The Need for the ERLC

In advance of our 2025 Annual Meeting in Dallas, the Southern Baptist rumor mill says to expect a motion to defund the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) of the SBC. This rumor is all the more believable since similar motions have been made repeatedly in the recent history of the Convention.

The question before the Convention in these previous motions, all of which have failed, is not a question of any one policy, or even of the overall direction of the ERLC. The question is whether we should have an ERLC at all.

I unapologetically believe that the work of our mission boards is and should be prioritized over our other common endeavors. I would go further to say that theological education is more necessary to the health of our churches than is the work of the ERLC. I will not argue that the ERLC is our most important entity.

I can safely say this, though: We need the ERLC more than we ever have needed it.

It is difficult to pin down a date when the ERLC was started. To do so, you have to choose which successor groups count as a beginning of the ERLC. But whichever of the possible dates you may choose, we can observe two things to be true.

First, the ERLC was established at a time when not one person in the United States of America had any trouble answering the question, "What is a woman?" or "What is a man?" Not a single state in the United States of America would grant a no-fault divorce. This was an America in which someone like Wilbur Mills, the powerful chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, could lose his political career just because he was seen in the company of a stripper. Abortion was illegal coast-to-coast. People were justified in trusting that their children could go to VBS and not be molested by a volunteer or a pastor.

In that environment, Southern Baptists concluded that we needed a Southern Baptist entity advocating for ethics.

In contrast, look at the moral chaos around us today. And before someone accuses me of "trying to bring back the 1950s" and chastises me for hearkening back to a decade filled with racism, let me say that I'm not having any of it. Our discourse is chock full of racism and antisemitism right now, only without stable two-parent homes, without dignity in civic life, and without sexual morality. I cannot fathom how anyone could conclude that we have less need for a Southern Baptist entity advocating for ethics than we had when the ERLC was founded.

Second, the ERLC was established at a time when Americans were overwhelmingly convinced about the rightfulness and importance of religious liberty. E. Y. Mullins, writing about the "Axioms of Religion," treated religious liberty as a foregone conclusion, barely articulating even a modicum of a rationale for it, naively concluding that no such defense was needed in an America in which everyone had conceded the truth and necessity of religious liberty (you'll find a better effort put forth by Roger Williams). The American ideal set itself up in opposition, at first against the state churches of Europe, and later against the state atheism of global communism. To be an American was to believe in strong, free churches operating within a strong, free state.

In that environment, Southern Baptists concluded that we needed a Southern Baptist entity advocating for religious liberty.

In contrast, the state of affairs today is far more bleak. States like Colorado and Washington persist, even in the face of adverse Supreme Court rulings, in their demonic persecution of Christians in their philosophical effort to subjugate Christianity to the competing infertlility religion exemplified by SOGI laws. Oregon v Smith is still the law of the land, and although the judicial branch gives every evidence of being robustly committed to RFRA and RLUIPA, these are mere congressional statutes, and not constitutional amendments—highly vulnerable to any Democratic majority in Congress. Or will it even require a Democratic majority? After all, we live in a time when the Republican President of the United States is fighting in the courts to protect abortion-by-medication. One congressional vote to repeal RFRA and RLUIPA and the whole framework of American religious liberty could be in grave peril.

And this is not the only threat. We live at a time when people pretending to be Baptists…even pretending to be Southern Baptists…openly declare their interest in the establishment of state Christianity and repudiate Article XVII of The Baptist Faith & Message. If we could go back to the days when the ERLC was founded and predict that this state of affairs would come to be in 2025, they would have laughed us out of the meeting hall.

Less need today for an entity advocating for religious liberty? How could anyone even start to make that case?

And so, it seems to me that the only way to argue that we do not need the ERLC today is to argue that it was a fool's errand to begin with. If we take that position, it will put us at odds with not only our spiritual great-grandparents and our spiritual grandparents, but also with our spiritual parents. During the Conservative Resurgence, the generation ahead of us worked so hard to wrest the ERLC out of the hands of leadership that was advocating for abortion on demand and was inviting pornographers to speak at ethics conferences. They did that because they saw needs that their forebears had identified long ago. Those needs are even greater now. That's why I will not support any efforts to mothball the ERLC.

The Faith and Message of Jimmy Carter

Christians in Government?

If you spend enough time going to school, it will enable you to rouse yourself to mortal combat over ideas that other people regard as trivial. This may not be the principal benefit of education, but it is certainly a feature.

For those who study Baptist history, the relationship between Baptists and Anabaptists is one of those contested ideas. Some see in the Anabaptist movement the early seeds of the Baptist movement. Indeed, for some Baptist historians, the Anabaptists are the immediate antecedent for the Baptists in a chain of antecedents (in one way or another) connecting modern Baptists to the primitive New Testament churches. Others are dubious about the connection, disjunctively tracing the Baptists to a group breaking away from English Separatism. Occasionally you'll run into someone who acts as though Baptists and Anabaptists first discovered one another sometime in the 1900s.

Even among the most Anabaptist-adjacent Baptists out there, we just can't sidle up to some of the quirkier aspects of Anabaptist theology. It was an interesting thing, back in the day, to spend time with so many Anabaptist scholars wearing .38 specials concealed in their waistbands. Anabaptists are against violence and war. They don't carry firearms. Baptists, on the other hand, generally subscribe to Augustine's Just War Theory. We Southern Baptists are periodically against everything else except war.

