Southern Baptists Then and Now

The Southern Baptist Convention has been in the national news (again) this month, and I am reflecting here upon that denomination with which I was directly connected for sixty years. 

The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) was formed in 1845 at a gathering in Augusta, Georgia. It was founded by Baptists who disagreed with the antislavery attitudes and activities of Baptists in the North.

In 1967, the SBC became the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S., surpassing the Methodist Church. Its peak membership of around 16,300,000 was reached in 2006.

I began attending an SBC church in 1945, exactly 100 years after its founding. I didn’t know anything about the SBC’s beginning for a long time, and I wasn’t happy when I finally learned about the reason it was organized.

Still, I was happy to be a Southern Baptist during the ten years I attended the SBC church in my northwest Missouri hometown. I was happy with the vibrancy of the SBC as I knew it in the 1950s and remember well the nationwide membership drive for “a million more in ’54.”

And I was happy to graduate from two Southern Baptist colleges in my home state (Southwest Baptist and William Jewell)—and then go on to The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (SBTS) in Louisville, Kentucky.

During my years as an undergraduate and then as a graduate student at SBTS (1959~66), I was happy to serve as pastor of two small-town Southern Baptist churches in Kentucky, Ekron BC (1959~63) and Clay City BC (1964-65).

Further, June and I were happy to be appointed in 1966 as SBC missionaries to Japan, and during our 38 years there we greatly appreciated the support of SBC churches through the Cooperative Program and the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering.  

A strong shift to the right in the SBC began in 1980. As a result, I increasingly became an embarrassed Southern Baptist,** and in the 1980s and early 1990s many respected SB professors and pastors, including some close friends, left the SBC.

Disgruntled Southern Baptists formed the Alliance of Baptists in 1987 and the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship in 1991. One of the co-founders of the former was Dr. C. Welton Gaddy, who died on June 7 at the age of 81.

Gaddy and I were graduate students at SBTS at the same time, but I didn’t know him well (he was three years younger than I). But I remember him as a bright, talented young man.

The sub-heading of a June 16 New York Times article about Gaddy states, “He started out in the Southern Baptist Convention, but when that group took a sharp conservative turn he became a voice for tolerance and diversity.”

Gaddy was known nationwide because of serving as president of the prestigious Interfaith Alliance from 1997 to 2014. Had it not been for that “sharp conservative turn” in the SBC, he could have served in that position as a Southern Baptist.

The 2023 annual meeting of the SBC was held earlier this month, and there was much that needed attention, such as last year’s half-million decline in membership. (Unlike “a million more in ’54” they could have talked about “why so few in ’22?”.)

But the action that garnered the most interest in the news media was the SBC’s renewed objection to female pastors. Rick Warren, the retired pastor of Saddleback Church in California, made an appeal for that megachurch to be restored to membership in the SBC.

Not only was Warren’s appeal rejected, opposition to female pastors even intensified. On June 22, The Washington Post published an opinion piece by Warren. It was titled “Expulsion of female pastors will only speed the Southern Baptists’ decline.”

The nationally known SB pastor remarked that the votes at this year’s annual meeting “helped ensure that the once great SBC will be known as the Shrinking Baptist Convention.”

Even though I’m glad not to be a Southern Baptist now, I still am sad because of the recent decline in the SBC and the likelihood that there will be even greater decline in the decade ahead because of its stance on women pastors—as well as because of its being a hotbed for the MAGA Movement.

_____

** In my book Fed Up with Fundamentalism, first published in 2007, I included a short section titled “An Embarrassed Southern Baptist” (see p. 5 in the revised/updated 2020 edition).

Is the Secularization of Society Beyond Doubt?

This post’s title comes from a new book by three sociologists and some of the article’s content is my reflection on a new novel. 

Beyond Doubt: The Secularization of Society (2023) is a scholarly work authored by three sociologists.* One of the three is Phil Zuckerman, a professor of sociology and secular studies at Pitzer College in Claremont, California.

Many large, public universities have Religious Studies departments. For example, my daughter Karen is the head of the Department of Religious Studies and Classics at the University of Arizona.

But in 2011, Zuckerman founded the Secular Studies department at Pitzer, the first college academic program in the nation dedicated exclusively to studying secular culture.

