In recent years, I’ve been astonished at a number of convictional reversals, wherein folks who’d been solid allies in the cause of biblical/cultural conservatism have changed sides. Some have been Southern Baptists, and others have been mainstays in the broader Evangelical world. But something happened, and now we have to watch our backs and also have the backs of the faithful taking fire from surprising sources.
Brainstorm Diagnostics
I’m neither a psychologist nor the son of a psychologist, but let me ruminate a bit on what might have precipitated these defections.
1. When I was a seminary student, I enrolled in a missions class around the time of the Falklands War. Our teacher had served with the SBC’s International Mission Board in Argentina, the invading nation. One student, using the term ‘Falklands,’ asked his opinion of the war. The missionary shot back, “They’re the Malvinas! Every Argentine school child knows that.” Well, excuuuse me. Apparently, he’d “gone native,” identifying with his target group, taking up their sensitivities.
Analogously, a range of commentators have had a fit over Trump and have turned their ire toward old friends who’ve not found themselves in the throes of this “Trump Derangement Syndrome” (TDS). They’ve elevated the perspective of those they’ve long hoped to reach.
2. They’ve shown (or discovered) who they were all along. They had good gigs in the former days, but exhaustion, “epiphanies,” or other opportunities have driven or drawn them to the other side. Perhaps they’d been trying other perspectives on for size or style, but they finally realized those outfits weren’t for them.
3. They’ve let personal relationships overturn conviction. Either they’ve rushed to the side of upset family and friends, or they’ve made new friends whose happiness is of surpassing concern.
4. Or they’re extremely thin-skinned, ready to “go postal” when their glory is questioned. Maybe they’re constitutionally fragile or primed for meltdown by earlier shocks or disappointments. Perhaps they never learned to take a hit and keep going, the sort of thing you learn in team sports. Who knows?
Whether any or some or all were in play when Ethics & Religious Liberties Commission (ERLC) chief Russell Moore turned on Southern Baptists and stormed into the waiting arms of a non-SBTS church and Christianity Today, I cannot say, but it’s clear that the emergence of Donald Trump as a viable candidate drove Russ—and, by extension, his ERLC—to distraction. This was not the Russell Moore I knew when he was my provost at Southern (SBTS), a man who was both inspiring and encouraging to me. But something snapped. And, not surprisingly, the ERLC has been under fire since he rose to power in 2013 (and continues to be so) as it’s gone forth under the leadership of a Moore hire, Brent Leatherwood.
Looking Back
I first became aware of the Christian Life Commission (forerunner to the ERLC) when my father-in-law and Executive Committee member, Rheubin South, came to Nashville during my Vanderbilt grad school days. He’d take us newlyweds out to eat, and then we’d sit in on EC meetings in the old SBC building on James Robertson Parkway. Those were the days when Foy Valentine (tenure, 1960–1987) pressed the denomination to shed its Jim Crow influences. He got that right, and not everybody loved it. But he also got much wrong, taking up, shaping, and fostering the causes of the “moderate” party opposed to the conservative resurgence. For instance, he and his crew were comfortable with the Roe decision allowing abortion. In that connection, one of his fellow travelers, Paul Simmons (ethics professor at SBTS), called me when I was a pastor in Arkansas, asking me to lobby against a bill that would deny state funding for abortions. And the ERLC was working too hard to be the Kool Kids, as when they held a 1970 conference on “new morality,” putting situation ethicist, Joseph Fletcher, and also a Playboy editor on the program. For this, and other reasons, the Convention was pleased to replace Valentine with Richard Land, a director with whom I worked closely as I became the VP for Convention Relations at the Executive Committee, serving from 1991 to 1995.
In 1989, SBC president Jerry Vines asked me chair the resolutions committee, and it was then that I came to realize the importance of the interplay between resolutions and the working of the ERLC throughout the year. I’d seen the dustup over resolutions the previous year in San Antonio, and I asked Dr. Vines whether we might declare a year’s moratorium for things to cool down. He explained, quite correctly that resolutions can be important tools in the hands of those shaping public policy.
Two years later, when I became an SBC spokesman in Nashville, I came to realize how vital they were. I’d get calls from various press outlets asking where we stood on this or that. Sometimes, I’d have a ready answer, but it was just as important to say we hadn’t addressed a topic, as when one caller asked for our view on the disposition of Native American remains uncovered at new building sites.
