The Washington Post: Russell Moore Letters
The Dispatch: David French on Leak of Russell Moore Letters
The Southern Baptist Convention, which frequently bills itself as "The Nation's Largest Protestant Denomination," is holding its annual meeting June 13-16 in Nashville, Tennessee, which also happens to be the home of its headquarters and its publishing enterprise, Lifeway Christian Resources. Southern Baptists suspended their annual meeting last year, due to COVID-19, and enacted a constitutional provision which extended the terms of its officers by one year.
There is probably not another denomination in the US into which the injection of Trumpism has caused more controversy. The SBC was already reeling from an expose in the Houston Chronicle which uncovered hundreds of cases of sexual abuse by Southern Baptist clergy in its local churches. It's executive committee had launched two angry investigations of its own Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission because the president of the commission, Russell Moore, has been an outspoken opponent of Trump.
Moore, who has been the target of pro-Trump members of the SBC executive committee ever since before the 2016 election, resigned his position as President of the ERLC several weeks ago to accept a position at Christianity Today and also stepped away from his membership in a Southern Baptist church. Two letters surfaced this week, revealed by a source known as The Baptist Blogger, which show that the pressure Moore was feeling was more closely related to his efforts to expose sexual abuse within SBC and to help victims deal with the aftermath than it was to his opposition to Trump and Trumpism. Some members of the SBC's executive committee think Moore is responsible for making the SBC "woke" and for causing it to buy into the #metoo movement, opening the door for the flood of sexual abuse cases uncovered three years ago by the Houston Chronicle. The letters indicate that there was a lot of opposition among the exec committee to the ERLC's efforts to help victims of the SBC clergy abuse and to taking any steps that would lead to the denomination doing anything about sex abuse allegations by church pastoral staff or by those employed in SBC entities.
A group of "messengers," those who are elected from churches to attend and vote at the annual meeting, presented a resolution at the last convention in 2019 condemning Critical Race Theory/Intersectionality. The convention approved the resolution, which declared CRT/I to be incompatible with the denomination's doctrinal statement, but not exactly in the kind of condemning tones that the originators of the resolution wanted. Still, after the release of the letters is it clear that Moore's public opposition to Trump was a factor into investigations launched by the Executive Committee against the ERLC, blaming Moore and the ERLC stand for churches deciding to stop giving to the denomination's Cooperative Program.
The Southern Baptist Convention, according to its own books of reports, lost just over a million members during the past four years, over 750,000 of those in 2019 and 2020 with the biggest decrease coming just this past year, 425,000. You'd expect in-person church attendance to be down over the past year because of COVID-19, but this isn't an attendance issue. These numbers represent church members who are leaving the membership of the Southern Baptist churches to which they have belonged and have made a commitment of support in the past. Trumpism, and its politics of fear, baseless conspiracy theories, outright lies, requirement of personal loyalty and the gross immorality of its leader doesn't fit well with Evangelical Christian theology. And it looks like the incompatible demands of loyalty to the Trump cult and its leader, which requires buying into and excusing his immorality and supporting and spreading his lies, all of which runs counter to Evangelical teaching and practice, are taking quite a toll.
The Christian scriptures, in Matthew 6:24, give a clear reason why:
No one can serve two masters for either he will hate the one and love the other or he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.
David French, in The Dispatch, puts it this way:
Fearful believers behave as if the maker of the heavens and earth needs corrupt politicians or corrupt pastors to preserve his people's presence in this land.
The "leak" of Moore's two letters, one to the executive committee of the ERLC trustee board, the other to current SBC President J. D. Greear, who shares Moore's passion for dealing with sexual abuse in the SBC, intensifies the decisions that will be made at the SBC next week, including which of four candidates will become president of the denomination. One of the candidates was among those Moore mentions in both letters as being party to the "psychological terror" to which he was being subjected.
This quote from John Stott in The Bible: God's Word for Today, sums up the decision Southern Baptists will face next week in their annual convention:
Nothing is more obnoxious in those of us who claim to follow Jesus Christ than arrogance, and nothing is more appropriate or attractive than humility. And an essential element in Christian humility is the willingness to hear and receive God's word. Perhaps the greatest of all out needs is to take our place again humbly, quietly and expectantly at the feet of Jesus Christ, in order to listen, attentively to his word, and to believe and obey it. For we have no freedom to disbelieve or disobey him.
The ultimate issue before us and the whole church is whether Jesus Christ is Lord (as we say he is) or not. The question is whether Christ is Lord of the Church (to teach and command it) or the church is lord of Christ (to edit and manipulate his teaching).
Southern Baptists seem to have been pushed toward the latter.
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