Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary

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Hey, Tennessean folks: Has SBC President Bart Barber changed theologically? Yes or no?

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Hey, Tennessean folks: Has SBC President Bart Barber changed theologically? Yes or no?

This is a strange one. In a recent profile of the Rev. Bart Barber — the current president of the Southern Baptist Convention — the Nashville Tennessean team did something that was both unusual and totally predictable.

Unusual? My state’s dominant newspaper used a theological term when it needed to find an accurate political term, of some kind. Yes, you read that right. I just urged some journalists — in this case — to use accurate “political” language instead of mangled doctrinal language.

Predictable? The abused theological term was “fundamentalist.”

To make matters even more complicated, the Tennessean used an ACCURATE historical-political reference in the headline — “Bart Barber defied the Conservative Resurgence. How it is now shaping his SBC leadership” — and then turned around and used “fundamentalist” in the overture.

Dang it! (I will also ask: Is the pronoun “it” in the headline a reference to Barber’s decisive act of defiance or to the Conservative Resurgence itself?) Here’s that flawed overture:

Bart Barber defied the top brass.

In May 2018, the Texas pastor and his fellow trustees at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth fired seminary president Paige Patterson, the architect of the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention. Following years of financial-related controversies, revelations about Patterson mishandling reports of sexual abuse pushed Southwestern’s board past a point of no return.

Barber, once a loyal foot soldier in Patterson’s movement, was a decisive vote in Patterson’s dismissal, thereby severing his allegiance. 

The emphasis on the “Conservative Resurgence” as a movement inside the SBC is accurate, since that is a commonly used term among historians. The Tennessean kind of explained that term later in the story, and we will get to that.

After making that wise choice, why use the church-history term “fundamentalist” at the top of the story? That’s a word that fit with some Southern Baptists who supported (as opposed to leading) the “Conservative Resurgence,” but not to all. Using that term also suggested that Barber has changed some of his theological beliefs, as opposed to his stance on crucial issues in SBC politics.

I see zero evidence in this news report that Barber has changed theologically. It that is the case, then ask him hard questions about that and then report the answers.


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What do seminaries do, in an age in which many believers are afraid of 'theology'?

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What do seminaries do, in an age in which many believers are afraid of 'theology'?

During the 1970s and '80s, the flocks gathered in conservative Protestant pews kept growing and growing -- until a third of the U.S. population could be defined as "evangelical."

Times were already getting tough for leaders of progressive Mainline churches, with sharp declines in budgets and worship attendance. But the waters were smooth for evangelicals.

"One might be considered a very capable kayaker if the river currents are moving along at only a few miles per hour," said theologian David Dockery, during the recent convocation rites at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Ft. Worth, Texas, after he was inaugurated as its 10th president.

But the currents changed, while many contented evangelical leaders didn't spot the dangerous waves around them. "I fear that the waters of our cultural context have become much choppier and are moving evermore rapidly with each passing year," said Dockery, who noted that he was beginning his 40th year working in Christian higher education.

Consider a sobering new study -- "The Great Dechurching. Who's Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back" -- by researchers Jim Davis, Michel Graham and Ryan Burge. Their numbers indicate that evangelicalism has backslid to where it was 50 years ago.

The big question is, "Why?" Dockery said he accepts the study's thesis that many boom-era evangelicals lacked "deep roots in their understanding of the Christian faith." Many evangelicals failed to teach practical discipleship in daily life and seemed reluctant to defend the truths "delivered to the saints" through the ages. This fear of theology has proven to be a disaster as America "has become more secularized, polarized and confused," he said.

Thus, the "Dechurching" trend leads straight to hard questions about seminaries, noted Burge, in his "Graphs about Religion" newsletter. He teaches political science at Eastern Illinois University and is one of my GetReligion.org colleagues.

Seminaries help define religious denominations and are "an incredibly important part of the religious economy. In many ways they are the canary in the coal mine for the health of American religion," he wrote.


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Baptist life in Texas: Where did all of those Southwestern Baptist Seminary students go?

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Baptist life in Texas: Where did all of those Southwestern Baptist Seminary students go?

I have no idea who said the following quote. But, somewhere in my young Texas Baptist life, I heard someone say: “Texas is the wallet on which the Southern Baptist Convention sits.”

OK, I cleaned up the grammar on that. It was probably: “Texas is the wallet Southern Baptists sit on.”

But the big idea was that there were so many Baptists in the Lone Star state — and so many different KINDS of Southern Baptists — that nothing could happen in the national SBC without taking into account the financial and statistical clout of Texas. Baptist diversity? Once upon a time, more than a few Texas Baptist preachers were basically Universalists with better preaching skills.

