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  In Response To ... The Conservative
         Evangelical Wilderness Experience

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Note: This essay first appeared in the May 2008 Baptist Studies Bulletin.

          "We despise all reverences and all the objects of reverence which are outside the pale of our own list of sacred things. And yet, with strange inconsistency, we are shocked when other people despise and defile the things which are holy to us." So declared Mark Twain at the very time that white Baptists in the South finally succeeded in muscling their way into religious and cultural dominance in the American South.
          A little over a century later, some Baptists in the South are loath to accept their steadily declining influence. Long the standard-bearer in the South, the Southern Baptist Convention reached its zenith of growth related-to-population in the 1950s, and a numerical peak in baptisms in 1972. It's been downhill ever since. A fundamentalist takeover of the denomination, ostensibly for the purpose of theological purification and numerical revival merely sped up the decline. Marriage to the evangelically conservative Religious Right only added to the problems. Frank Page, current SBC president, recently concluded that the decline of the SBC is in part because of widespread perception of Southern Baptists as "mean-spirited, hurtful and angry people." Furthermore, Southern Baptists "have not always presented a winsome Christian life that would engender trust and a desire on the part of many people to engage in a conversation on the Gospel," lamented Page.
          While the SBC president places much of the blame on the shoulders of his own denomination, J. Gerald Harris, editor of the press arm of the Georgia Baptist Convention (affiliated with the SBC), exhibits the tendencies lamented by Page.  Agreeing with Page that conservative Christians are portrayed by the media as intolerant, "narrow and sectarian," Harris nonetheless revels in the negative labels, insisting that "evangelical Christians" are the "good guys" in America, while all others are "bad guys." Tolerance is evil and public schools are pagan, Harris insists, claiming to speak for all "Bible-believing, Christ-loving and soul-winning Christians."
          While Southern Baptist leaders alternate between regret and defiance, conservative evangelicals in general are having a larger-scale wilderness experience, their long-sought secular political ambitions largely unrealized and now fading fast. The recently released Evangelical Manifesto, recognizing serious problems among conservative evangelical ranks, is a half-hearted apology that skewers liberalism and refutes the excesses of the Religious Right without completely annulling the conservative evangelical marriage with the Republican Party. At least one prominent SBC leader disagrees with a softening of Religious Right rhetoric. Al Mohler, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, rejects the Manifesto acknowledgement that evangelical faith is merely one of many valid expressions of Christianity and scoffs at the affirmation that other faiths should have equal access to the "public square."*
          The wilderness sojourn of the Southern Baptist Convention and the conservative evangelical movement at large did not have to happen. Baptists of the 17th and 18th centuries understood the importance of diversity. Unafraid of pluralism, they insisted religious liberty applied equally to persons of all faiths and no faith, and in turn they put their lives on the line to secure the separation of church and state. Southern Baptist leaders of recent decades have strayed far from the teachings of the long-ago heroes of their own denomination. Marrying politics and religion in an arrogant effort to secure the rights of evangelical Christians above the rights of all others, they have boldly rejected their own faith heritage. And in their rebellion, they have led the way into a dry and desolate landscape of self-serving myths and self-glorifying rhetoric.
          Grudging regret, continued defiance and half-hearted apologies are not paths out of the wilderness.  As Jesus taught two millennia ago, a recognition of lostness must precede renewal and rebirth.

* Editor's Note:  For further reading regarding the significance of the Evangelical Manifesto, read Melissa Rogers, Marci Hamilton, and Joseph Conn.  Also of interest is an Associated Baptist Press story.