Zuckerman is also the author of several books on secularity, including Living the Secular Life (2014) and What It Means to Be Moral: Why Religion Is Not Necessary for Living An Ethical Life (2019).

He can also be found on YouTube, speaking on various secular or agnostic/atheist sites. For example, here is the link to his March 31 talk titled “How Secular Values Will Save the USA.” It is an attractively presented talk, and I agreed with much of what he said.

However, I was also “turned off” by that talk: even though he is an academic, Zukerman came across as an “evangelist” for secularity and presented misleading “facts.” As often happens, he presented the best examples of secular morality and the worst examples of religious morality. 

Heaven & Earth (2023) is a challenging novel by Joshua Senter (b. 1979), who was born in the Missouri Ozarks and reared/homeschooled in a fundamentalist Christian home

.Senter’s book is about a disgraced megachurch pastor Sam, who was born near Conway, Mo., a small town on Route 66 and about 40 miles west of the author’s hometown.

But even more, Heaven & Earth is about Sam’s wife Ruth, who was abandoned by her hippy mother and raised by her devout Christian grandmother. Until the last chapter, Ruth is also an exemplary Christian, but she jettisons her faith to embrace the secular worldview of her mother.

The sociologists’ book documents how religion is currently losing out to secularization and Senter’s novel depicts how that happened in the case of one particular Christian believer. 

Religion is not always good and secularization is not always bad (as many religionists imply). But the opposite is also true: secularization (=secularism) is not always good and religion (=faith) is not always bad (as many secularists imply).

As I have often emphasized, secularization is better than secularism and faith is superior to religion.**

I agree with the sociologists: the further secularization of American society is quite surely “beyond doubt.” But that is not necessarily a bad thing. Secularization is an antidote to the current widespread advocacy of (White) Christian nationalism, and it helps ensure the freedom of religion for all citizens.

And I agree with the strong emphasis of Ruth’s mother in the novel: we need to embrace the joy of living now instead of focusing only the “life beyond.”

However, I strongly disagree with Zuckerman’s insistence that secular morality is (always) good and religious morality is (always) bad. He even says that it is not only possible to be moral without belief in God, theistic belief is often a barrier to morality.

Zuckerman’s negative view of religion seems to be based largely on the errors and excesses of conservative (fundamentalist) Christianity. (Sad to say, Pat Robertson, who died on June 8, did incalculable damage to U.S. Christianity.) But Zuckerman mostly neglects other forms of Christianity.

And in the novel, an atheistic nurse tells Ruth that “living for today as opposed to living for some future grandeur [that is, Heaven]” is a gift, “a wonderful realization. Life is suddenly so potent” (p. 217). That is the view that Ruth adopts at the end of the book.

But it doesn’t have to be either/or. It is certainly possible to believe in Heaven and to fully appreciate/enjoy the grandeur of life in this world now.

Perhaps everything is sacred (religious) and nothing is profane (secular), as Fr. Richard Rohr contends in his insightful “daily meditation” for June 12. 

_____

* The authors are Isabella Kasselstrand, Phil Zuckerman,  and Ryan T. Cragun. Zuckerman (b. 1969) is the oldest and most prominent of the three.

** See, for example, my 2/19/20 blog post titled “Affirming Secularization, Opposing Secularism” and “Faith and Religion Are Not the Same,” my 6/10/18 post.

Too Many People, or Too Few?

This blog post is about the human population of the world. Are there too many people, or are there too few? 

(A slightly inaccurate graph of the world's population growth, but the point is well made.)

The county of my birth is very small; it could be argued that there are too few people there. I was born in Worth County, Missouri, which is the youngest of the 114 counties in the state. It is also the Mo. county with the smallest land area and the smallest population.**

According to the U.S. census records, the peak population of Worth Co. was in 1900 when the number of residents reached nearly 10,000. But in the 2020 census, the population had dropped to under 2,000.

It can be argued, with good reason, that there are now too few people in Worth Co. for it to be viable still, and the same is true for many rural counties across the nation.

The population of some nations is decreasing, and some people in those countries are worrying about there being too few people—especially too few of the “right” kind.

