Whether they’ll admit it or not, when covering conflicts and controversies many (not all) journalists seem to think that one of their main duties is to help (wink, wink) readers separate the people in white hats from those in black hats, smart people from the not-so-smart people and kind people from mad people.

There are several ways to do this. Reporters can quote calm, articulate people on one side, will seeking the most radical, scary voices on the other. I have, when covering events linked to abortion, seen TV crews rush past women who oppose abortion (including women who have experienced abortions) in order to interview screaming male protesters who are waving (literally) bloody signs.

Journalists can do long, personal interviews with people on one side, while pulling dry, boring quotes from press releases on the other. They can allow one set of activists to define all the crucial terms and questions, while ignoring or distorting the beliefs of activists on the other side.

Journalists also get to choose the labels they pin on the competing armies. That was the subject that loomed over this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in), which focused on the bitter debates surrounding the resignation of Russell Moore as leader of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.

The obvious other news hook: The nation’s largest non-Catholic flock will hold its 2021 national meeting next week (June 15-16) in Nashville. For more background, see this earlier post: “That SBC powderkeg: Clearly, executive committee is bitterly divided on sexual-abuse issues.”

As the old saying goes, “You can’t tell the players without a program.” Well, it’s going to be crucial how journalists label the “players” in this conflict.

For example, here is a crucial section of a new Peter Wehner essay at The Atlantic, which ran under this headline: “The Scandal Rocking the Evangelical World — The sudden departure of Russell Moore is forcing an overdue conversation about the crises of American Christendom.”

His departure was not primarily prompted, as many people had assumed, by his role as an outspoken critic of Donald Trump, although that had clearly upset powerful members within the politically and theologically conservative denomination. Instead, the letter suggests, the breach was caused by the stands he had taken against sexual abuse within the SBC and on racial reconciliation, which had infuriated the executive committee. The chair of the executive committee at the time, Mike Stone, is now running for SBC president. …

“The presenting issue here is that, first and foremost, of sexual abuse,” Moore wrote. “This Executive Committee, through their bylaws workgroup, ‘exonerated’ churches, in a spur-of-the-moment meeting, from serious charges of sexual abuse cover-up.”

The language there is quite restrained. In particular, note that this is framed as a conflict inside a “politically and theologically conservative denomination.”

That “conservative” reference is accurate, even though many Southern Baptists fiercely disagreed over whether or not to publicly support Trump. Some SBC insiders attacked Trump for reasons that echoed their opposition to former President Bill Clinton. They had big questions about morality and ethics.

However, other Southern Baptists tried to pin a “liberal” or even “woke” label on those, such as Russell Moore, who refused to endorse Trump in 2016 or 2020 (which is not the same thing as supporting some, but not all, of the actions of the Trump White House). Those efforts continue.

However, when you look at crucial questions of doctrine, all of these Southern Baptists can accurately be described as “conservative evangelicals” (and a few would even fit under the frequently abused term “fundamentalist”).

On Twitter, I have been asking Southern Baptists to address some of the flashpoints of the current conflict in doctrinal terms.

Take the race for SBC president, for example. One of the candidates, Southern Baptist Seminary President Albert Mohler, was one of the young leaders of the “biblical inerrancy” forces who stormed into SBC leadership in the early 1980s. He is fiercely pro-life, opposes the ordination of women and has been highly critical of some elements of secular Critical Race Theory (while stressing the need for efforts to work with the Black church in fighting racism). He has strong ties to Russell Moore.

In the earlier SBC civil war, Mohler was a “conservative” who clashed with the old-guard “moderate” leadership, which tended to be more progressive on moral and social issues, backed the ordination of women and supported seminaries that included a small number of genuine (in doctrinal terms) “liberals.”

Now, Mohler is being called “liberal” or “woke” on Twitter by some of the more louder voices on the right.

Meanwhile, one of the leaders of the current SBC rebel alliance — the Conservative Baptist Network — is also seeking the presidency. The Rev. Mike Stone has been a strong critic of Russell Moore and others linked to the current SBC president, the Rev. J.D. Greear.

The question I have been asking, with zero responses so far, is this: What is the difference, in doctrinal terms, between Mohler and Stone?

This links up with some of the key issues currently being debated: Is it “conservative,” “moderate” or “liberal” to want to see the SBC take steps to avoid sexual abuse in its institutions and to expose those who have been accused or convicted of committing or hiding abuse? What are the doctrinal issues here? Isn’t it “conservative” to attempt to prevent sexual abuse and sin? Why or why not?

Consider the debates about race. Why is it doctrinally “liberal” to build bridges (and share leadership) with the leaders of the growing number of predominantly Black churches aligned with the SBC? As a general rule, these Black congregations are very conservative — in terms of doctrine — on issues of moral theology, the Bible and salvation.

Here’s a relevant flashback. Over the years, many readers have assumed that I developed the “tmatt trio” questions about doctrinal fault lines among Christians while covering conflicts in liberal mainline Protestantism. I actually started using early versions of these questions while covering the SBC wars in the 1980s. Here are those questions again:

* Are biblical accounts of the resurrection of Jesus accurate? Did this event happen?

* Is salvation found through Jesus, alone? Was Jesus being literal when he said, "I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me"?

* Is sex outside of marriage a sin?

In the earlier SBC conflicts were were some leaders on the Baptist left who were already getting vague in their answers on the second and third questions. And doubting the resurrection? That depended on how one wanted to interpret a few vague academic papers.

What are the key doctrinal differences in this latest SBC war? If SBC leaders will not discuss these issues openly, then journalists will simply continue to use political language and that is that.

Consider this passage in the new Atlantic essay:

Partisan, cultural, and regional identities tend to shape religious identities. “In American pop-culture parlance, ‘evangelical’ now basically means whites who consider themselves religious and who vote Republican,” according to the Baylor University historian Thomas Kidd. In so many instances, cultural identity is completely dominant over faith; it is the prism through which faith is interpreted. “‘Evangelical’ used to denote people who claimed the high moral ground; now, in popular usage, the word is nearly synonymous with ‘hypocrite,’” Timothy Keller, one of the most influential evangelicals in the world, wrote in The New Yorker in 2017. I have heard from pastors in different parts of America who describe a “generational catastrophe” that is unfolding because of how disillusioned young people, including many young Christians, are by what they have seen.

Do you see any clear references to doctrine in that passage?

So I will ask again, what is the doctrinal labels that need to be used when covering #SBC2021? If you listen to the podcast, you can hear me struggling with that issue all the way through it. In what sense is someone like Mohler a “liberal” or a “moderate,” other than simply using those terms as curses? Or look at the other side of the coin: What is the “conservative” approach to doctrine that yields silence (or worse) on issues of sexual abuse or evidence of racism in the behavior of some police?

I’ll be blunt: If SBC leaders, on both sides of the conflict, shun questions on doctrine then that makes it pretty obvious that the actual fault lines are linked to Trump-era political differences.

Am I right or am I wrong?

Enjoy the podcast and, please, pass it on to others.

Oh, and stay tuned for evidence that SBC warfare is moving into the smartphone era. What does that mean? Check this out: