The small Baptist church was almost at the end of the street, as far from the main drag in town as it could get. There was a small Lutheran church on the other side of the street that dead ended in the city cemetary. It was one of two Baptist churches in town, formed in 1954 by a group of people who had migrated there from southern states, mostly Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, and a cluster of families from Virginia. The "other" Baptist church in town had once been affiliated with the American Baptist Churches, USA, the heir to the Triennial Convention headquartered in Philadelphia, known as Northern Baptists. This particular church was affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention because, even though they were both Baptist, that's just the way it was.
Or so it was in my way of thinking.
My parents had migrated here from West Virginia, where most of the Baptists were of the Northern variety. When they first relocated to this small Arizona town, they hadn't been participating in a church. My Dad grew up in a church affiliated with a denomination known as the Disciples of Christ, and stopped going to church about the time he enrolled in college. My mother was the wild child of her family. Raised in a deeply rural area of West Virginia, she abandoned the Methodist church that her parents occasionally attended when she ran away from home to elope. So finding a local church wasn't their priority.
But after working at a nearby military base as an air conditioning mechanic, one of the other guys in his shop invited him to church one Sunday. As it turned out, it was the Southern Baptist church he attended, and so my parents became regulars. I'd gone to Sunday School there on occasion, so it wasn't a big change for a six year old. So it was that I wound up being raised in a Southern Baptist church.
The Essence of Southern Baptist Christianity
The "theology", doctrine and Christian practice that is found in smaller Southern Baptist churches, especially in small towns or rural areas where a pastor with seminary training is a premium, is more of a combination of superstition, folk religion and a literal, "verse by verse" interpretation of the Bible. Since the Bible wasn't divided into verses when it was written, and a literal interpretation misses the entire original meaning and historical context of the original language, I don't think what I was taught was authentic Christianity.
And I more or less figured this out by the time I was ten or eleven years old. I didn't really have much of a choice as to whether I went to church or not, and I spent a lot of time in Sunday School trying to make some sense of what never really made much sense. And as I got older, I learned that asking difficult questions only antagonized my Sunday School teachers, none of whom were educated beyond high school and who perceived difficult questions as skepticism and doubt. I was told that my questions were a sign of my lack of faith.
I did something else that some of the members of that church didn't like. I was admitted to the freshman class at the small university that was affiliated with the Southern Baptists in the state. I'd have thought they would have been pleased, but within this small congregation made up mostly of people who had been born and raised in Dixieland, there was a very strong bias against college and seminary trained pastors, and they sensed that the Biblical studies department at this university was "liberal."
Learning the Basics of Christian Faith and Practice From Educated Liberals
It turns out they were right, at least, from their own perspective.
I went intending to major in history and minor in English with a concentration in secondary education to get a teaching certificate. Taking survey courses in Old and New Testament studies was a first year requirement for freshmen, and the professors I had for both of those courses really caught my attention. From them, I got a perspective of Christian faith and practice that was focused much more on being a lifestyle than a set of intellectual assertions to specific doctrinal points.
Most Evangelicals believe that all parts of the Bible are equally inspired, which undermines the Christian gospel and leads to the kind of literalist fundamentalism that has produced the pseudo-Christian nationalism that has led Evangelical churches into apostasy. But what they call liberal is actually the Christian gospel that was revealed in the teaching and preaching of Jesus, beginning with the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount. It's actually a lifestyle, not merely a legalistic intellectual assent to a set of doctrines.
The Christian gospel is the interpretive criterion for every other part of the Bible. And there isn't even full agreement on what actually constitutes "the Bible." Understanding it requires knowing what its 40 different authors intended to convey to their original audiences, and understanding that the circumstances to which that meaning applied are long gone and no longer exist. In Christian doctrine, the gospel as revealed by Jesus is where the values and principles that establish the practice of the faith are found.
Human existence is considered sacred. In Christian theology, humans are created in the image of God, a reflection of divine existence, and supported by Jesus' stating that the greatest commandment consists of two concepts. One is true worship of God. The other is that the evidence of being a Christian is seen in those who love their "neighbor," their fellow human beings, as they love themselves.
Concepts That Are Inconsistent With the Christian Gospel
What this means is that almost everything I was taught, and believe to be Christian is completely inconsistent with the rhetoric of conservative Evangelicalism into which political ideology incompatible with Christian principles has intruded. If the Christian gospel is a system of life-enhancing values and principles, lived out as love for one's neighbor, defined by Jesus as any other human being, then it is impossible to call any war "just."
It is also not possible to claim that God's spiritual annointing is on a leader whose lifestyle shows zero consistency with any principle of the Christian gospel. Old Testament leadership examples do not apply, since there is no longer any nation which exists as a theocracy under the direct control of religious leadership. And while there are historical examples of "flawed men" God appeared to use in achieving his ends in governing ancient Israel, they also demonstrated full spiritual conviction when it came to their flawed character, depending on God for forgiveness. That's not what we see in the American political leadership misled conservative Evangelicals accord to their political idol.
The idea that an unrepentant, morally bankrupt, narcissistic, convicted felon and adulterer would be chosen by God as a political leader would have been considered absolute heresy by the people in that small town church in which I grew up, if that idea had surfaced back in the 70's. Now? It's hard to say. At any rate, such an idea is inconsistent with authentic Christian faith and practice, which is built on a foundation of grace. Old Testament examples used to justify war and violence against people whose religious beliefs and cultural practices took place before Jesus introduced the Christian gospel. They are irrelevant and inapplicable to the church age.
Blessed are the peacemakers, said Jesus, for they shall be called the children of God.
