Will Southern Baptists be Baptists or Just Southern

JD Greear was for three years President of the Southern Baptist Convention. He had then and has today a sense of how the public perceives the SBC. It is seen by the public as sin condemning and Republican. He knows this is not a recipe for a bright future. Recently he gave an address to the SBC Executive Committee. Greear repeated what I have said here repeatedly, culture drives religion. If religion understands this properly it can help itself. If not, Southern Baptists and their side kicks Catholics will be driven into the ground.

About Southern Baptist leaders who supported Trump and are on the front lines to put anti abortion and gay rights into law Greear says, "God did not call Southern Baptists to save the world." Southern Baptists are here, he says, to live lives of good and decent Christians. The Southern Baptist denomination should not be known universally as an arm of the Republican Party and the go-to source of expertise about sin.

Greear is at the opposite end of a spectrum of views in both Southern Baptist and Catholicism. I saw a view the other day which said, "We will not have carried out the will of God until we have punishment for sin encoded into our laws."  That is exactly what abortion protesters who shout their prayers at women entering women's clinics want. As some Muslims say, what good is religion if we cannot put it into law.

The Southern Baptist Convention started in the South but is all over the world. Its hostile reaction to Critical Race Theory was one, Greear says, that was more Southern than Baptist. If the denomination is going to reverse its decline it needs to be something besides Southern, he said. 

Since the beginning of time religions have faced the same dilemma as Southern Baptists, and most of Christianity, face today. It is the nature of religion to believe it has discovered eternal truths that will never be refuted. As times change and events do not play out as they were predicted people conclude their religion was not right, it did not provide the eternal truth it proclaimed. 

Of the hundreds or thousands of gods and religions humans have believed in none have survived over long periods of human history. All have died. Christianity/Judaism have survived roughly 1/2 of 1% of all human history. If history repeats itself it, too, will be gone one day.

JD Greear is like the proverbial Dutch boy who put his finger in the dike to prevent a flood. Unfortunately for him, there are other leaks he cannot reach.