Thus, it’s important that, for the past quarter century or so, there have been TWO competing Southern Baptist conventions in the state — the conservative Southern Baptists of Texas and the old-guard Baptist General Convention of Texas. My father worked for the BGCT when I was in elementary school.

I can remember the old days when the state’s ink-on-paper Baptist Standard newspaper had legions of out-of-state subscribers, because many pastors wanted to scan the announcement pages to see when there were open jobs in Texas pulpits. Most of those readers were, logically enough, graduates of the then-massive Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.

This brings me to a much-discussed headline in the Nashville Tennessean: “Why a prominent Southern Baptist seminary is on the verge of 'crisis' after leadership upheaval.” This is a calm, factual story that, well, shows admirable restraint when it comes to some hot-button issues causing SBC tensions. These two names are missing, for example — Donald Trump and retired Judge Paul Pressler. But there is also a rather important hole linked to the Texas Baptist clout I mentioned earlier. Hold that thought.

First, here is the overture:

A prominent Southern Baptist seminary is taking corrective action as it reels from a cascade of financial mismanagement and reputational hits spanning several presidential administrations.


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Podcast: Americans have long been divided (and often confused) on abortion issues

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Podcast: Americans have long been divided (and often confused) on abortion issues

When people ask me to list some must-read books — if the goal is understanding religion and the news — the first one I mention is “Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America” by sociologist James Davison Hunter.

Pundits love to toss “culture wars” around as a kind of journalism hand grenade, but few bother to flash back to this 1991 classic and note how Hunter defined that term. In 1998 I wrote a column — “Ten years of reporting on a fault line” — in which I noted Davison’s description of America’s ongoing legal and political wars about religion, morality and culture.

The key: Americans were no longer debating specific religious beliefs or traditions. Instead, he said they were fighting about “something even more basic — the nature of truth and moral authority.”

… America now contains two basic worldviews, which he called "orthodox" and "progressive." The orthodox believe it's possible to follow transcendent, revealed truths. Progressives disagree and put their trust in personal experience, even if that requires them to “resymbolize historic faiths according to the prevailing assumptions of contemporary life."

The book Hunter wrote in 1994, right after “Culture Wars”? It was called “Before the Shooting Begins: Searching for Democracy in America's Culture Wars.” Hold that thought.

All of this brings me to this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in) focusing on a new Lifeway Research study — on behalf of the Land Center for Cultural Engagement at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary — probing how religious faith and practice affect what Americans believe about abortion. The survey took place days before the leak of the draft opinion by Justice Samuel Alito indicating that the U.S. Supreme Court is poised to overturn Roe v. Wade.

The survey results are complex and will provide little comfort for those committed to a consistent pro-life stance or. on the other side, the defense of America’s pro-abortion-rights legal structures built on Roe.

In the podcast, I argued that this survey deserves mainstream media coverage — but I sincerely doubt that this will happen. Why?


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Plug-In bonus: Southern Baptist sexual-abuse probe uncovers apocalyptic sins and crimes

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Plug-In bonus: Southern Baptist sexual-abuse probe uncovers apocalyptic sins and crimes

“It is an apocalypse,” declares Russell Moore, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.

It is “far worse” than anything the Rev. Ed Litton, the 13.7 million-member denomination’s president, had anticipated, report the New York Times’ Ruth Graham and Elizabeth Dias.

It is a “bombshell” (per the Houston Chronicle’s Robert Downen and John Tedesco). It is “historic” (The Tennessean’s Liam Adams). It is a “blockbuster report” (Religion News Service’s Bob Smietana).

If you cheered for the movie Spotlight when it won an academy award, you will want to read this.

"Bombshell 400-page report finds Southern Baptist leaders routinely silenced sexual abuse survivors." https://t.co/GbTbd6M91f via @Froomkin

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) May 23, 2022

Sunday brought the long-awaited release of an independent investigation into sexual abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention, and damning might be too feeble a word to characterize the findings.

The bottom line, according to Guidepost Solutions’ 288-page report:

An unprecedented investigation of the Southern Baptist Convention’s top governing body found that an influential group of Baptist leaders systematically ignored, belittled and intimidated survivors of sexual abuse for the past two decades while protecting the legal interests of churches accused of harboring abusers.

The claims are “expected to send shock waves throughout a conservative Christian community that has had intense internal battles over how to handle sex abuse” (Washington Post’s Sarah Pulliam Bailey).