Because of their pacifism, Anabaptists have generally stayed somewhat aloof from government, skeptical about the degree to which true Christians could be involved in the work of government (Anabaptists have varied from one another in this regard). In the Schleitheim Confession, a group of early Anabaptists weighed in pretty decisively on the question of whether Christians should consider serving in any governmental roles that included enforcement of the law.

Thirdly, it will be asked concerning the sword, Shall one be a magistrate if one should be chosen as such? The answer is as follows: They wished to make Christ king, but He fled and did not view it as the arrangement of His Father. Thus shall we do as He did, and follow Him, and so shall we not walk in darkness. For He Himself says, He who wishes to come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. Also, He Himself forbids the [employment of] the force of the sword saying, The worldly princes lord it over them, etc., but not so shall it be with you. Further, Paul says, Whom God did foreknow He also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of His Son, etc. Also Peter says, Christ has suffered (not ruled) and left us an example, that ye should follow His steps.

Finally it will be observed that it is not appropriate for a Christian to serve as a magistrate because of these points: The government magistracy is according to the flesh, but the Christians' is according to the Spirit; their houses and dwelling remain in this world, but the Christians' are in heaven; their citizenship is in this world, but the Christians' citizenship is in heaven; the weapons of their conflict and war are carnal and against the flesh only, but the Christians' weapons are spiritual, against the fortification of the devil. The worldlings are armed with steel and iron, but the Christians are armed with the armor of God, with truth, righteousness, peace, faith, salvation and the Word of God. In brief, as is the mind of Christ toward us, so shall the mind of the members of the body of Christ be through Him in all things, that there may be no schism in the body through which it would be destroyed. For every kingdom divided against itself will be destroyed. Now since Christ is as it is written of Him, His members must also be the same, that His body may remain complete and united to its own advancement and upbuilding.

Baptists can admire the Anabaptists' level of commitment, but we have reason to doubt the soundness of their hermeneutics. From Cornelius to Joanna, the New Testament story of Jesus' ministry and the life of the early church features a significant number of people closely connected with the government, and there is no indication that either Jesus or the apostles called upon them to disavow those connections. A ban preventing Christians from serving in the military, law enforcement, or any branch of government is unsupportable from the Bible.

This Anabaptist ban on Christians serving as magistrates? We reject it. But that does not mean that we also have to disregard the Anabaptists' reasons for concern. Both theology and history give us reason to fret over how well any Christian can protect his spiritual wellbeing from his heavy engagement in the work of government. The occasion of Jimmy Carter's death makes for a good moment to ponder this issue.

Jimmy Carter: The Born-Again President

I was alive for the Nixon and Ford presidencies, but the 1976 election of Jimmy Carter marks the first time that I paid any attention to the Federal Government. You see, my mother was a Carter before she married, and the name on all of those yard signs caught my attention.

Jimmy Carter's faith preceded his highest political achievements. He attended a small Baptist church in Plains, GA, for many years. He taught Sunday School. He volunteered for a Billy Graham crusade. He shared the gospel with others and wanted them to come to faith.

Carter received some negative attention for being too Christian early on. He was the first president to call himself a "born-again Christian." He nearly scuttled his winning 1976 electoral campaign when he admitted in an interview with Playboy magazine that he had "committed adultery many times in [his] heart" because he had "looked on many women with lust." Quoting and applying the Sermon on the Mount nearly did in the Carter presidency before it started.

The late-night talk shows ridiculed Carter for uttering these lines, portraying him as a lustful man. Ironically, he had been answering a question from Playboy about whether he was so pious, self-controlled, and circumspect that he would be some sort of inflexible theocrat if he were to occupy the Oval Office. Whether they used it to portray him as a prude, a would-be philanderer, or a backcountry buffoon, many people in the country were uncomfortable with Jimmy Carter's overt religiosity.

Post-inauguration, Jimmy Carter's faith remained an integral part of his life. He immediately joined the First Baptist Church of Washington, DC. He attended church there more than 70 times during his term in office. That's a remarkable track-record of church attendance for a sitting president.

The fact that it is a remarkable attendance record is itself remarkable. Most of the people who will read my blog make it to at least fifty Sunday services a year. Count in Wednesdays and other gatherings, any many of you will chalk up more than seventy appearances at a church service in just six months. Certainly that was true for an enormous number of Southern Baptists in the late 1970s.

Even if 70 times in four years is lackluster, as church attendance goes, Carter was more committed to his faith than Reagan, either Bush, Clinton, Obama, or Trump. To be clear, I do not identify regular church attendance as a reliable indicator of good spiritual health, but apart from very good reason (confinement, for example), I identify regular church non-attendance as a reliable indicator of poor spiritual health. The fact that it is so rare for a president to attend church regularly may give us reason to join the Anabaptists in questioning whether it is good for the soul to get too involved in politics.

Carter's church attendance picked up after he left office. He and Rosalynn worked hard as volunteers for Habitat for Humanity. He received less attention for his efforts to eradicate Guinea worm disease, which painfully afflicts people in some of the poorest countries of Sub-Saharan Africa. Jimmy Carter tied all of these initiatives to the outworking of his faith in Jesus.