Of course, I was pleased to assure the press that we’d spoken against abortion. And decades later, in the spring of 2019, I was once again grateful that I could draw on an SBC resolution to argue against an effort to register women for the military draft. I could testify to the National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service that we opposed the employment of women in combat, in part because of their shortfalls in “survivability and lethality.” I also took this opportunity to suggest it was important we note what we’d be drafting women away from (namely motherhood), but it was our denominational objection to what we’d be drafting them to that had landed me on the panel.
During my five-year tenure at the Executive Committee, I was staff liaison to the Resolutions Committee for each convention, and I huddled with them for hours, even days, both before and during each annual meeting. Along the way, I came to believe that resolutions did two things properly: (1) giving the messengers a way to express what they were fired up to say, e.g., opposition to homosexuals in the military; and (2) bringing things to their attention they needed to know and would immediately would want to address, e.g., the emergence of the RU486 abortion pill.
Sometimes the committee would overreach, leaving the messengers puzzled and even uneasy, forcing them to say, “Well, I’ll take your word for it,” e.g., when, in 1991, they asked the Convention to side with Indians smoking peyote sacramentally since the language disallowing it was problematic. Well, okay. We’re for religious liberty, but why press the messengers into a very short course and extemporaneous vote on a tricky subject?
It was a well-meaning instance of using rather than serving the messengers. You can do both in the same resolution, but the “top down” approach is tiresome when you’re hustled into an unfamiliar universe of discourse, or worse, an alien agenda. The notorious Resolution 9 on Critical Race Theory in Birmingham in 2019 is a case in point, but so were a range of resolutions handed down by Russell Moore and his fellow wokesters in the early 2000s, e.g., affirming the 150-year-old Dred Scott decision, as if that were in question and as if the sentiment behind it was a matter of understandably grave concern among us.
You might say that Russell saw the SBC as his tool, handy for endorsing his causes. Or perhaps he saw us as his ornery teenager, needing some stern guidance. Hence, his scolding of Trump voters, saying that “evangelicals and other social conservatives . . . [must] repudiate everything they believe” to support him (never mind that Moore’s constituency voted overwhelming for Trump). As Mike Huckabee put it, “I am utterly stunned that Russell Moore is being paid by Southern Baptists to insult them.” Indeed.
Okay, Russ, be David French, but don’t arrogate unto yourself the title of “leader” among us. And what a shame that his successor, Brent Leatherwood has “led us” to rebuke the Louisiana legislature for its tough abortion strictures and to use the Covenant School shooting as an occasion to hack on gun laws while insisting that the killer’s diary should not be released. Does he not understand that we “deplorables” are struggling to change the culture’s narrative that transsexuality is okay? Would he similarly fight publication of a murderous skinhead’s journal?
I look back to the Saturday when ERLC head Richard Land convened a group of us to hash out what we we’d say to a vigilante intent on taking out an abortion doctor, one who was involved in killing unborn babies by the truckload. It was a day of genuine give and take, confirming our consensus that his act would be immoral. There were real differences among us on a number of ethical issues, but we were called together to hash things out. The dialogical nature of the enterprise was manifest, and I don’t recall seeing that during the Moore regime. In the spirit of that 2015 New York Times editorial, it was more dicta and defamation.
Can We Talk?
Speaking of dialogue, here’s a list I prepared for one of my SBTS seminars, sketched out on a piece of paper over lunch between sessions. Some students were reluctant to offer comments in unfamiliar territory, so I suggested a series of questions they could use to make their way into discussions on all sorts of topics:
Can you give an example? (illustration)
What’s at stake? What difference does it make? (application)
Where are you going with this? (destination)
But wouldn’t that mean . . .? (implication)
What exactly do you mean by . . .? (clarification)
So, it’s kind of like . . .? (analogy; comparison)
But what about . . .? (counterexample)
Wouldn’t it be better to look at it this way? (alternative paradigm)
So, you’re saying . . .? (summarization)
But how does this square with . . . ? (cohesion)
On this model, it seems to me that the ERLC would do better by leading the way in thoughtful discourse, incorporating the puzzlements and wisdom of the constituency in their deliberations. I don’t mean they need to sponsor a denomination-wide debate on the advisability of settled matters, such as abortion, adultery, or plagiarism. But there are many things not proscribed in our documents, items that invite discussion.
