Reply #16: I've been a Southern Baptist all my life -- but not anymore [View All]

I grew up in the largest Southern Baptist Church in a medium-sized town in west Tennessee. I went to Sunday School and learned to sing "Jesus Loves Me" and to be a good and decent person who loves others. I married the pastor's daughter. I went to a Baptist liberal arts college and from there, went on to the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, back in the old days, where I was taught (in both institutions) how to think for myself, to use the mind that God gave me, to ask and consider difficult questions about theology, philosophy, history, and the role of the church in contemporary society. Southern Baptists in those days -- the 1960s and 1970s -- were good and decent people who treasured the separation of church and state. The president of the Seminary, Duke McCall, was a respected denominational statesman who wrote a column every month called "Thinking Aloud" -- which he said was a conscious play on the phrase "thinking allowed." The faculty at Southern consisted of world-renowned scholars like George Beasley-Murray (from London) and Frank Stagg, and Henlee Barnette. In short, I learned to be a liberal because that's what Jesus was.

Then in the late 70s, I saw the fundamentalists begin to take over. Professors under whom I had studied in college and seminary began to be pushed into early retirement or fired outright. Slowly but inexorably, the fundamentalists took over. They won.

The Southern Baptist Convention of today is nothing like the SBC I grew up in. My church left me. I suppose I'm still too much of a Baptist (at least what USED to be Baptist) to be anything else, but I'm not comfortable anymore as a Baptist. So where does that leave me? Pretty much non-institutional, non-denominational.

Bake