knew immediately to what law he was referring.

In simple terms, the video told us public officials that we must conduct our business out in the open, not secretly behind closed doors. As I sat for an hour and watched the video, I marveled how clear and precise the law was.  Only an idiot could not understand the plain language and terms of the law and the video explaining it as well as the penalties for violating the law. Afterward, as I began my tenure on the public commission, I was grateful that I was schooled so quickly in such matters.

What I liked most was that the law is non-partisan, meaning it applies equally to Democrats and Republicans as well as Independents and other party members. I'm sure some politicians—being the personalities that they are—have tried to circumvent the law, but to my knowledge it has been administered fairly and equally in the State of Texas.

Regrettably, I know of no church bodies that have a similar law or policy. Texas' laws do not apply to churches, only government bodies.  The same is true of "open-meeting" laws in other states. I've known a few people to argue that their religious organization has an "open- meetings" policy or rule, but on further investigation discovered that what they were referring to was nebulous, vague and filled with all sorts of loopholes—or in some cases was just the figment of the person's imagination.

Today in too many churches and denominations too much church business is conducted in the dark. Whether it is couched as a "forum" or "private dinner for trustees", a "deacon's meeting for deacons only" or a "closed church business session", it's all the same thing: God's business conducted in darkness.

On pages 250-251 in Witness to the Truth, I describe in detail the closed-door, unhealthy situation in the Southern Baptist Convention that I found when I arrived there to work in the early 1990s. Closed meetings remain the order of the day in the SBC, both in the denomination as well as in local churches.

In the wake of Vatican Council II, Roman Catholics learned to be more open and public, but they still have a long way to go to overcome their long history of conducting business in the dark.

Many other denominations have the same problem. 

I know I'm an idealist, but I'd like to see all churches and denominations take a cue from the Texas Legislature and change this closed-door situation by adopting clear and unequivocal open-meetings laws or rules.