A couple of dozen things spring to mind right off. What if the ERLC had featured in print or online opposing views—point and counterpoint—regarding a vote for Trump, the viability of the Black Lives Matter movement, COVID-driven church closings, the level of financial transparency advisable in churches and entities, the case for releasing the Covenant School diary, involvement with NGOs, hiring illegal migrants, abolitionism vs. incrementalism regarding abortion, Christian Nationalism, removal of Confederate statues, a preference for Christian classical schools, consumption of beverage alcohol, business boycotts, use of credit cards or mortgages, biblical strictures on divorce and remarriage, marriage history and deacon service, platform sharing with heretics, the purchase of an AR-15 “assault rifle,” a Netflix subscription, the purchase of expensive cars, guidelines for living wills, tithing, Halloween, and tattoos.
Why not enlist thoughtful voices to lay out rationales and options for our consideration, treating us like adults? Why not get a good read on the denominational constituency, instead of reading to us as children gathered at your feet?
What’s in a Name? From the CLC to the ERLC to the ePP*C*
These matters of personal and church behavior are more congruent with the former agency name, the Christian Life Commission, not the Christian Lobbying Commission. As important as statehouse and courthouse advocacy can be, we have cause to wonder if we’ve turned the ERLC over to politicians (of which Leatherwood, he a former Republican leader in Tennessee, is one) instead of pastoral prophets. Their mission statement says they’re to help “you to understand the moral demands of the gospel,” but they move quickly to say, “In particular, the ERLC focuses on four main areas (life, religious liberty, marriage and family, and human dignity] where we want to bring the truth to bear on public policy.”
For them, the emphasis is upon what is politically astute, not morally acute. Case in point, Leatherwood’s refusal to consider any sort of legal accountability for women who seek abortion. It’s supposedly expeditious to count all of them as “victims,” even the promiscuous, seductive career woman who is sleeping her way to the top, and, after a surprise, hires an abortionist so she won’t be sidetracked by a baby. “Move on. Nothing to see here.” Indeed, if they’re taken by this mindset, then let’s go with a lower case ‘e,’ as in eRLC.
Of course, it’s good that they speak up for continuation of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and condemn the Communist Chinese persecution of Uyghurs. But wouldn’t it be better to call themselves the Ethics and Public Policy Commission (ePP*C*), since “public policy” is a real passion and religious liberty is only one of four foci? Which brings us to another question: “How much of their work concerns religious liberty?” A quick look at the site shows a series they’ve deployed on mental health. Important matter with some nice work, but how does it fit their program assignment? Wouldn’t that better fit the LifeWay bailiwick or the work of seminary counseling programs? And what next, a treatise on missiology or pneumatology? Sure, everything connects somehow, but they seem to be all over the place, suggesting that the Commission has commissioned itself to do its own thing. So, I’d suggest the ePP*C*. (Yes, there’s an EPPC in Washington DC—the Ethics and Public Policy Center—but our fonts would differentiate the two.)
Something’s Got to Give
I submit that they would do a great service to the denomination by helping us think through everyday things biblically, acknowledging that “Come let us reason together” can be a better approach than “My way is Yahweh” on matters of well-meaning but non-trivial disagreement among Southern Baptists.
In this vein, I’d also suggest that the ERLC supply resolutions they as an organization plan to propose to the messengers several months before the annual meeting, soliciting both favorable and “counterpoint” essays for publication, so messengers don’t have to make flash-bang decisions without having read respectful postings of dissent.
Maybe the Executive Committee could publish these. Or, on rotation, we might give this editorial task to LifeWay and the seminaries, so they could solicit/produce/publish full-blown, quality discussions of the matters at hand. Maybe LifeWay could use their polling capacity to run things up the flag pole to see who salutes. The point being that the ERLC would be constrained to prove it when they said they represented Southern Baptists.
I don’t see that we’re there yet. Disinclined to platform serious ethical dialogue across the board, from the personal to the cultural, they ask us to acquiesce to their perspectives. Why would we continue to do that?