I have long been concerned about the rapid increase of the world’s population. When I was born in 1938, there were about 2.2 billion people living on this earth, but by 1998 (just 60 years later) that number reached six billion—and this year it topped eight billion!

If my home county had grown by the same percentage as the world’s population between 1900 and 2020, it would have a population of around 49,000, not fewer than 2,000.

But already by the early 2000s, there was serious talk about the declining population in Japan and the need to encourage more Japanese women to marry and for couples to have more children.

And it is true, many of the wealthy countries of the world are losing population, and even some in China, until this year the world’s most populous country, are increasingly concerned about the current population decline there.

The cover story of the June 3^rd-9^th issue of The Economist was “The Baby-Bust Economy,” and they highlighted the problem of the declining population growth in most of the world’s wealthiest countries: “The largest 15 countries by GDP all have a fertility rate below the replacement rate.”

Thus, they project that before the end of this century “the number of people on the planet could shrink for the first time since the Black Death.”

The unchecked growth of the world’s population has long been a concern of some scholars, and others. It was 225 years ago when Thomas Malthus published the first edition of An Essay on the Principle of Population as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society (1798).

Malthus (1766~1834) was an English economist and demographer and is best known for his theory that population growth will always tend to outrun the food supply and that betterment of humankind is impossible without stern limits on reproduction.

Malthus was the first to write publicly about carrying capacity and overshoot, which are central themes of William Catton’s book that I introduced in my March 23 blog post, and that perceptive author refers to Malthus several times.

Malthus didn’t know of the coming industrial revolution in the 19^th century or the “green revolution” that began in mid-20^th century. But as Catton clearly explains, the extension of the carrying capacity of the earth was primarily based on the exploitation of depletable and non-renewable fossil fuels.

It was quite disappointing that the concluding paragraph of The Economist’s recent cover story states, “Unexpected productivity advances meant that demographic time-bombs, such as the mass starvation predicted by Thomas Malthus in the 18th century, failed to detonate.”

True, such time-bombs haven’t detonated yet. But why do they think that those time bombs are not still ticking in this world with its continual global warming, ongoing over-consumption of non-renewable resources, and increasing inequality and strife between the “haves” and “have nots”?

Because of the current, but insufficiently understood, ecological crisis, there will most likely be a drastic, and catastrophic, decline in the world’s population long before the end of this century.

Fortunately, rather than being a problem, the current decline in population pushes the coming catastrophic decline further into the future.

_____

** You might also find it interesting that the land area that became Worth County in 1861 was the most northwestern corner of the United States after Missouri became a state in 1821. 

Does Renaming Help Anything?

In last Sunday’s issue of Kansas City Star, the editorial board published an opinion piece titled “Relics of racism belong in museums, not on Kansas City street signs.” That provocative piece called for renaming some of the major streets in Kansas City—but would renaming those streets help anything?

“Kansas City leaders must develop a plan to rid the city once and for all of street names, monuments and other public symbols that honor slaveholders and others who participated in the oppression of Black Kansas Citians and other minorities,” the editors declared.

There has already been some movement in that direction. As the editors wrote that three years ago “Kansas City took the bold step of stripping the name of prominent real estate developer J.C. Nichols from a parkway and fountain near the Country Club Plaza.”*

Now the target is historic—and infamous—Troost Ave., a major north-south street that has long been the dividing line between the affluent part of Kansas City to the west and the economically deprived and racially segregated part of the city to the east.**

The avenue is named after Dr. Benoist Troost (1786~1859), the first physician to reside in Kansas City and an outstanding civic leader. But according to the 1850 Federal Census Slave Schedule, Troost owned six enslaved men and women.

But is that sufficient reason to remove Troost’s name from the historic street?

It is rather ingenious that Truth is the proposed new name—but that reminds me of the rather untruthful social media platform known as Truth Social, so I don’t know if much would be gained by renaming.

June and I are graduates of William Jewell College (class of ’59), and most of our college classes were in Jewell Hall. Dr. William Jewell (1789~1852) was a physician in Columbia, Mo., and provided the bulk of the funds for the founding of WJC in 1849.

Construction on the first classroom building of WJC was begun in 1850, and it was named Jewell Hall. The first major remodeling was completed in 1948, and that is where June and I had most of our college classes. Recently, though, there have been strong suggestions for the name to be changed.

