Word: baptist
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Call it the great mouse schism. Last week 16,000 delegates of America's largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, kept very busy in Orlando, Fla. They elected the 16 million-member Convention's first baby-boomer president, James Merritt, 47. They announced a couple of headline-grabbing conservative policies: support for the death penalty and an explicit ban on women pastors. But for all its productivity, the meeting was awfully quiet. This was because most of the usually rancorous, relatively liberal opposition sat it out. The rebels, who call themselves the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, will also meet...
...Cooperative Baptists swear that the decision to hold their counter-meeting at Disney World was inadvertent, not a symbolic insult. Few believe them. "It was a Mickey Mouse move," cracks Albert Mohler Jr., president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, the SBC's premier teaching institution. "It was like children rebelling against their parents." In fact, the gesture is a reaction to the right-wing takeover of the Southern Baptist movement...
...aligned itself--loosely--with moderate Southern Democrats. Then, in a now famous meeting at New Orleans' Cafe du Monde, two scandalized conservatives, Paige Patterson and Paul Pressler, hatched an insurgency. Packing the annual convention of 1979, they elected a conservative president and unearthed bylaws that amplified his power. "Baptist battles" consumed each convention until 1990, when the right wing prevailed decisively. The SBC then allied itself with the Republican Party, insisted on word-for-word biblical inerrancy and produced a drumbeat of provocative pronouncements on topics like wifely submission and the need to convert Jews. All that remained...
...mood in the nation's most Baptist state supports that threat. The Baptist General Convention of Texas is a 6,000-congregation powerhouse. No liberal refuge, it supported the outlawing of abortion and expelled a congregation that ordained a gay deacon. Nevertheless, it thinks nothing of ignoring SBC edicts. When the SBC demanded wifely subservience, the Texans simply took their own vote and let the women stand tall. And the Texans' patience seems to be wearing thin. Speaking of his organization's $40 million contribution to the national convention last year (roughly a quarter of the SBC budget), David Currie...
...Southern Baptist leadership has struck an unapologetic stance on its policies. "Somebody said the other day that we were trying to set things back 200 years, and we felt like that was a big mistake," convention president Paige Patterson told reporters this week. "We're trying to set them back 2,000 years. We want to go all the way back to Jesus and the Bible." Liberal and moderate state conventions (including those in Texas and Virginia) will continue to squirm, Van Biema predicts, as the national convention slides irrevocably toward a more right-wing philosophy. And while moderate Southern...