You know what: I think it was sincere. I think Jimmy Carter really was born again. I hope to see him in Heaven. In his personal behavior, he demonstrated the walk of a Christian better than we have come to expect from our political leaders.

The Infidelities of Jimmy Carter

His admission to Playboy notwithstanding, I suspect that Jimmy Carter was faithful to Rosalynn for the duration of their marriage. He ought to be commended for that. Where he will receive criticism from many believers—well-deserved criticism—is less in the area of his practice than in the area of his beliefs.

His most important infidelity is this, even if others get more attention: Jimmy Carter believed that people could be saved apart from trusting in Jesus Christ for salvation. He tended to hedge his statements along these lines quite a bit. Rather than just asserting that people are saved apart from the gospel, Carter tended to say that (1) there's wiggle-room in what the Bible says, (2) Carter preferred not to be judgmental, and so (3) he chose to believe that people could be saved even if they rejected the gospel. He was wrong on his first point, which made him wrong in his conclusion. 

How tragic it is that people from all over the world and from many different faiths stopped by for Sunday School at a Baptist church and heard an unclear message as to whether they needed to be saved and as to how they could be saved! His charitable work was admirable and thoroughly Christian, but you can't build enough houses or cure enough diseases to make up for failing to love people enough to give them a clear understanding of their need for salvation in the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Jimmy Carter also wandered away from biblical Christianity on lesser (but still important) items. He famously declared himself to be leaving the Southern Baptist Convention because of his egalitarianism, but two other questions most prominently divided him from other Southern Baptists.

On the question of abortion, Carter said that he personally considered abortion to be wrong. He also said that he did not think Jesus would approve of abortion. He opposed federal funding for abortion. But he supported the legal regime of Roe v Wade, which made abortion legal at every stage of pregnancy.

This approach to abortion is incomprehensible, which is why it has died out. The person in the womb either is or is not a person in the womb. If there is not a person in the womb, why is abortion wrong? Why shouldn't the government fund it? If there is a person in the womb, what reason other than barbarism could we find for failing to protect that person's life. Carter's position was always a halfway-house to the "Shout Your Abortion" position of the Democratic Party today, but for Carter himself it seemed to be his sincere conviction. If he ever gave evidence that his position had changed, I was unaware of it.

In contrast, his position on homosexuality moved constantly over the course of his adult life. His was the first administration to welcome gay-rights activists to the White House. He claimed (falsely) that Jesus never said anything about gay marriage. He first came out in support of same-sex civil unions, then he came out in support of full-fledged gay marriage. After the 2015 Obergefell ruling, Carter espoused a thoroughly non-Christian sexual ethic: "I think Jesus would encourage any love affair if it was honest and sincere and was not damaging to anyone else." This approach would open the door to condone adultery (if kept a secret or condoned by the other spouse), polyamory, and whole host of other forms of debauchery.

It's not a sexual ethic; it's an explanation for not having a sexual ethic.

Which is surprising coming from the most ethical president in my lifetime in terms of sexual behavior. That puzzle—the gap between the unmistakable Christian nature visible in the rhythms of Carter's life and the striking absence of Christian influence in some of his policy positions—is worthy of analysis and introspection on the part of his fellow believers. Carter is a paradigm in some ways of the liberal wing of late-twentieth-century Evangelicalism. In other ways, he is emblematic of the entirety of Evangelicalism, conservative and liberal alike.

Please Learn Something from Jimmy Carter

We need to learn a lot from the good things Jimmy Carter did. His faithfulness to his church, his faithfulness to his wife, his steadfast charitable voluntarism, his yearning for peace for people who are trapped in zones of combat—these things are waning in our culture, and they need to be reinforced. I hope that the occasion of his death will be a time when people champion these virtues.

We also need to learn from Carter's mistakes. In those places where President Carter got it wrong, he made substantial use of what I long ago named "The Hoover Hermeneutic." You can get away with almost anything while still claiming to believe that the Bible is absolutely true if you just keep alleging that the Bible is rarely absolutely clear. Carter did this a lot. 

Can people who reject the gospel be saved? Well, the Bible doesn't really tell us definitively, so that leaves room for me to be a universalist.

Are people in the womb really people? Must we defend their lives? Well, you know, ruah and all of that…it is hard to know for sure what the Bible teaches. Abortion is probably wrong, but let's not be dogmatic without good cause.

Homosexuality? I don't really think Jesus talked about it. Yes, there's that part in Matthew 19 about marriage being between a man and a woman (and the fact that God made them with a fixed gender), but let's not go leaping to conclusions based upon what Jesus said there. And then there are those passages in the Old Testament, but since that's the Old Testament, we don't really have to pay much attention to that. Romans? 1 Corinthians? Well, that's paired with things like selfishness and the like, so maybe those are all pretty minor sins that all of us indulge in just a bit. Since the biblical testimony is so unclear, why don't we just live and let live?

It has a veneer of kindness to it. Declaring biblical truth seems harsh to some people. Why not lessen the impact by dialing down the certainty?

But ultimately, it is either an accusation against God that God is not kind, or it is a harmful refusal to let people know what God has said. Either way, it is neither Christian nor helpful.

