Southern Baptist Convention
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The Southern Baptist Convention is an American Baptist denomination founded in 1845. With a claimed 16 million members, has the distinctions of being the largest Protestant denomination in America and the largest Baptist denomination in the world. It has a particularly notable history of racism although it does seem to be recovering (the homophobia and sexism are both very much still evident).
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[edit] History
The Southern Baptist Convention was founded as a pro-slavery denomination in 1845 after a dispute over the appropriateness of letting slave-owners be missionaries to Africa. The Baptists never were as anti-slavery as were, for instance, the Quakers or the Methodists, and in the two decades of the Second Great Awakening they gave up pleading for slaves to be freed,[1] instead remaining neutral on the subject of slavery. Neutrality, however, wasn't enough for the slave-owning elites they'd attracted and slave owners insisted on the Baptists condoning slavery by allowing slave owners to be missionaries; this was too much even for the Baptists and they refused. At which point the Southern Baptists seceeded and formed their own denomination.
After the American Civil War black people had unsurprisingly had enough of the exclusively white-run and segregated Southern Baptists and in a few waves in the late 1860s left the Convention, leaving it almost exclusively white.
Given its overtly racist origins and almost exclusive white membership it should surprise no one that the Southern Baptist Convention was one of the driving forces behind Jim Crow laws.
In 1995 on its 150th anniversary, the Southern Baptist Convention renounced its racist roots and passed a motion apologising for its historical defence of slavery, segregation, and white supremacy.[2] They appear to have been serious about this and in 2012 they elected Fred Luter Jr. as the first ever African-American president of the SBC.[3]
Prominent members include Billy Graham, Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwell (the latter being a convert). Jimmy Carter, who had been a member, left for a more moderate Baptist denomination due to a fundamentalist takeover in the 1980s.
[edit] Beliefs and practice
As a church explicitly founded to support slavery, although they have massively improved on the racism front, they are generally on the wrong side of history. In particular they are both homophobic[4] and sexist, subscribing to complementarianism.
Southern Baptists, like most baptists observe: the Lord's Supper and Believer's baptism by full immersion.[5][6]
The denomination allows a considerable degree of autonomy to individual congregations, and while the organization itself has largely broken free of its past outlook on race relations, there remain many local SBC-affiliated churches which look sharply down their nose at interracial marriage.
[edit] Homophobia
Southern Baptists are one of those groups running and even supporting so-called reparative therapy and going so far as to claim this quackery[7] works.[8] The Southern Baptist Convention also asserts that same sex marriage has nothing to do with civil rights,[9][10] probably because after supporting both slavery and Jim Crow they want to deny this has anything to do with their history.
[edit] Sexism
From the early 1970s they have asserted the primacy of "traditional gender roles"[11], in 1998 they amended their statement on marriage to assert male headship, and in 2000 they asserted male only pastors.
[edit] In Popular culture
A lot of kids in the late 1960s and 1970s knew of the group because of their cartoon series Jot, which was used as filler material on Saturday morning TV. Jot tried to brainwash kids into believing the morality of the Bible.
[edit] Footnotes
- ↑ Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginning of the Bible Belt, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998, pp. 10–18, 155
- ↑ RESOLUTION ON RACIAL RECONCILIATION ON THE 150TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE SOUTHERN BAPTIST CONVENTION
- ↑ The Rev. Fred Luter Jr. of New Orleans elected first black president of Southern Baptist Convention Times Picaune
- ↑ The SBC website on sexuality
- ↑ Reuters Factbox: The Southern Baptist Convention
- ↑ SBCnet Comparison of 1925, 1963, 2000 versions
- ↑ The American Psychiatric Association certified reparative therapy as quackery back in 1997
- ↑ Baptist Press News
- ↑ Fox News - probably deserves an automatic question of its reliability
- ↑ NBC's an improvement
- ↑ "Sbc Resolution: Resolution On The Place Of Women In Christian Service". Sbc.net. http://www.sbc.net/resolutions/amResolution.asp?ID=1090. Retrieved December 10, 2011.