According to an April 28 article in The Kansas City Beacon, “A commission created to study William Jewell College’s historical ties to slavery recommends renaming Jewell Hall, its oldest building, to honor the enslaved people who built it.”

What would it help to rename Troost Avenue or Jewell Hall? I didn’t know when I was a student that Dr. Jewell had been a slave owner or that enslaved people had helped build stately Jewell Hall—and I don’t know that I would have been particularly upset if I had known that.

After all, that was more than 100 years earlier, before the Civil War. What I should have been more concerned about was the fact that there were no African American students at Jewell when we were students. (June and I were friends, though, with Gladstone Fairweather, a very black Jamaican.)

The first African American students at Jewell were not admitted until the early 1960s, and one of those was A.J. Byrd, who has become a prominent citizen of Liberty and was recently elected to a second term on the Board of Liberty Public Schools.

For decades, though, WJC was primarily a White school with just a few Black students. In recent years, however, the percentage of BIPOC students at Jewell has increased dramatically.

June and I are encouraging enrollment of Black students in Jewell with the establishment of the Leroy and June Seat Family Scholarship, which awards $2,500 each year to an incoming student who self-identifies as a person of color and an active follower of Jesus Christ.

Whether it is an avenue in Kansas City or the college here in Liberty, rather than renaming, seeking to change the past, it seems wiser to make changes in the present which will create a better future for those who belong to segments of society that have been unfairly treated in the past.

_____

* My 3/20/19 and 6/30/20 blog articles were partly about Nichols. You can access those articles here and here.

** The Wikipedia article gives helpful (and correct) information about Troost Avenue, including “points of interest.” One of those is Rockhurst University, located between 52nd and 55th Streets along Troost. For years I drove down part of Troost Ave. going to teach my weekly class at Rockhurst U. 

66 Years Ago on Route 66

Route 66 is one of the iconic national highways in the U.S. On May 26, 1957, 66 years ago today, June and I drove up that highway as newlyweds. We were on our wedding trip to Chicago—and driving up Route 66 was the best way to get there. 

Route 66 was established in 1926, and it was the major U.S. highway from Chicago to Los Angeles, traversing about 2,450 miles.

In Chapter 12 of the powerful novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939), author John Steinbeck writes:

HIGHWAY 66 IS THE main migrant road. 66—the long concrete path across the country ….

66 is the path of a people in flight, refugees from dust and shrinking land, from the thunder of tractors and shrinking ownership …. 66 is the mother road, the road of flight.

But even by the 1940s, Route 66 was viewed in a much happier mood by many people: Nat King Cole recorded the hit song, “Get Your Kicks on Route 66” in 1946 (hear it here).

It amazes me now to realize that June and I were driving up Route 66 for our honeymoon “kicks” only 31 years after it was established as a national highway.

“57 Years for a ’57 Marriage” was the title of the blog post I made on May 25, 2014. I made some reference there to our marriage, but it was more about the year 1957 in general. (You are invited to (re)read that post, and see our wedding picture, here.)

June and I met in September 1955, not long after we matriculated as first-year students at Southwest Baptist College in Bolivar, Missouri (30+ miles north of Springfield.)

It wasn’t very long before we started talking about getting married at some point. A few months before graduating from the small junior college, we decided that point was soon after our graduation in 1957.

So on May 26, a Sunday afternoon, we were married in Rondo Baptist Church, June’s home church about 15 miles north of Bolivar. Following the reception in the decorated basement of the church, we left at about 4:30 and drove east for a little over an hour to Lebanon, where we got on Route 66.

It was not much more than an hour’s drive to Rolla, but it had been a big day already, so we decided to stop for the night at Schuman’s Motor Inn. (I was amazed to find that there is a “Shuman's Motor Inn US Route 66 Rolla Missouri 1957” postcard for sale on eBay.).

The cost for the room in Rolla was $7—which seems very cheap now, but that was all I made in seven hours working for minimum wage at a shoe factory later that summer. At the current minimum wage in Missouri that would be equivalent to just over $72.

