Editors' Note: This article has been corrected.
1. Election of New Southern Baptist Convention President Signals Return to Past. Will the Membership Follow?
After two years under the leadership of Frank Page, a culturally and theologically conservative South Carolina pastor who tried to steer the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) away from overt politicking, the SBC last week elected Johnny Hunt as president. The move is evidence of the continuing strength of the conservative political insiders who staged a takeover of the SBC in the 1970s.
David Key, Director of the Baptist Studies Program at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University, told me that, unlike Page, incoming President Hunt was the favored "inner circle candidate" who "buys into the Falwellian 'we've got to take back America' Puritan model."
Yet while the SBC's political machine flexed its muscle within the denomination, said Key, it faces increased marginalization as the SBC's membership rolls stagnate and SBC churches face competition from independent, non-denominational churches and the burgeoning charismatic movement.
No other single denomination or organization -- apart from the National Association of Evangelicals, which represents 30 million evangelicals -- could claim to be able to mobilize such a large chunk of voters to the polls. But with the proliferation of independent, non-denominational churches, free of denominational bureaucracy and top-down orthodoxy, evangelicals have more choices for both worship and political involvement.
While the SBC remains the largest Protestant denomination in the country with 16 million members, its flagging membership is suggests that it is losing its three-decades long position as the standard-bearer of the religious right.
During the heyday of the conservative takeover, SBC insiders believed they could grow the denomination by being as conservative as possible. Rank and file Southern Baptists, while still conservative and Republican, Key went on, are not looking for the SBC to be a political machine. The machine Southern Baptists, said Key, "are living in the past era. The world keeps going, the train hasn't stopped, and yet they've stayed on the same platform as 1980." As a result, the SBC "looks more and more marginalized."
2. SBC Resolution Calls on Members to Vote
Along with Hunt's election, the SBC passed a resolution on "political engagement," urging Christians to "seek to apply their spiritual and moral values to the political process. ... We plead with all Christians to exercise vigorously their responsibilities to participate in the political process by registering to vote, educating themselves about the issues, and voting according to their biblical beliefs, convictions and values." The resolution, of course, is code for voting for anti-choice, anti-gay, and culturally reactionary candidates. (The SBC also passed a resolution condemning the California Supreme Court's decision legalizing gay marriage.)
Does John McCain fit the bill? SBC members say they would "rather have a third-rate fireman than a first-class arsonist," SBC Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission's Richard Land told the Baptist Press. Hardly a ringing endorsement, but a recent pollby the anti-choice site Lifeway showed that 80 percent of SBC pastors intend to vote for McCain; only one percent for Obama, with 15 percent undecided.
3. Obama Meets In Secret With Christian Leaders.
McCain will end up being the default candidate of the religious right, but Obama sees a clear opening to peel away the votes of more moderate and liberal evangelicals. Polling shows he's made some headway beyond John Kerry's share of that same demographic in 2004, but it's not an overwhelming shift (up seven points among centrist evangelicals and nine among modernist evangelicals from Kerry's share in May 2004, according to the recent Calvin College Henry Institute on Religion and Public Life). The numbers in Obama's favor are not accompanied by shifts to Democratic party affiliation though; evangelical defectors from the GOP are largely becoming independents.
When Obama met with about thirty Christian leaders behind closed doors in Chicago last week, it was another clear sign that he's bending over backwards to diffuse both the rumors he is a Muslim and the perception, post-Jeremiah Wright, that he's some sort of radical anti-white Christian unfit to hold public office. Although the meeting was off the record (a disturbing development from the candidate who claims to value transparency), some participants divulged a few details.
Doug Kmeic, the former Reagan Administration official who has endorsed Obama (Kmeic, who is Catholic, was denied communion over the endorsement) was one of the attendees. He hailed Obama's claim that he wants to reduce the number of abortions, even though Kmeic recognized that they part ways on the choice issue.
Richard Cizik, who heads the political arm of the NAE, said he told Obama during the meeting that "religious Americans want to know why is it you love this country and what it stands for and how we can make it better." Do they need a different answer than other Americans?
4. Huckabee, the Southern Baptists, and the Future of the Religious Right.
In my interview with Professor Key, I asked him why Mike Huckabee did not appeal to the SBC insiders during the Republican primary. Huckabee, Key said, has a reputation within the SBC of having served as a moderate president of the Arkansas Baptist Convention, a position he held before running for governor of Arkansas.
The SBC's chief political spokesperson, Richard Land, has a distaste for Huckabee that "is personal," said Key, because Huckabee beat out the SBC's favored candidate for the post and prevented conservatives from dominating the state convention. Even though Huckabee turned right during the 2008 Republican primary, he was hampered by "lingering distrust in the partisan machine."
Huckabee's embrace of the charismatic movement, as evidenced by his self-identification as a "Bapticostal" during guest sermons at charismatic churches, including John Hagee's, during the campaign, could also rankle Southern Baptists, said Key. Independent charismatic churches, many of which are just as conservative on social issues as the SBC but offer a different kind of emotional and worship experience (including female pastors), provide competition to the SBC within the same socioeconomic class.
5. Hagee and the Anti-Defamation League's Abe Foxman Exchange Love Letters.
Last week, John Hagee and Abe Foxman exchanged letters making amends over Hagee's sermon about God and the Holocaust.
How long will this go on? There's no shortage of nutty things Hagee has said and written; after all, he's been on television daily for decades now. His Jewish allies have decided to make a political bed with him because Israel (they think) just doesn't have enough friends.
But as Jeremy Ben-Ami, Executive Director of J Street, the new pro-Israel, pro-peace lobby group, told me, "The fundamental problem with John Hagee and the close alliance between Christians United for Israel and established Jewish leaders can't be erased by a series of apologies."
True enough. The bottom line is that Hagee is opposed to any territorial concessions by the Israelis, which doesn't serve Israeli, American, or (something always left out of Hagee's discussions) Palestinian interests. As Ben-Ami, whose J Street PAC endorsed seven Congressional candidates this week, put it, "We believe Pastor Hagee's opposition to any concessions by Israel for peace is counter to Israel's best interests."
Ultimately the Hagee alliance will never lose its potency over theology. It will have to be shaken by a rejection of his political stance by Jews and Christians alike, and by a political establishment that has been far too reflexive in accepting the dogma that Hagee's politicking is good for Israel.
Contact me at tapthefundamentalist AT gmail DOT com.
Correction: Emory University's school of theology is the Candler School, not the Chandler School.
