Setting aside their smartphones and MAGA hats for a moment, the Southern Baptist Convention voted to exclude women pastors this week. The photos seem to show a rather dour delegate pool that seems ready to head to the apothecary for some leeches to take care of this headache. The conservative mind is a curious place. I can understand wanting to slow change down—it is moving at a scary pace, leaving many of us concerned and confused. Yet the idea that nothing has changed in two millennia isn’t only demonstrably wrong, it’s something that history demonstrates is a relatively recent, and reactionary, idea. The fundamentalist brand of religion that elevates the Bible to godhood has only been around for about a century. It’s a reaction to a hundred-year-old modernism that, in spite of all the evidence, closes its eyes.
Fear is natural enough. Some of us actually watch horror movies voluntarily, after all. But when fear overtly drives your religion isn’t it time to stop and ask what you’re doing? The Southern Baptist Convention ejected its largest church, Saddleback, which had achieved national influence under Rick Warren. According to the New York Times, Warren himself addressed the Convention citing none other than Billy Graham in his defense of women pastors. The convention overwhelmingly voted to excise its most successful church for fear of that dreaded slippery slope of liberalism. We’re fixated at some sexual level, it seems, and afraid of what might happen if we admit that even as AI is taking over our world, things may have changed. At least a little.
The Bible is a sacred document with a context. That context was patriarchal and it held considerable sway for about two millennia. Power is difficult to relinquish. When you get to call all the shots you don’t want to be reminded that those shots are wounding and killing innocent people. “It was just better that way,” people think, ignoring the very Bible they worship. It’s a point of view I understand, having grown up in it. I remember reading with the juvenile furrowed brow of some tender twenty years how C. S. Lewis simply couldn’t see how women could be priests. And then noticed how Baptists and other Protestants embraced Lewis although they condemned his idolatrous Anglicanism. Sometimes it’s difficult to believe we’re actually in the twenty-first century with AI knocking at the door. And we still can’t get over women wanting to be in the pulpit.
Roger Williams’ first Baptist church (in the country)
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