The next night we stayed in the southern suburbs of Chicago—and it cost $9 there. And then we spent a couple of nights in the elegant Palmer House in downtown Chicago. The construction of that 25-story hotel was completed in 1925. It was an impressive place for us, two Missouri farm kids, to stay!

So, what can I say after 66 years of marriage? Would I do it again, get married that young? We struggled financially for our first nine years, during which time the two of us, combined, were full-time students for eleven years—and we also had two children by November 1960.

But, yes, I would do it again, no question about it. In spite of the challenges of those first years—and different challenges in the following decades—I have never for a moment regretted marrying my beautiful 19-year-old bride 66 years ago, when I was still 18.

For several years now, we have talked about hoping we will be able to celebrate our 75^th wedding anniversary. My parents were married 88 years ago this month, and they celebrated their 72^nd anniversary about 2½ months before my father died at age 92 in July 2007.

But we are still hoping that on May 26, 2032, we will, indeed, be able to celebrate 75 years of married life. We may not make it—but if not, we will die trying. 

Having Hope, Feeling Hopeless, Being Hope Free

As you see from the title, this blog article is about hope, but please note that it is only about hope in the here and now. Hope for or in the “afterlife” is certainly of great importance, but this post is only about the hope we have, or don’t have, in this world at this time. 

Hope is a widely used word and an appealing concept. I have long been an ardent advocate of hope, in spite of not always being optimistic.*

Often, though, hope is just a word expressing what we desire: we “hope” it won’t rain on our picnic planned for the weekend or we “hope” our team wins the game we have tickets for. But such hope is nothing more than wishful thinking and has negligible impact on what we will do or not do.

In a more robust sense, hope means to work for and to wait for something with the confident expectation and anticipation that it will at some point, sooner or later, be fulfilled. In that sense, hope is grounded in a positive view of the future that we believe is conceivable.

Challenging circumstances sometimes siphon off hope, but then through determination one can cultivate new hope. In fact, “New Hope” is the name of two churches that are very meaningful to me.**

In numerous ways and at numerous times, having hope is a good and positive mindset, one to be affirmed and promoted.

When we no longer have hope, we feel hopeless, and that is usually an uncomfortable state of affairs.  

In his book Die Wise (2015), Stephen Jenkinson writes, “Hope is very often a refusal to know what is so, and steadfastly it is a refusal to live as if the present moment is good enough and all we really have. Hopeless is the collapse of that refusal, and it looks a lot like depression.”

So, feeling hopeless is often a negative state of mind and one we want to avoid as much as possible. But, realistically, sometimes it is necessary to give up hope and to deal with what is rather than what we would like to be otherwise.

For example, when a terminally ill person’s loved ones give up hope, they put that loved one on hospice, seeking to make them as comfortable as possible for the remainder of their days, no longer hoping that they will miraculously regain their health.

Some who see the current ecological crisis most clearly think the struggle to save the environment is hopeless. Thus, Guy McPherson avers, “The living planet is in the fourth and final stage of a terminal disease. . . . it is long past time we admitted hospice is the only reasonable way forward.”***.

There is a close relationship, then, between hopelessness and being hope free.

Why can being hope free be considered a good thing? Well, hope can be, and perhaps often is, a refusal to accept reality. In that way, it is ill-founded and detrimental. To be hopeful in spite of clearly having a terminal illness is not helpful.

In January of last year, I made a blog post about the “serenity prayer” attributed to theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. That prayer begins, “GOD, grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can; and the Wisdom to know the difference.”

Perhaps some of us have mostly emphasized the second part: the prayer for courage to change things. But maybe the first part is more important: the prayer for the serenity to accept things that cannot be changed, thus, to be hope free.

That doesn’t mean being constantly depressed as when we feel hopeless. Rather, as is expressed in the longer version of the prayer, it means “Living one day at a time; enjoying one moment at a time; accepting hardship as the pathway to peace.”

Accordingly, hope free advocate McPherson, who thinks “near term human extinction” is certain, writes, “I recommend living fully. I recommend living with intention. . . . I recommend the pursuit of excellence. I recommend the pursuit of love” (Only Love Remains, p. 175).

Amen.

_____

* Some of you may remember my Oct. 30, 2021, blog post titled “Hopeful, But Not Optimistic.” (Click here if you would like to read it again—or for the first time.)  

