The Southern Baptist Convention in Town
Lock up your Gospel so it won't be set ablaze
My father was brought up Southern Baptist. He left behind the denomination because he didn’t believe in immersion baptism. My mother was brought up Methodist, though she might as well have been Baptist because of all the revivals she went to on weekends during summers when she was a teenager. Eventually the whole family became Methodist but some of that Baptist theology always hung around.
When the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) came to Dallas last week, I couldn’t help paying attention to it, wondering what would be their fixation this year. Last year they spent time on the denomination’s sex abuse scandals. Before her death from a series of strokes at 47, Jennifer Lyell survived alleged sexual abuse committed by her Southern Baptist seminary professor. Church leaders had accused her of fabricating her story and she lost her job. The SBC moved on from that topic and her name was never mentioned.
Last year, the SBC did find time to figure out how to shut women up once they step foot in a church—they expelled any congregation with a female pastor. Never mind that the Apostle Paul said in Galatians 3:28 that in Christ there is no male and female.
This year the target was same-sex marriage.
Today, the Dallas Morning News publicized my letter to the editor with commentary on the this year’s convention.
The mandate to invite in immigrants (Matthew 25:31-46) and to treat them as “the native born” (Leviticus 19:34) is well established in the Christian Bible in more than 30 passages. The conditions faced by our immigrant neighbors—children watching from their schools as their parents are dragged away, US citizen children with cancer being deported, immigrants without due process being sent to a dangerous Central American gulag—should be a priority for those of us who are Christians. The Apostle Paul in Galatians 5:13 wrote, “all the law is fulfilled in one word… you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
The Southern Baptist Convention is focused on eliminating marriage rights for same-sex couples and not on following Jesus’s teachings. Anyone who believes in inerrancy and Biblical authority should understand what we Christians ought to be prioritizing, and the SBC has made the wrong choice.
If the Southern Baptists push back, I know what they’ll bring up: Matthew 5:27-30 and Matthew 19. Both refer specifically to divorce. Same-sex marriage opponents seize on Matthew 19:4-7, particularly the passage, “Have you not read that the one who made them at the beginning ‘made them male and female,’ and said ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh?’ Since there was no same sex marriage in first century Galilee, we really don’t know what Jesus would think about it. Opponents will maintain that without a doubt if Jesus appeared today and made an appearance at this week’s convention, he would undoubtedly announce that the “male and female” reference means same sex-marriage should not exist.
Not so fast, I’d tell them. Keep reading. Jesus continues, “It was because you were so hard-hearted that Moses allowed you to divorce your wives...and marry another.” This is a story of some hard-hearted men abandoning their wives to economic uncertainty so they can marry other wives. A woman alone in that time was dependent on an ex-spouse keeping to the terms of the ketuvah, a marriage contract. But just as men nowadays get richer after divorce and women get poorer, in spite of community property and child support laws, even legal agreements may not be enough to guarantee a woman’s economic security.
If you’re guided, though, by the small ‘g’ gospel of a political party, rather than the teachings of Jesus, then you have to make it work somehow. And ‘make it work’ often comes down to concocting interpretations to make a square belief fit into a round hole of dogma.