Editor’s note: Every Friday, “Weekend Plug-in” meets readers at the intersection of faith and news. Click to join nearly 10,000 subscribers who get this column delivered straight to their inbox. Got feedback or ideas? Email Bobby Ross Jr.
By Bobby Ross Jr. | Religion Unplugged
I’m no expert on the Southern Baptist Convention, but I’ve followed it — as a journalist focused on religion news — for nearly a quarter century.
I covered my first SBC national meeting in person in 2001 after I became religion editor for The Oklahoman, the daily newspaper in Oklahoma City.
That gathering, which drew about 9,100 Baptists to New Orleans’ Superdome, came during a time of relative peace for America’s largest Protestant denomination.
The number of attendees that year marked a significant decline from the record 45,519 registered messengers who flocked to Dallas in 1985 for what a church historian called “a watershed moment in the conservative revolution in the convention.”
That revolution started in 1979 when conservatives who had attacked the SBC’s seminaries as “hotbeds” of liberalism flocked to Houston. Moderates who had expected a giant rally at the Astrodome featuring the Rev. Billy Graham to be the meeting’s highlight got a surprise.
But by 2001, many moderates had left the SBC and formed alternative groups such as the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. Former President Jimmy Carter had cut his famous ties with the denomination in 2000, saying its “increasingly rigid” positions violated his faith.
Thus, “Southern Baptists wrap up meeting without controversy” was the headline one newspaper chose in June 2001.
“Resolutions that riled critics in past years, such as declarations that women should not be pastors and should ‘submit graciously’ to their husbands, were absent from the two-day gathering,” the late religion writer Rachel Zoll wrote in her Associated Press report.
(Keep reading. That whole issue of women’s roles might not be totally settled.)
This column appears in the online magazine Religion Unplugged.
Shutterstock photo
Faith. Family. Fastballs. 