More than two million church members have left the 45,000 or so congregations that make up the Southern Baptist Convention in less than a decade. The slide started before Trump decided to run for President, in fact, attendance had started to plateau in the 1990's, in spite of the denominational leadership becoming more conservative, a movement going back to 1979. But the decline has accelerated and steepened over the last five years, with membership losses of three quarters of a million since Trump took office after the 2016 election. Attendance, which is a better measurement of actual participation, is down by more than million in a decade, half a million since the 2016 election benchmark.
So what's going on? Trumpie-style politics, lack of ethics and immorality, and a very un-Christlike political fight has been launched, courtesy of the Trumpie religious right political corruption.
The Influence of Trumpism
It started when Dr. Russell Moore, executive director of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (a small lobby organization advocating for whatever religious liberty issues Southern Baptists think are important) made it known that his own ethical standards would not permit him to support a morally corrupt, womanizing, adulterous philanderer for the highest government office in the land. One other high profile SBC executive, Dr. Al Mohler, President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, joined Moore in his dissent, mildly and with lots of explanation. For Mohler, that lasted until he had used up most of his good will and wanted to run for convention President. For Moore, it was consistent.
That prompted a Georgia pastor who was chairman of the SBC's executive committee, Mike Stone,to push for an "investigation" into the ERLC and Moore, on a bogus claim that churches were withholding their denominational financial support because of Moore's stance and the ERLC board's continuing to support him. Though the executive committee did not have the authority to investigate another entity, among the independent, autonomous boards of Southern Baptist missions, seminaries and commissions, Stone pushed ahead and put himself in a position to affect the outcome.
In the middle of all of this, the Houston Chronicle published the results of an investigation it had been conducting, exposing hundreds of cases of clergy sexual abuse among Southern Baptist churches. Several organizations had been pressing denominational leadership to look into this for years, and had been ignored and rebuffed. Now, suddenly, the issue crashed into the convention like a cannonball, as serious and widespread as the Catholic church has had to face, and with similar multiple attempts to cover up specific instances by SBC leader.
It was the responsibility of Moore and the ERLC, note "ethics commission" to take the initial steps and figure out how to help the convention navigate through the mess, which they did, admirably in fact. But all of a sudden, because Moore is now leading the charge to bring about reform in the SBC on this chronic issue, a group of conservatives who were opposed to his leadership of the ERLC and who had started to organize in order to put like-minded political conservatives on trustee boards and leadership positions in the SBC, are also pushing back on any response from the SBC regarding sexual abuse. Some are going so far as to say that the issue is a ruse being used to keep conservatives from getting control of anything in the SBC, even though they currently control everything. Stone was the candidate they ran for President of the SBC in their June 2021 Nashville convention meeting. He lost to Ed Litton of Alabama, a much less strident political figure who has been supportive of convention efforts, including those of the ERLC, to deal with clergy sexual abuse and listened to his best advisors when appointing the task force to deal with the situation.
Keep reading, there's a whole lot more.
After Litton defeated Stone on the second ballot election, conservatives (mostly church pastors active in the SBC somewhere) attacked him for plagiarism in sermon preparation. No real evidence was produced, just recordings of a sermon he had apparently borrowed from his predecessor, J. D. Greear with permission. Litton hadn't given a verbal attribution, but that opened the door for conservatives to continue to attack his character, claim most of his sermons are plagiarized or lifted from books, though no proof has turned up regarding any of the other multiple accusations.
Prior to the 2021 Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting, Moore resigned from the ERLC, citing the pressure from the attacks on his character and leadership, taking a position with Christianity Today. He left behind a couple of letters that someone from one side or the other "leaked," detailing much of what had been going on since the ERLC took up the sexual abuse issue, an embarrassment to those who were involved at the executive committee in forcing him out.
This whole scenario just drips with Trumpie-style politics, backstabbing, double dealing, lying, character assassination and manipulation. Fortunately, many of the SBC messengers at the convention could see what was going on, and were careful about casting their vote. But this is far from over.
Abandoning Christian Values for the Sake of Religious Politics
When conservatives used the denominational apparatus to gain control of the boards and committees in 1979, a predicted "split" of the denomination, as progressives and moderates left, really never materialized. Most moderates, understanding the independent and autonomous nature of the local churches within the convention, made a few adjustments in their mission support and stayed in the SBC. But I think the fracture this time is deeper, runs along political rather than doctrinal or theological fault lines, and the rhetoric has been far more vitriolic and hateful.
There's a whole organization that has formed, known as the Conservative Baptist Network, attempting to get enough messengers from churches to elect the officers of the SBC who have sweeping appointive powers over who serves on the trustee boards and commissions. It doesn't take long, looking at the information they put out, to realize the political motivation behind them. There are a couple of "attack blogs" that are particularly vicious,(I won't post a link to that trash but if you google "SBC discernment blog, you don't have to go far to get to the really vicious stuff) and slanderous, since they provide no evidence for their claims.
This has all come about because one of the executive officers of the SBC was publicly and personally, by conviction, opposed to Trump.
A Scandal in Lynchburg
One of Trump's best friends among political Evangelicals is Jerry Falwell, Jr. You can click the link and see that they share many of the same values.
More of Trump's Evangelical Friends Sharing His Values
It wouldn't be fair to blame all of this on Trump. Megachurches, which are not the Christian communities identified as the church that Jesus and the Apostles established, tend to be places where temptations to corruption are created by big money and lots of personal influence. But it does explain their attraction to Trump. These are the kind of people who think they can live on a different level than others, because of their influence and wealth. Rules and laws are for others, not for them. And they think God is going to hold their coat-tails and cheer them on while they enjoy themselves because they provide expensive religious entertainment every Sunday.
From prison, two thousand years ago, the Apostle Paul wrote,
"For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without any self-control. brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people" II Timothy 3:2-5
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