Commentary : Factions Look to Future in Rift Among Southern Baptists : Progressives: Recent changes make divison all but inescapable as disaffected group pulls away.

Schism now appears virtually inevitable in the Southern Baptist Convention. When it comes, this division will offer Southern Baptists a clear choice of remaining within the historic Baptist tradition or accepting, in its place, a late-20th-Century marriage of theological fundamentalism and political extremism.

The likelihood of such schism has increased appreciably with the creation last month of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship by more than 6,000 disaffected progressives, many of whom are beginning to believe that loyalty to historic Baptist principles must supersede loyalty to Southern Baptist structures. Although still in its infancy, the fellowship already provides the basic outline for what probably will become a new Baptist body within the next five years.

Like divorce in a family, schism within the church is not to be taken lightly or as a matter of course. If there were nothing more at stake in the prolonged conflict among Southern Baptists than who controls the convention’s agencies and institutions, division would be plainly wrong. But more--much more--is at issue.

First and foremost, the bedrock Baptist principle of “soul liberty” is at stake. That is the term coined in the 1630s by Roger Williams, the founder of the Baptist movement in America.

What this principle means is that no human authority--ecclesiastical or governmental--is competent to command faith or compel religious conformity. In the Baptist tradition, this has included the freedom of the individual to study and interpret the Bible for oneself. The theological assumption behind this historically radical idea is that the Holy Spirit guides the believer’s study and interpretation. Within Baptist life, the level of trust was such that this presupposition was considered sufficient to safeguard orthodoxy.

That has changed in the Southern Baptist Convention with the recent rush to theological fundamentalism, whose main tenet is that the Bible contains no errors or internal inconsistencies in any realm of knowledge, including science and history. Ever more narrowly drafted statements of faith about the Bible are used as weapons of orthodoxy in the effort to ensure that anyone in a position of influence is theologically “pure.”

Second, the new Southern Baptist fundamentalism has usurped the freedom of local congregations to choose their own ministers without outside interference or fear of retaliation. For example, under new rules imposed by the Southern Baptist Home Mission Board, mission churches may not choose women or divorced people as pastors without forfeiting salary supplements previously provided by the convention. And many instances have been reported of heavy-handed pressure by prominent fundamentalist leaders on congregational committees searching for new pastors. This has even included SBC presidents, who have lobbied for their own hand-picked candidates, often including statements that God has revealed to them who should be chosen.

Third, the new leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention have made a 180-degree turn in rejecting the distinctive contribution early Baptists made to America--separation of church and state. By endorsing government-written school prayers and lobbying for federal tax monies as subsidies for church-run programs, they have repudiated their own denominational legacy of religious freedom for all citizens.

Instead, the architects of the successful takeover of the SBC advocate a cozier relationship between church and state, to the point of flirting with reconstructionism, the philosophy that argues for abolition of the country’s democratic institutions and their replacement with a form of theocracy modeled on the Puritan Fathers’ notion that the church should control the government.

In addition, virtually all current SBC leaders have come out in support of conservative Republican candidates for public office. For their part, Republican politicians have gratefully accepted the delivery of the nation’s largest Protestant body as a reliable voting bloc.

Church splits are always painful--and should be. But just as some marriages are irretrievably broken, so it is sometimes with churches. In the case of the Southern Baptist Convention, divorce is unavoidable because the partners’ theological and political differences are irreconcilable.

In short, this divorce is inevitable because the Southern Baptist Convention has ceased to be Baptist.

BACKGROUND

The self-proclaimed moderate minority within the Southern Baptist Convention has been battling with the denomination’s strict fundamentalist majority for more than a decade. But at the church’s annual convention in Atlanta last week, for the first time there was a noted absence of debate between the two factions about the infallibility of the Bible. The moderates had formed their own group, the Baptist Cooperative Fellowship, in May. In light of the conservative ascendancy, two veteran Southern Baptist journalists evaluate the likely future for the nation’s largest Protestant body.