There's another problem evident in Jimmy Carter's deviations from the truth. Carter had, I believe, a defective view of religious liberty (and that comes from someone who is 100% committed to religious liberty). The view of religious liberty enshrined in Hubmaier and Helwys, in Williams and Backus and Leland, in Mullins and Truett, is a view that poses no hindrance whatsoever to imposing Christian morality by law where practicable. A law against blasphemy would run afoul of the biblical and constitutional ideals of religious liberty, but a law against adultery would not. The former has to do with the "first table of the Law," which is beyond government's rightful authority. The latter pertains to the "second table of the Law," which is precisely what human government exists to govern.

Jimmy Carter was a member of that generation of liberals who, while personally beholden to Christian ethics, thought it was somehow inappropriate to "legislate morality." Well, that's just nuts. Every law—every single one—is legislating someone's morality. What they really meant was that they were uncertain about the validity and applicability of their Christian ethos and were therefore reluctant to impose it by law.

For my part, I'll tell you that I think we do need to think seriously in some ways about which parts of Christian ethics warrant enforcement by law, but not because it is in any way inappropriate for the government to legislate and enforce morality.

The government is a human institution and consequently is fallible in all that it does; therefore, every good law is going to be poorly enforced at least some of the time. Innocent people will be arrested and convicted. Guilty people will take advantage of corruption and go free. Disobeying parents is immoral, and the government would not be transgressing the boundaries of its authority to take action against this wrong. But the damage the government would do in its attempts to investigate, prosecute, and punish such a crime would likely outweigh considerably any good that might be accomplished.

That kind of practical thinking, however, is a far different thing from the reluctance that Jimmy Carter demonstrated when it came time to decide whether the boundaries of Christian ethics that he himself observed should be applied to the lives of others. Rather than deliberating whether government enforcement was practical, Carter hesitated at wondering whether it was appropriate. Again, although I shared and appreciated Carter's commitment to the Baptist doctrine of religious liberty, in cases like these, I think he misunderstood and misapplied it.

This final critique may be the most important one. I think that part of what motivated Jimmy Carter to minimize the clarity of the Bible on key issues and part of what motivated Jimmy Carter to shrink back from trying to apply the moral teachings of his faith to others was simply this: his political supporters and his political party were moving away from the Christian faith in those areas, and Carter wanted to be able to retain their affiliation and support.

It is at precisely this point that we Baptists need to show the Anabaptist project a little more respect. It is at precisely this point that Jimmy Carter has as much in common with Wolfe as he has with Wallis. How much can Christians give themselves to politics without giving themselves away to politics? How hard is it for a Christian to embrace government as a calling without embracing it as their first and highest calling?

Carter landed in a place where Democratic priorities of using the government to oppose greed, violence, and racism just happened to be the places where he thought Christianity ought to have a great deal of influence over society. The priorities embraced by the Religious Right of using the government to oppose debauchery, abortion, Islamic extremism, and government excess just happened to be the places where he thought that Christianity ought to restrain itself. Jesus determined much of Jimmy Carter's faith; the Democratic Party governed a lot of his message.

If this kind of thing is a coincidence, it is a coincidence that sure seems to happen a lot.

Maybe what we ought to learn from Jimmy Carter is that he actually was a Christian, and a good one at that, but that the arena of national politics is a place where even good Christians are hard pressed to remain true to their faith. His areas of compromise are not really puzzling. The politics explains them.

This kind of analysis is perhaps the least likely to take place, because that kind of question exonerates none of us. But it is the most needed for precisely the same reason.

What Does "Category 4" Look Like?

The messengers to the SBC Annual Meeting have thrice affirmed that churches should have access to a warning system. This warning system would exist to help churches who know about allegations of abuse warn other churches who might not know about those allegations. Churches would benefit from that warning system because otherwise, ignorant of what they might learn from the warning system, they could be considering hiring as an employee or drafting as a volunteer someone who was alleged to have committed abuse in another context.

In the proposal for that warning system, the term "credibly accused" was defined by four categories. The first three categories involve people who have been convicted in a criminal court, people who have lost a civil suit, and people who confessed (except for people who confessed to an attorney, a spouse, or in any other context in which they have legal privilege). The fourth category involved people for whom a third-party investigation of alleged abuse found the allegations to be credible.

Much of the conversation about "category 4" has suggested that it consists of he-said-she-said situations where no one has any evidence to know what happened. It's easy to have Twitter wars about what this category means when there's no warning system and people are just imagining hypotheticals. These sometimes-bad-faith objections seem to assume incompetence or intransigence on the part of the people involved in managing a warning system like this. And yet, even if we assume hypothetically that there are people spiteful enough or agenda-driven enough to manage a warning system recklessly, where will they find customers? Who is going to consult a bad, error-ridden warning system? Anyone who wants such a warning system to succeed is going to be motivated to earn the trust of churches by approaching every category—1, 2, 3, or 4—carefully and responsibly.

The objections are built upon hypothetical assumptions that those in charge of the warning system will not act carefully and responsibly.

But we don't have to settle for hypotheticals. Let's look at a concrete example and see how well it compares to some of the scaremongering online. Consider a congregation that was deemed not to be in friendly cooperation with the SBC back in February of this year (2024). Here's part of an article from the Nashville, Tennessee newspaper, The Tennesseean:

Among the latest additions, West Hendersonville Baptist in North Carolina employed a pastor who is “biblically disqualified” according to SBC standards on abuse response.