** You may want to (re)read this blog article I posted about those churches nearly ten years ago.

*** McPherson (b. 1960) is Professor Emeritus of Natural Resources and Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona, where he was a tenured professor from 1989 to 2009. The words cited above are from his 2019 book Only Love Remains: Dancing at the Edge of Extinction (p. 199). He is also the author of "Becoming Hope-Free: Parallels Between Death of Individuals and Extinction of Homo Sapiens," Clinical Psychology Forum, No. 317, May 2019.

In Opposition to Monarchism (and Christian Nationalism)

It is Saturday morning on May 6 as I am writing this. Perhaps many of you are watching the coronation of King Charles III at this time. I am not, intentionally, for I am among the growing number of people who stand in opposition to monarchies in this modern world. 

Archbishop Welby crowning Charles III 

Opposition to the British Monarchy

“God Save Us from Christian Empire” is the name of a May 4 article by Adam Russell Taylor, the president of Sojourners. (It was because of reading that thought-provoking piece that I decided to write this one.)

According to CNN, the coronation in Westminster Abbey was “a symbolic coming together of the monarchy, church, and state for a religious ritual.” The Archbishop of Canterbury anointed Charles III with oil and placed a heavy crown on his head.

Since the days of Henry VIII, the British monarch has been the supreme head of the Church of England and often referred to as the “defender of the faith.”

Taylor calls attention to the problematical “global legacy” of the British Empire. That legacy “includes centuries of exclusion; racism; and plundering of land, resources, and human beings on nearly every continent—a legacy that is inseparable from both the British monarchy and the church.”

In recent years, Barbados and Jamaica have both announced their intention to sever ties with the British crown. Quoting Taylor again,

In both nations, enslaved people were forcibly brought from Africa and toiled in brutal conditions for hundreds of years, all to the economic benefit of the empire and its sovereigns—just one chapter of a long history of the royal family’s role in financing human enslavement that goes back to Queen Elizabeth I.

This is a large part of my ongoing opposition to the British monarchy—but there are other reasons that I will not mention at this time.

Opposition to the Japanese Monarchy

As Wikipedia accurately explains, the “Japanese monarchy is the oldest continuous hereditary monarchy in the world. The Imperial House recognizes 126 monarchs, beginning with Emperor Jimmu (traditionally dated to 11 February 660 BC), and continuing up to the current emperor, Naruhito.”

I remember well the opposition to the monarchy in Japan when Emperor Showa (Hirohito) died in early January 1989, and his son, Emperor Akihito (the present emperor’s father), ascended to the Chrysanthemum Throne.

Freedom of religion is guaranteed by the current constitution of Japan, which went into effect on May 3, 1947 (and May 3 is now Constitutional Memorial Day, a national holiday). There is no state-sanctioned religion in Japan, and the constitution prohibits any religious group from exercising political power.

Accordingly, Japanese Christians, among others, expressed strong opposition to the enthronement ceremonies of the new Emperor in 1990, which was couched in Shinto rituals.

Part of that criticism was linked to the role of the Emperor in the ruthlessness of Japan in expanding the Japanese Empire in the 20^th century, which was partly modeled after the colonial expansion of the British Empire in the previous centuries.

Opposition to Christian Nationalism in the U.S.

Last week my friend Brian Kaylor, president and editor-in-chief of the Baptist periodical Word&Way, posted an article titled “Coronating Christian Nationalism,” indicating how the coronation of George II was giving Christian nationalism “a global spotlight.”

The U.S. fought the Pacific War in opposition to the Japanese monarchy and the concomitant excesses of the Japanese Empire. The U.S. colonists fought the Revolutionary War against King George III and the British Empire which wanted to rule as much territory as possible in North America.

But now there is a dangerous movement of right-wing Christians and politicians to override the principle of the separation of church and state in the U.S. That would make it more like Great Britain now and like Japan of the 1930s in its union of the nation with State Shinto.

Let’s not go there. It’s too late in the world for a King as a religious leader and national allegiance given to that King as a defender of the faith. I stand with the early religious dissenters to the British monarchy and the state church, men such as John Bunyan and Roger Williams.

What about you?