America’s evangelical church is being torn apart by culture wars by Barry Hankins for The Guardian
Rightwing Southern Baptists believe they must ‘save’ white Christian America by embracing Trumpism. A more moderate faction just won control – by the tightest of margins
!s the Southern Baptist Convention – the largest and arguably most powerful Protestant denomination in the United States – being held together by culture wars instead of Biblical teaching? That is the question in recent weeks, as thousands of Southern Baptists gathered in Nashville for their annual meeting to determine the bitterly contested future of the convention.
Many conservative members of the denomination seem to have seen in Donald Trump’s populist authoritarianism a last-gasp chance to save white Christian America – theology, and, for Trump, Christian morality, be damned.
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I am a historian of evangelical Christianity and have written extensively on Southern Baptists. Although not Southern Baptist myself, over the past two decades I have often defended them as being serious about theology, even as that theology is often shaped in part by cultural concerns. By 2020, I had come to believe that conservatives of the right wing of the SBC were not just subordinating theology to the cultural concerns of white Christian identity politics, but had in fact lost their way as Baptists.
The most striking example of this is Al Mohler. Mohler is the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and arguably the Southern Baptist community’s leading intellectual. During the 2016 election, Mohler was a never-Trumper, saying the candidate was “below the baseline level of human decency” that Christians could accept and vote for. His comments could not have been more forceful. Mohler was fighting what seemed to be a losing battle: in 2016, Trump was elected with the support of around 80% of white evangelical voters and the endorsement of some of the SBC’s most powerful and respected conservative leaders, including Robert Jeffress, Franklin Graham, Jack Graham and others.