That pastor, Jerry Mullinax, faced discipline in 2003 when he taught at a middle school and reportedly sent “improper emails” to a female student, according to news reports. The North Carolina Board of Education revoked Mullinax’s teaching license in 2004.

Source: https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/religion/2024/02/20/top-southern-baptist-convention-panel-ousts-four-churches-over-woman-pastor-abuse-response/72586735007/

Here are some things we learn in this story.

• If Mullinax has been convicted of a crime in this case, the story makes no mention of it.
• If Mullinax has lost a civil judgment in this case, the story makes no mention of it.
• If Mullinax has confessed to a crime in this case, the story makes no mention of it.
• Therefore, this scenario does not fit under categories 1, 2, or 3 in the definition of "credibly accused."
• And yet, the SBC Executive Committee declared this church not to be in friendly cooperation (following, from the appearance of the records, similar action by the local association and the state convention).
• The local school district (a third party) and possibly the state board of education (another third party) investigated the claim (see the next paragraph). Pursuant to that investigation, they revoked his teaching license.
• Therefore, this scenario fits under category 4 in the definition of "credibly accused." A third-party investigation found the allegations to be credible enough to revoke that license.

The Tennessean had earlier reported on Mullinax's case when it first became public knowledge back in 2003 (see the story here, https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/2003/05/14/teacher-offers-resignation-after-parents-complaints/28133007007/). At the time of that story, Mullinax had resigned but his teaching license had not been revoked. The school district was still investigating the matter. At some point subsequently, if the newspaper article is correct, the state of North Carolina revoked Mullinax's teaching license.

When you encounter a scary hypothetical online, you'll read that category 4 is some contested allegation with no evidence one way or the other culminating in a rush to judgment. In real life, it shows up as situations where the state board of education and the local school district conducted an investigation and revoked someone's teaching certificate for the emails he was sending to middle-school girls.

I don't know what happened in North Carolina. I wasn't there. I do know that the Southern Baptist Convention does not have the authority to tell any church whether they can hire a pastor whose teaching license has been revoked by the state over allegations about "'improper emails' to a female student." That's the decision of the local church. I don't know what West Hendersonville Baptist Church's reasoning was for hiring and retaining Mullinax as their pastor.

But here's something I do know. I know that the revocation of someone's teaching certificate under such circumstances will not appear on anyone's criminal background check. I further know that it would be easy on a pastoral resume to hide one's having lost a teaching license for such allegations. I therefore know that any church considering such a candidate, if they are putting their trust in a standard criminal background check, runs a high risk of not knowing about this sort of episode in a candidate's past.

I also know that I would not want to have to explain to the parents in my church why we didn't know that the Sunday School teacher we put in the fourth-grade class had previously had his teaching license revoked in another state on the basis of allegations of improper conduct toward middle-school girls.

The final thing I know is this: Whatever the church decides about putting someone like that into service, they deserve to make an informed decision—to have all of the pertinent information available to them when they make their decision. If (a) I were considering hiring someone in that circumstance, if (b) I didn't know about the revocation of their teaching license, if (c) you did know about it, and (d) you didn't tell me, I would not consider that to be the behavior of a friend. Indeed, if my church were plunged into scandal by way of that person's actions after being hired by us, your unwillingness to warn me would likely mark the end of our friendship. Friends—how much more so brothers and sisters!—warn one another about dangerous situations and dangerous people.

So, whenever you hear someone say that category 4 is unjust, unbiblical, and untenable legally, ask them if they are aware that the SBC already deems churches not to be in friendly cooperation on the basis of category-4 scenarios. Ask them if they want someone teaching their daughter's Sunday School class whose teaching certificate was revoked in response to allegations that he was sending inappropriate emails to female middle-school students. Ask them if they plan to make a motion in Dallas to reinstate West Hendersonville Baptist Church to correct what they must surely think is a grave injustice that has been wrought, if they think that category 4 is categorically unjust.

Any warning system, no matter what categories or rules it may follow, does not deny anyone employment. Local churches make decisions about whom to employ or whom to use as volunteers. Anyone has the opportunity to explain the falsity of any allegation to a church who is considering them. Any church that knows about allegations of sexual abuse has the right to ask to hear both sides of the story before making a decision. None of those things are at question here. 

Rather, the question is this: Do you prefer a world in which your church gets to know about situations like this one when you hire people or recruit them as volunteers, or do you prefer a world in which it is easy to hide such allegations from you when you are making hiring or recruiting decisions as a church? For me, that's an easy question to answer.

Epilogue

From those who are skeptical about this warning system, just once, here's what I would love to hear. 

"Hey, we also think that scenarios like this one (where someone's teaching license, state bar membership, medical license, etc., have been revoked) are situations that churches ought to be warned about when they have to hire new staff members or recruit new volunteers. We are open to hearing about other category-4 scenarios similar to this one that we can all agree give good reason to make churches aware of what has been alleged. But we are still worried about murky cases where no one knows what happened. Here are the constructive proposals we offer about how to have a functional warning system that helps churches to avoid putting minors into the care of the people you are worried about, Bart, while alleviating the concerns that we still have about the possibility of people's being damaged by false accusations."

I would LOVE to have that conversation. I would totally respect and give careful attention to the input from anyone who approached this question in that way.