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Thinking about prayers at executions: These stories offer glimpses of an old church-state unity

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Thinking about prayers at executions: These stories offer glimpses of an old church-state unity

This is a “feeling guilty” post. For quite some time now, I have been planning to examine the coverage of some important religious-liberty cases that have been unfolding in the death-row units of prisons.

The decisions are worthy of coverage, in and of themselves. At the same time, these cases have demonstrated that it is still possible, in this day and age, for church-state activists on the left and right to agree on something. Maybe I should have put a TRIGGER WARNING notice at the start of that sentence.

Like I said the other day in this podcast and post — “Covering a so-called 'religious liberty' story? Dig into religious liberty history” — this kind of unity in defending religious freedom has become tragically rare (from my point of view as an old-guard First Amendment liberal). Indeed, to repeat myself, “America has come a long way since that 97-3 U.S. Senate vote to approve the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993.”

The problem is that you rarely, if ever, see reporters catch this church-state angle in these decisions. The key is to look at who filed legal briefs in support of the religious liberty rights of the prisoners.

This brings me to an important Elizabeth Bruenig essay that ran the other day at The Atlantic, under this dramatic double-decker headline:

The State of Texas v. Jesus Christ

Texas’s refusal to allow a pastor to pray while holding a dying man’s hand is an offense to basic Christian values.

Here is the meaty overture:

Devotees to the cause of religious liberty may be startled to discover during the Supreme Court’s upcoming term that the latest legal-theological dispute finds the state of Texas locked in conflict with traditional Christian practice, where rites for the sick, condemned, and dying disrupt the preferences of executioners.


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Did January 6 attack on Capitol highlight 'D.I.Y. Christianity' as decade's next big thing? 

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Did January 6 attack on Capitol highlight 'D.I.Y. Christianity' as decade's next big thing? 

As investigations of the January 6 U.S. Capitol riot proceed, there's an intriguing religion angle for the media to explore. Welcome to the emerging prominence of "D.I.Y. Christianity" (that is, Do It Yourself).

After some of the Capitol rioters uttered odd prayers and waved religious placards, The New York Times reported that they demonstrated "some parts of white evangelical power." GetReligion boss tmatt then asked whether the mob included any representatives of actual "power" seen in the denominations, megachurches, parachurch ministries, schools or even the flocks of well-publicized Trumpite preachers.

(Despite the absence of evangelical leaders, freelancer Steve Rabey reports that several obscure Protestant pastors do face charges over January 6.)

Washington Post stalwart Michelle Boorstein revisited January 6 as a religious phenomenon and caught the moment by applying the D.I.Y. label not just for certain Capitol rioters but a broader trend emphasized by Adam Greenway, president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.

The D.I.Y. phenomenon could become the decade's next big thing in religion, a sizable groundswell of extremely individualistic or eccentric Americans who identify as Christians but are disconnected from conventional churches or even any definable religious fellowship or tradition.

Such radical individualism follows, of course, years of significant growth for non-denominational local congregations that are rigidly independent and lack ties or accountability with other Christians. This growing segment of U.S. evangelical Protestantism is nearly impossible to count accurately and thus its significance has often been neglected by journalists and scholars. GetReligion has been underlining the importance of this trend for years.

The Post cited analysts who believe one element on January 6 was that "institutional religion is breaking apart, becoming more individualized and more disconnected from denominations, theological credentials and oversight."


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The single-most important word in WSJ's fascinating portrait of Southern Baptists' generational divide

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The Washington Post’s Sarah Pulliam Bailey called it a “fascinating read.”

To which I say: Amen!

I’m talking about Wall Street Journal national religion writer Ian Lovett’s story this week on a generational divide shaking Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas.

The recent turmoil (recent as in the last year and a half) at that seminary is not breaking news, of course. But Lovett explores an angle that does seem fresh, especially for a major secular newspaper such as the Journal.

The lede sets the scene by outlining the news that has captured headlines and then putting it in a larger context:

FORT WORTH, Texas — After the Rev. Adam W. Greenway stepped to the lectern during his inauguration as the ninth president of the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, he acknowledged the tumult that had engulfed the school in recent years.

The previous president was fired. Enrollment plummeted, and the training ground for many of the nation’s most famous pastors found itself at the center of a debate over the treatment of women in the church.

“I cannot change the past,” he said. “For any way in which we have fallen short, I am sorry.”

A generational gulf is threatening to split evangelical Christianity.

While older evangelicals have become a political force preaching traditional values, younger ones are deviating from their parents on issues like same-sex marriage, Israel, the role of women, and support for President Trump.

And then the Godbeat pro offers his nut graf:


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