Here we go again.
The Southern Baptist Convention, which is the nation's largest Protestant denomination, and the largest conservative Evangelical denomination, is making the news yet again, and not in a good way. The most recent interim President of the Southern Baptist Convention executive committee, who is essentially the CEO of the denomination, suddenly resigned after it was discovered that his resume falsely represented his educational background. A search committee, interviewing Willie McLaurin for consideration as the permanent President of the Executive Committee, discovered this in checking with the colleges and universities he listed as having attended and from which he received several degrees, including a doctorate from one of them.
McLaurin is the fourth individual since 2010 who has either resigned from the executive board presidency because of a moral or ethical failing, or who has failed to meet the expectations required by the nation's largest Protestant denomination of it's CEO. Southern Baptists appear to have adopted the lack of transparency, dishonesty, nepotism, favor-granting, misuse of power and misappropriation of funds that characterize the far political right of the GOP which many of them have allowed to infiltrate their churches. Birds of a feather, and all that. It's subjective to argue that Southern Baptist denominational politics resembles the corruption of the Republican party, but here's more evidence, on top of a nasty sexual abuse scandal by clergy and church leaders. It's my conclusion that there's a connection, because it sure looks like it.
The question at this point is how someone, who was previously employed by the Tennessee Baptist Convention in its executive administration, and subsequently at the SBC's executive committee as Vice-President for Great Commission Initiatives, a high dollar, high power executive office, got that far without having his educational background vetted. It would be unusual for someone at that level of executive leadership either in a Baptist state convention office, or at the Southern Baptist headquarters, to not have at least a master's degree, preferably from one of the six seminaries operated by the denomination. Someone didn't do their job, and in the very backward manner in which Southern Baptists often operate, it was because someone higher up,, and with influence, was doing McLaurin a favor in exchange for some benefit or favor from McLaurin later on.
A Troubled Office
The President of the Executive Committee, while not actually the "head" of the denomination, is the CEO of its business operation. The committee carries out the work of administering the unified budget plan, distributing funds to six seminaries, two mission boards, the largest Christian publishing house in the world, and the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, and follows the directives and recommendations of the messengers at the annual, two-day convention where business is conducted and voted on by messengers from the churches. So this office is the most visible face of Southern Baptists to the world. It hasn't been a very good representation since 2018.
The person who holds this office is chosen by a search committee. No one gets any paid position in the Southern Baptist denomination without bowing at the feet of a small group of far right conservatives who plotted a takeover of the trustee boards and committees that control the business operations and carried it out by the end of the 1980's. So the last four occupants of this most visible, and powerful, of Southern Baptist denominational offices, who have not been very consistent with their Christian testimony, have held the position because of the conservative faction's use of their own influence and power.
Yes, I'll repeat that. Conservatives control who gets the jobs in the SBC, and are responsible for the last four failures.
McLaurin is one of two of the past four presidents who served in an interim capacity, but sources inside the committee say he was about to be made the permanent president, becoming the first black executive to lead anywhere in the denomination. His predecessor, Ronnie Floyd, resigned when the convention itself overwhelmingly passed directives over his strenuous objection, mainly related to waiver of privilege so that investigators could get to the bottom of the clergy sex abuse scandal. Prior to Floyd, another interim, August Boto, was stonewalling convention messengers' desires to "do something" about the sexual abuse scandal. He refused, citing legal liabilities and fear of lawsuits. And Boto became interim when Frank Page resigned, citing an "improper relationship" as his reason for stepping down.
That's quite a record for a conservative, fundamentalist, Bible-thumping, majority Republican, Christian denomination. It appears that marital infidelity, silence and lack of transparency, resistance to the will of the people and lying have become the values which characterize leadership in the SBC. This didn't happen in a vacuum. McLaurin held two paid executive positions, one in the Tennessee Baptist Convention, the other at the SBC executive committee, prior to becoming interim. So how is it that no one bothered to check his resume the first two times he was hired?
Yes, Right Wing Politics is at the Bottom of the SBC's Problems
There are those within the Southern Baptist Convention who claim that the lack of transparency has always been a problem, that a small oligarchy of prominent, mostly larger-church pastors and a handful of wealthy church members, have always called the shots and bent the rules to their favor, to avoid controversies and questions from the messengers who attend the annual meeting, and where accountability for convention business rests. That's an accurate statement. But until recently, the denominational politics was largely internal, mostly doctrinal and theological fights between fundamentalists, conservatives and moderates. It's only been since the 1990's that secular, Republican politics intruded into the debate, and only since Trump that it has had the kind of corrosive, corrupting effect that is clearly visible now.
The tight, self-appointed leadership oligarchy has done this to themselves. One of the two men who is labelled as an "architect of the conservative resurgence," Paul Pressler, an influential Texas Republican and a state appeals court judge, was interested in commandeering the influence of the denomination on the side of Republican politics, turning it into a political action committee. Pressler manipulated, or more accurately, bullied the trustees of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) of the denomination to make Richard Land its executive director, to facilitate the marriage with the GOP. Land infamously authored the letter from the Christian right to Dubya, explaining how blowing the smithereens out of Iraq would be a "just war" from a Christian perspective. This willingness to distort and use the Christian gospel for something it did not, in any way, shape or form, justify, is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the corruption of the Southern Baptist Convention by its leadership.
That's one of the reasons why Trump's immorality, fraud, lies, deception, and promotion of worldliness like prostitution and gambling interests didn't draw criticism from Southern Baptist leadership when he ran for President, but, in fact, actually got support from some prominent leaders including Land, Pressler and Robert Jeffress, the pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas, whom Trump calls "one of my favorite Evangelicals." They rejected two of their own members, Ted Cruz and Lindsay Graham--not stellar, outstanding examples of ethics or morality themselves, but at least, they belong to and attend Southern Baptist churches-- in order to support the evil, antichristian demagogue, not only during his run for the Presidency, but also through the GOP nomination process.
So the crocodile tears and caterwauling over Willie McLaurin's phony resume credentials is subterfuge covering up a much bigger internal problem, including rank deception and dishonesty, also known as lying, which, apparently worked right up to this point. Willie McLaurin is black. If he were white, I seriously doubt that the person, or persons, on the search committee who found this deception would have bothered to check. This was his second try at the executive position, after a first choice by the search committee was voted down because, well, because he had been the chair of the search committee. Many of those on the Executive Committee had resigned themselves to the reluctant conclusion that McLaurin might be the first African American to hold any executive leadership position in the Southern Baptist Convention, anywhere. Now, they are absolved of that dilemna.
The bigger problem for this denomination is a severe and spectacular decline in its membership and attendance, way beyond the dent put in attendance by COVID. In just the past decade, membership has declined by 3.2 million, with more than 400,000 leaving in each of the last three years. Expectations are that 2024 will bring at least a drop of 500,000. They lost 100,000 members in the weeks after the convention annual meeting in June, when they voted to kick out churches who had women on staff designated as "pastors." One church they booted, the largest in the denomination, had over 40,000 members, and another large, prominent church, which left rather than remaining in to be booted later, over 30,000. Reports are that about 30 other churches have since severed their ties.
It's pretty clear, from the evidence, and in spite of efforts on behalf of SBC leaders to blame their tanking membership on everything but what's causing it, that being good at deception, lacking transparency and being run by a small group of self-appointed leaders who admire political leaders that bear no characteristics of, or resemblance to anything "Christian" is a problem.
You can't make this stuff up.
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