A Parable for the Election

I present the following parable to promote understanding and grace. I composed it for that purpose and that purpose alone.

• I did not compose it to direct, shape, inform, or change anyone's planned vote in the upcoming election.
• I did not compose it to tell you how I will vote in the upcoming election, although I can tell you that I will not be voting for either of the pro-choice candidates.
• I did not compose it to stir up controversy, although I resign myself to the fact that controversy will inexorably come as day follows night.
• I did not even compose it to defend the rationales, ideas, and characterizations that will appear below as accurate or helpful (nor to malign them as inaccurate or unhelpful).

Rather, knowing that large numbers of self-styled Evangelicals will vote for Donald Trump in November, I anticipate the think-pieces that will be written in the aftermath (no matter the election's outcome) lambasting or lampooning those believers who will do so, accusing them of never having really cared about the lives of babies murdered by abortion, etc. Many of these jeremiads will display little willingness to try to understand why, even when he stabs Evangelicals in the back, Donald Trump remains the most appealing candidate for many of my friends who are Evangelicals.

And so, I offer you a parable of a married couple with three children.

They were married in 1942, just before he shipped off to war. Their first child—a son— was born while Dad was fighting at El Guettar in North Africa. America won, and Dad returned home. The firstborn son grew up, excelled in school, was the catcher for the high school baseball team, and fell in love with a high school sweetheart. His parents loved him and were proud of him. Following in his dad's footsteps, he enlisted in the Army straight out of high school. He went missing in action in Vietnam, and they never heard from him again.

Back in 1945, when Dad came home from Europe at the end of World War II, the family soon welcomed a second son. To be honest, he found it difficult to live in the shadows of his older brother. His grades weren't quite as good; his athleticism wasn't quite as exceptional. It all became worse when his older brother went missing, presumably dead, as a war hero. How could he possibly measure up to a shrine—a martyr. So, maturing in the early 1970s, he fell into alcohol, marijuana, womanizing, and a life of wanton abandon. He never finished college. He held some jobs, but never any plan so grandiose as to be called a career. He eventually came to a balance where he earned just enough and drank just little enough to survive.

But he loved his parents, this second son. The line between love and manipulation was difficult to discern sometimes, to be sure. But he showed up. He apologized after fights and failures. He needed them, and they loved to be needed. He was, in many ways, the repudiation of all of the values they had taught him, but he never explicitly repudiated those values all the way. He just never quite lived out those values. Nevertheless, they could not help but love him.

Just a year younger than him was the final child—a daughter. She was the apple of her Daddy's eye and the spitting image of her mother. Studious and hardworking, she excelled at school. She saw first-hand how her parents grieved over the misbehavior that their middle child so enthusiastically pursued, and she was, by firm resolve, nothing like him. She was chaste. She never drank to excess and never experimented with drugs. She was studious and hardworking, and her classes readily succumbed to her academic regimen.

This youngest daughter became the first in the family to earn a college degree, having earned a scholarship at the state university. She made the Dean's List. She dated a promising college peer who was as level-headed and responsible as she was. This was truly an exemplary child.

While in school in the late 1970s, this daughter took a required class in Sociology from a professor who was enamored with the Frankfort School's early Critical Theory. The moment was ripe to convince students to be suspicious of power structures—the Vietnam War had just ended and Watergate had been the biggest story in the newspaper during the formative years of these college students. And so, the couple's youngest child excelled at the University and became a thoroughgoing critic of American military power, white racism in the 1960s, and the general way (she came to believe) in which her parents' generation had ruined the world.

Here you have them: The three children of this couple. One is dead but forever alive in their memories, one is a perennially self-absorbed screw-up they could justifiably have disowned years ago, and the third is a successful, moral, hardworking success story who just happens to think that her parents and her deceased brother are basically Hitler.

From which child will they feel the greatest betrayal? The one who misbehaves, or the one who repudiates the things for which they have sacrificed the most? To which child will they give the most of their time, their hearts, their money, and their support?

The Republican Party has manipulated Evangelicals for years and has failed to deliver on their promises time after time. Many Republican leaders live a lifestyle that is antithetical to the lifestyle prescribed by Evangelical Christianity. And yet, even with all of that being true, they have never told Evangelicals that Evangelicals were the source of all of the problems in American life.

On the other hand, the Democratic Party has, in the minds of many Evangelicals, called Evangelicals deplorables, racists, ignoramuses, fascists, and hypocrites. Many Evangelicals get the feeling that Democrats view Evangelicals as The Enemy. They have repeatedly threatened, by way of things like the curiously (mis)named "Do No Harm Act," the very liberty of Evangelicals to preach and practice their faith whenever it comes into conflict with their radical sexual agenda.

Some Evangelicals will practice some "tough love" this November and will withhold their vote from a now-pro-choice National GOP. Very few Evangelicals will vote for Vice-President Harris (although they few may make a lot of noise), but some will vote third-party or not at all. Others, even if they feel like they ought to be tough-love conservatives, will not be able to find the strength within themselves to keep from pulling the lever for Republican candidates. After all, the Texas GOP's party platform is not pro-choice at all, so it is technically inaccurate to declare that the Republican Party en masse has abandoned the Pro-Life cause. So, some genuinely Pro-Life Evangelicals will stick with the Republican Party in the hope that the party will come around to Evangelical sensibilities eventually.

