Southern Baptists shouldn't build churches in neighborhoods where decent people live.

I'm not saying that they don't have a right to under the First Amendment, but their churches make me uncomfortable.  What about my "right" to not being subjected to the "triumphalism" of religious extremists who hate my values.  The Southern Baptist's churches are an affront to the equal rights and freedoms that  America stands for. 

As example, this morning on my TeeVee a Southern Baptist minister was arguing that Muslims shouldn't build mosques in the United States - anywhere - because of the 9/11 attacks and various other crimes committed in the name of Islam by extremist Muslim fundamentalists. He stated that these crimes are what Islam stands for throughout its history.  His argument reminded me of the ugliness and hate that Southern Baptists have preached throughout their own history.

The Southern Baptist Convention was born of a single issue: human slavery.  Southern Baptists were for it. When northern Baptists began to criticize the institution as inhuman and anti-Christian in the decades prior to the Civil War, the Southern Baptists broke off relations and instituted their new denomination on the basis of a defense of human slavery. 

Their Biblical expositions of Negro inferiority were based on Noah's curse of slavery upon Canaan, son of Ham, who was presumed to be the ancestor of the Black race; and also based on the patriarchal and Mosaic acceptance of slavery, and, also based on the New Testament commands of Peter and Paul regarding slave-master relationships. Rev. Furman (a leading Southern Baptist spokesman) stated, "For though they are slaves, they are also men; and are with ourselves accountable creatures; having immortal souls, and being destined to future eternal reward." The Southern Baptist view was that slaves were better off under the loving, tender, compassionate care of Christian slaveowners, and the institution of slavery was to be "a blessing both to master and slave." *

Throughout the civil rights era, Southern Baptists defended racism and segragation on Biblical grounds. For most of the life of their sect, they have represented racism, slavery and segregation as essential to their Biblical beliefs. The church is rooted in the doctrine of "Biblical inerrancy", aka "literalist fundamentalism", so eventual disavowals of their foundational history  (which came late in the 20th Century when overt racism was, finally, becoming untenable in polite circles) obviously involve a bit of interpretive contortionism and raise questions about the very notion of their  belief in"inerrancy."  While there have been "official" disavowals of their racist past - which was their ONLY rationale for existence as a separate denomination - can we trust them?   For more recently the Southen Baptist Convention has affirmed another to0-familiar invocation of inequality and servitude, wrapped in denials of a clear intent.

On June 10, 1998, the Southern Baptist Convention, for the first time, amended the 1963 Southern Baptist statement of faith known as the Baptist Faith And Message, adding a brand new section (XVIII) entitled the “Family Amendment” that states in part, “A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ. She, being in the image of God as is her husband and thus equal to him [spiritually], has the God-given responsibility to respect her husband and to serve as his helper in managing the household and nurturing the next generation [in the societal realm].”  Of course, Southern Baptists believe their amendment concerning the necessity of wifely “submission” and the wife’s duty to “respect, serve and help” her husband, is what the Holy Scriptures demand. But Southern Baptist slaveowners once believed the same thing regarding the “submission” of slaves and the slave’s duty to “respect, serve and help” their masters.*

So there you have it.  A church steeped in bigotry and discriminatory beliefs based on extreme fundamentalism. And if any in the church object ?

Southern Baptist seminary professors were forced to sign a pledge of acceptance of the Family Amendment, or be fired. And denominational leaders were given the green light by their agencies to brand dissenters as heretics. Dr. Richard Land, President of the Southern Baptist Convention Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, and drafter of the Amendment, has written that those who do not support the Family Amendment are either "goddesses of radical feminism," "gurus of political correctness," "defenders of the subjective, secular Church of Sociology and Political Correctness," or have succumbed to the "trendy egalitarian rhetoric of the late 20th century." [November/December 1999 issue of Light (official magazine of the SBC Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission) entitled, "Questioning Biblical Submission: Religious Critics Renew Debate."] Similar ridicule was heaped on Black Baptist ministers mere decades ago for refusing to attend the then segregated Southern Baptist Convention meetings and who insisted on the full equality of Blacks. Back then the pro-segregation Southern Baptist Convention leaders ridiculed the Black ministers, calling them "unchristian" in their objections, and unduly influenced "by what are essentially Russian Communistic theories."

Let’s review. Southern Baptists favored slavery, Jim Crow laws, segregation, and fought against women's suffrage, federal lynching laws, desegregation and civil rights. Now they call for women to submit to their husbands regardless of the talents, abilities or calling of the parties… *

So, Southern Baptists, please don't build your churches near me or my family. I say it in the spirit of ridicule, satire and irony...they have First Amendment protections to spread their aggressive ignorance and bigotry. And I suppose we should accept at face value their expressions of remorse at using "Christianity" to rationalize the crimes of slavery and segregation. But honest to God, I really don't want these creeps like the raving preacher I encountered over my morning coffee - with their "inerrant" track record of extremism, prejudice and bigotry - anywhere near me, not even on my TeeVee.  The irony, of course - and it's a rather pathetic irony - is that this character (his name thankfully escapes me) was fulfilling the perfect stereotype of the "Christian crusader" as an enemy of all Muslims of every stripe, everywhere,  drawn to the specifications of the bin Ladenist  cohort of extremist Islamic  fundamentalism.

(* Block quotes are borrowed -  freely and extensively - from Duke University professor Edward T. Babinski's "Southern Baptist History 101.")

Comments

[pablo]

My first inclination is to suggest you switch stations and watch something a bit more secular..or something more religious.

After the Mexican revolution clerics were confined to preaching within the four walls of their respective religious edifices.. and outside were forbidden to make political speeches while wearing the collar.
To the extent that anything works well in Mexico this seemed to draw a line between affairs of state and affairs of soul.

I like it. 'Freedom of' should also mean 'Freedom from'...and that a minister can rail on TV about what is essentially a zoning issue shows that the US isn't sufficiently secularized.

BTW, wouldn't a sign of a healthy republic, which purports to promote egalitarian access to institutions and full citizenship rights for all, include a diplomatic cost to States which foster a state religion?