Southern Baptists like to think of ourselves as evangelistic, but we’re not as evangelistic as we think we are. Southern Baptists like to think of ourselves as massive in numbers, but we’re not as big as we claim we are. Southern Baptists like to think of ourselves as standing boldly against the culture for family values, but we’re not the culture warriors we pretend we are.
What if Southern Baptists are just slow-train sexual revolutionaries?
The forthcoming issue of the Southwestern Journal of Theology contains an article I wrote, entitled “Southern Baptist Sexual Revolutionaries: Cultural Accomodation, Spiritual Conflict, and the Baptist Vision of the Family,” that explores this question. The journal is dated Fall 2006 because the serial is catching up on its volume sequence, but it will be released this Spring. In the meantime, you can access this article here.
The central point of the article is that Southern Baptists accomodate ourselves quite easily to the ambient culture’s redefinitions of the family, just twenty or thirty years behind everybody else. We rail against a decadent culture, but only those aspects of the culture that we haven’t yet adopted. Just look at the difference between the way we speak of gender reassignment surgery versus the way we speak of divorce. Could it be that the difference between the two modes of discourse is because we have fewer transgendered deacons and Sunday school teachers than divorced ones? Or, worse, could it be because divorce now seems “normal” to us?
There are several ways we’ve adapted to the culture mentioned in the article, but the most tragic and burdensome in my view is divorce. This is, I firmly believe, the most significant theological issue facing Southern Baptists right now. And, yes, it is theological. It doesn’t matter how many times we preach eternal security (or perseverance of the saints, or “once saved, always saved”) in our pulpits or how many times we affirm it in our confessions of faith; we are repudiating it in our pews. When young Southern Baptist children see the visible representation of the Christ/church union ripped violently asunder before their eyes repeatedly, what in the world does that do to the way they, the way we, hear the gospel?
The antidote here is not more self-righteousness. We’re all, all of us, vulnerable to this. Our “You kids get off my lawn” crankiness sure isn’t helping the recovery of the family. And the antidote surely isn’t another denominational program. In the article, I outline what I think might be a few steps for all of us, the first of which is to see what’s at stake here: the gospel of Christ Jesus.