Even if you think the Evangelicals who still vote for President Trump are foolish, I hope you'll show them a little sympathy. These are matters of the heart, and life sometimes forces difficult choices upon us.

Three Things Messengers Know when Voting on Sex Abuse Reform

For the third straight year, the messenger body of the Southern Baptist Convention gave their overwhelming endorsement to the creation of a warning system¹ to warn churches about people who have been credibly accused of sexual abuse. In other words, they keep affirming the creation of the "Ministry Check" website. Why have they so consistently voted in this way?

Over the past two years, I have sometimes heard people speculate (that is, people who oppose this measure) that the messengers keep voting for Ministry Check because of what they do not know. They don't know the legal risks, we are told. They don't know what "biblical justice" is, others say. And yet, those criticisms (along with all of the others) have been aired for more than three years. It is no longer (if it ever was) a credible argument to suggest that messengers are voting the way that they are voting because of ignorance.

Rather, messengers are voting to affirm Ministry Check over and over with massive majorities because of at least three things that they DO know:

1. They know that their names will not be listed.
2. They know that there will be a growing number of people rightfully listed.
3. They know that they are going to need to hire employees and recruit volunteers for their churches sooner or later.

There it is. They keep voting for Ministry Check because they know those three things.

1. The messengers know that their names will not be listed. How can they know that? Because they know that they haven't been guilty of sexual misconduct. Whichever Southern Baptists are pursuing teenagers from the youth group sexually, are filling their hard drives with child porn, or have had their teaching certification pulled by the state for inappropriate behavior with teenagers, those are Southern Baptists who are not voting for the warning system. The Southern Baptists who are voting for the warning system know that no one has ever even accused them of any of these things.

This point exists in contradiction to anyone who would suggest that the SBC is chock full to the brim of sex offenders in our pulpits. If that were so, why would these people be voting for their own annihilation? Vote after vote, the Southern Baptist Convention has demonstrated that our rank-and-file Southern Baptists find church sexual abuse to be abhorrent and that they themselves are not sexual abusers.

2. The messengers know that there will indeed be a lot of names rightfully listed. In the 14 days surrounding the SBC Annual Meeting, serious allegations of sexual misconduct and abuse emerged regarding two mega-church pastors and a Southern Baptist pastor in Florida. Again, that's just over the span of a few days.

It's not crying wolf to acknowledge the growing problem of abusive sexual behavior among church leaders. It's also not "wokeism." It is utterly conservative to expect pastors, deacons, and church volunteers to follow the Christian sexual ethic. It is utterly conservative to refuse to give leadership positions to abusers. The Ministry Check website is conservative, Bible-believing Christianity. We live in a decadent culture. It gets worse every year. Sexual abuse is not unique to churches (it's in schools, Hollywood, athletics, etc.), but it is waging war against the churches and infiltrating them, constantly seeking to breach what Roger Williams called "the hedge of separation" between the wilderness of the world and the garden of the church. The worse the culture gets, the more of this we are going to see.

We rightly ought to be guarding the wall. We rightly ought to be alarmed. We rightly ought to take a defensive posture on behalf of the flocks alloted to our charge.

The warning system only makes us better at doing that.

3. The messengers know that they are eventually going to need to hire an employee or recruit a volunteer. They don't want to hire or recruit someone else's sexual abuse problem. They don't want to hire the predator who got chased away from another church and then came to their town fleeing the consequences of abuse and looking for somewhere to start fresh.

Can you blame these pastors for not wanting to be kept in the dark about these people when they have to hire someone? Their own children attend their churches. Their friends' children attend their churches. Children they visited in the hospital when they were born. Children they baptized when they came to faith in Jesus. They want to hire good people to serve their flock. They don't want to hire some wolf in sheep's clothing.

The warning system will benefit every kind of church that ever hires anyone or recruits anyone to volunteer. It will benefit megachurches and small churches. It will benefit urban churches and rural churches. It will benefit IX Marks churches, CBN churches, NAAF churches, Pillar churches—it will benefit every kind of church that doesn't want to hire that guy who created a sexual abuse scandal at another church three states away but didn't wind up on a sex offender registry.

Earlier this year, candidates for the SBC presidency debated whether we have a sexual abuse "crisis." For those who eschewed the description, they commonly offered the caveat that any church sexual abuse is a crisis for that one church. Yes, it is a crisis if a sexual predator plunders the flock of one church. Sometimes, because people are sneaky and devilish and highly motivated by their depravity, it is a crisis that could not easily have been prevented in that first church. But it is an even greater crisis when a single sexual predator creates crises at two churches, three churches, or a dozen churches. For any church after that first one, somebody could have done something to prevent it.

The messenger body knows that. They want to do everything they can do to avoid being that first church in crisis, but at the very least they also want to receive adequate warning to avoid being that second, third, or fourth church to fall into the clutches of a serial church abuser.

The messengers know that people will keep secrets and will work against them. They want every advantage they can get in the battle against these predators. It's good for their churches. And so, that's how they vote—they vote for the thing that will protect their churches and will protect the people in their churches.

