Southern Baptists at the Crossroads

Will Southern Baptists embrace culture or theology and mission?

I became a convinced Southern Baptist in 2006 because of theology and mission. I started at Southern Seminary for my Master of Divinity degree in 2005. Southern Baptist students receive half-price tuition, but I wasn’t and hadn’t ever been Southern Baptist. I couldn’t commit to being a Southern Baptist either, so I didn’t get the discount. By 2006 that had changed. The theology and the mission convinced me.

Theology

Theologically, Southern Baptists staked their claim where I would too. We embrace the historic beliefs of the church on the Trinity and Jesus Christ, expressed in the Nicene and Chalcedonian creeds. We affirm historically Protestant beliefs, like justification by faith alone. We believe distinct things about the church, hold to a high view of the Bible (inerrancy), historic sexual ethics, and other keystone things. Yes, and amen.

Mission

Missionally, after a lifetime of watching missionaries raising support, the Cooperative Program struck me as genius. What is the Cooperative Program, you ask? It’s a way for local churches to network together in mission. Each local church gives a portion of its budget to the work of the mission. This funds the largest Protestant mission agency in the world (International Mission Board), church planting and disaster relief (North American Mission Board), and six seminaries (where Southern Baptist students receive half-price tuition).

Culture

But in 2006 I didn’t realize something. I didn’t understand fully that culture can trump both theology and mission. Here’s an illustration. In 2006, I perceived two prominent Southern Baptists to be on different sides of an important issue. Pastor Jack Graham in Texas was not a Calvinist and Pastor Tom Ascol in Florida was a staunch one. The debate then was theological, or so it seemed to me. Traditionalist Baptists hated the growing influence of Calvinist theology in the SBC. Calvinist Baptists hated the refusal of Traditionalist Baptists to embrace regenerate church membership. (Regenerate church membership is a key Baptist theological belief, that churches should only have Christian become members).

So imagine 2006 Danny’s surprise if he learned that Jack Graham had endorsed Tom Ascol for SBC President in 2022. I would have to explain to Danny from 2006 that many alignments in evangelical and Southern Baptist life are often cultural more than theological. That’s the only way I can explain the re-alignment of evangelical and SBC life in the last few years.

As Michael Graham and Skyler Flowers have described, evangelicals have fractured in six ways. Their descriptions of numbers 1-3 hit Southern Baptists on the nose.

(1) Neo-fundamentalists are those who have deep concerns about both political and theological liberalism. There is some overlap and co-belligerency with Christian Nationalism (a syncretism of right wing nationalism and Christianity) but neo-fundamentalists do so with more theological vocabulary and rationality. Concerning threats within the church, they have deep worries with the church’s drift towards liberalism and the ways secular ideologies are finding homes in the church. Outside the church, they are concerned by the culture’s increasing hostility to Christianity, most prominently from mass media, social media, and the government.

(2) Mainstream Evangelical – Historically this term has been Protestants who hold to the Bebbington Quadrilateral of conversionism, activism, biblicism, and crucicentrism. The emphasis for this group is on the fulfillment of the Great Commission. Concerning threats within the church, they share some concern for the secular right’s influence on Christinaity, including the destructive pull of Christian Nationalism, but are far more concerned by the secular left’s influence and the desire to assimilate since the world still remains so hostile. Outside the church, they are likely uncomfortable with the rhetoric Trump and other conservatives use but view this direction as the lesser of two evils.

(3) Neo-Evangelical – People who would see themselves as “global evangelicals” and are doctrinally “Evangelicals” (w/ some philosophy of ministry differences) but no longer use the term “evangelical” in some circumstances in the American context as the term as an identifier has evolved to be more political than theological. Within the church, they are highly concerned by conservative Christianity’s acceptance of Trump and failure to engage on topics of race and sexuality in helpful ways, but they have not totally abandoned evangelical identification and likely still labor in churches with the broadest spectrum of these groups. Outside of the church, this group feels largely homeless in today’s world. There is equal concern, or slightly more either way depending on the person, at the threat the left and the right pose to Christians seeking to live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness.

A key thing to note about these groups is their cultural nature. They are a mood as much as a belief system. These folks hold generally similar beliefs, but they approach and apply them very differently. Thus we arrive at a key tension point in SBC life. It’s a cultural realignment that revealed itself in last year’s presidential election. The first ballot broke along lines of the 1s, 2s, and 3s, with Mike Stone (1s), Al Mohler (2s), and Ed Litton (3s) each getting about a third of the total vote.

And we come now to this year’s SBC Annual Meeting. A staunch Calvinist in Ascol has become the standard bearer for those more inclined toward a neo-fundamentalist mood. These brothers and sisters are worried about the outside culture’s decay and what they see as the SBC’s internal decay. They argue that the SBC is drifting toward liberal “wokeness,” and the direction must be changed. I find their arguments and anecdotes almost wholly unconvincing.

Instead, I think that my brothers’ concerns stem from wrongly combining political and cultural concerns with theological and missional ones. For example, I agree with these brothers and sisters on the inerrancy of Scripture, male-only ordination, historic sexual ethics, and for the reformed ones, the five points of Calvinism. Yet I’m called a “woke liberal.” I believe in the total perfect inerrancy of the Bible, that the pastorate is a role for men, and that the LGBT+ agenda is a perversion of God’s design. If I’m a “woke liberal,” I can only assume that “woke liberal” is a cultural or political description more than a theological one.

Ironically, neo-fundamentalist Southern Baptists often accuse mainstream and neo-evangelical ones of being culturally captured. I would argue that the opposite is more likely the case. The mainstream and neo-evangelicals tend to acknowledge our cultural influences like a fish in water, but attempt (at our best) to swim upstream (and often fail, sadly). Those inclined toward a more neo-fundamentalist mood seem to think they’re the biblically pure ones. Just there is the danger of cultural captivity—fish who don’t know they’re swimming in far-right political and cultural waters.

All of this to say: Southern Baptists in the next few days need to affirm our theological and missionary commitments over our cultural ones. That includes in large part a theological response to the recommendations from the Sexual Abuse Task Force. We can’t let cultural values guide us, but we must consider theology and the mission. Theology and mission that doesn’t protect the vulnerable and repent of sin isn’t worth the drive to Anaheim.

2006 Danny would be confused but also hopeful. Because 2022 Danny is more committed than ever to Southern Baptist theology and mission. And he and many others are on the way to Anaheim to do the business of our network of churches with theology and mission in mind.