Conclusion

There's just no mystery in this. The SBC Executive Committee now holds in its hands the third consecutive affirmation of this plan, referred to them by the messengers. There will be discussion about this. The perennial opponents of any kind of warning system will most definitely make their case. The members of the EC and everyone else will hear from those opponents all the reasons not to provide this warning system to churches.

I'm not looking to get in the way of anyone who wants to make their case against a warning system. We have a deliberative system. Let each one make his case as best he can (and let them make it publicly and on the record). And Southern Baptists should listen carefully (and critically) to what those people say.

But I do want to get in the way of this: When people dismiss the repeated votes of the messenger body by calling into question their knowledge or wisdom, I hope we'll all throw a little side-eye their way and point back to these three undeniable truths that have motivated the messenger body. The messengers' voice and the messengers' case should be articulated with appropriate clarity, enthusiasm, attesting data, and force. The reasons that motivate the messengers from the churches may not make a lot of sense to people whose daily work is outside the local-church context, but to a pastor, these three things are important realities. Although there is a further case to be made with additional reasons to implement a warning system, these three reasons are sound and compelling all by themselves. Let us show the respect due the messenger body—overwhelmingly populated by leaders in their own churches—and take their reasons and their needs seriously, too.

After all, don't the entities of the SBC exist "to assist the churches"?

¹This is often called "the database." I call it a "warning system" because I am open to any methodology that adequately warns churches about dangerous people.

Against Political Violence

A message I just sent to the people of FBC Farmersville:

In the past few minutes, we have learned that someone has apparently shot Former President Trump. He was bleeding from the ear, but appeared not to be seriously injured at all. He, his campaign, and the United States Secret Service all say that he is fine. The shooter is dead, as are at least two attendees at the rally.

Let us pray for our nation.

Let us make it clear that this kind of behavior is unacceptable. Unlike people in many other places around the world, we get to speak by way of our votes. We live in a nation where our votes are not coerced, we are not threatened or intimidated in our voting, our votes are fairly counted every time, and our country transfers power every time in accord with the expressed wishes of the people.

Unlike in Iran, Russia, South Sudan, or many other places we could mention, there is never any need for us to resort to violence in order to be heard or to create political change. This is a double blessing for Christians, since our system of government allows us to be active in shaping the character of our country without violating what God's word clearly commands us in Romans 13:1-7 and I Peter 2:13-17. The person who resorts to violence is therefore not only at war with a political opponent but is also at war with the majority of our countrymen and at war with the word of God.

In his second inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln was trying to bring the country together after the Civil War. Imagine how divided the nation was at that time. Imagine how powerful your own feelings would have been at that time. Perhaps you had sent your own son to fight in the war or your own husband. Perhaps he had been killed or injured. Perhaps your house had been burned or you had lost all you owned. How would you feel about your enemy at war?

Abraham Lincoln said this at the time: "With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in." Charity, not malice.

And so, as believers, let us all pray for President Trump, no matter how you plan to vote in November. Let us all speak with one voice saying that this kind of behavior is WRONG. Let us not contribute to making things worse, but let us be the ones summoning what Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature" in all of those around us. Let us do all of those things around our family tables, in our Sunday School classrooms, and in our presence online.

And as we watch the deterioration of our country, let us remember that our home still stands waiting for us in Heaven, secure in peace and truth.

Statement regarding Iranian Attacks on Israel

Sunday, April 14, 2024

RE: Iranian Attacks on Israel

I had been taking some time to unplug. I don’t just mean stepping back from social media—I mean taking a big step away from all kinds of media, putting away the phone, and clearing out space to listen in stillness. When asked Saturday night if I wanted to make any sort of a statement about the events in the Middle East, I had to ask, “What events in the Middle East?”

I want not to think about war. I want not to know about a 66-year-old retired schoolteacher who was murdered in Kfar Aza on October 7. But unplugging the phone and ignoring the world doesn’t make the violence of our world any less real. War may be real and unavoidable, but Jesus gives a greater peace.

At our most recent meeting, the Southern Baptist Convention stopped to pray for the peace of Jerusalem. October 7 had not yet happened. Iran was at the time pursuing their aggression against Israel in more subtle ways than they did on this weekend’s sabbath. Southern Baptists stopped to pray for Israel just because Israel is in constant need of prayers for peace.

So, to those who suffer from Iranian violence and oppression through their proxy warriors in Hamas and Hezbollah, please understand this. Southern Baptists are praying for you. Southern Baptists are on your side. Southern Baptists support the defeat of these terrorists and the establishment of a just and lasting peace in Israel. If you are worried that we who live far away from the conflict have stopped paying attention and have forgotten about you, I can assure you that we have not.

The sacred writings we share in common with the Jewish people give us the words of a Jewish leader who lived through war and came out singing on the other side. I close with some of the words he wrote in Psalm 27.

The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?
The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?

When evildoers assail me to eat up my flesh,
My adversaries and foes, it is they who stumble and fall.

Though an army encamp against me, my heart shall not fear;
Though war rise against me, yet I will be confident.

One thing I have asked of the Lord, that I will seek after:
That I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life,
To gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple.

For he will hide me in his shelter on the day of trouble;
He will conceal me under the cover of his tent; he will lift me high upon a rock.

And now my head shall be lifted up above my enemies all around me,
And I will offer in his tabernacle sacrifices with shouts of joy;
I will sing and make melody to the Lord.