I moved to the town of Blue Ridge, TX just before I turned 12 years old back in the late winter of 1984. It didn’t take long for the secretary of the First Baptist Church (FBC) of Blue Ridge to knock on our door to invite us to come to the church. A few months later, I found myself at that church one Sunday morning in early summer with a new friend and his family after I had spent the night at their house. Pastor Barry Beames preached his sermon and then as it happened every Sunday, he gave the “invitation” for people to step forward and accept Jesus into their hearts. With a nervous feeling in my gut, I went to the front of the church where the pastor met and prayed with me. At some time later that summer, I was baptized in that church. FBC of Blue Ridge remained my church throughout junior high and high school — though I did also attend the local Church of Christ, but that is a story for another time.

When I was 19 and in the Marines, I attended Kailua Baptist Church. Like the FBC of Blue Ridge, it too was Southern Baptist Church (SBC) near Marine Corps Air Station Kaneohe. My first Sunday in attendance happened to be the first Sunday that the new youth minister started working there. She had just graduated from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, TX with a Master’s in religious education. She had completed her undergraduate studies at Oklahoma Baptist University in Shawnee, OK prior to heading south to Fort Worth. Both schools are part of the SBC. We met and six months later we were married in Kailua Baptist Church in a ceremony that lasted far too long — as did the marriage.

By 1992, my then wife had accepted a job as Minister of Education at Nu’uanu Baptist Church in Honolulu. The job was more in line with what she had studied at Southwestern so the job change made sense. While we were members there, the church held a series of sermons and anti-LGBT propaganda about the “gay agenda.” They brought in speakers to talk about the rampant promiscuity of gay men. They falsely equated being homosexual with being a groomer and pedophile. They falsely claimed that the “gay agenda” was destroying America as they derided LGBTQ+ culture. They falsely claimed that being gay or lesbian was a choice and a sin against God and nature. As a faithful Baptist, who at the time had not had any higher education, or well developed critical thinking skills, I sadly bought the malodorous excrement they were peddling and became a vocal anti-LGBT bigot. Mercifully, I have long since repented of this shameful sin and have been exponentially louder as an ally than I ever was as an ignorant bigot. That’s what I call grace…

Unfortunately, the SBC has remained firmly in the camp of hatred, bigotry, and lies about the LGBTQIA community. They remain on the wrong side of history. That history was entirely unknown to me during my two decades immersed in Southern Baptist theology. By the time I did learn some of it, I was no longer surprised. In the 19th century, as abolitionists clashed with the enslaving class of white supremacists, Baptists in the South intentionally chose white supremacy when they split with Baptists in the north over the issue of slavery and missionaries who enslaved others. One of the early proponents of what would later become the SBC was a South Carolina pastor named Richard Furman. He was “one of the most influential Baptists in antebellum America.” (1) In 1822, Furman wrote “A Defense of Slavery”using the Bible as his guide. He falsely equated slavery in the ancient world with the white supremacist chattel slavery practiced in the Americas and Caribbean. Through a modern lens, both are of course reprehensible, but there were distinct differences in slavery in the Ancient Near East and white supremacist chattel slavery of the Southern aristocrats.

It was axiomatic in the ancient world that slavery was normal. That’s why it is so often mentioned in various books of the Bible. However, it was not strictly based upon race as it was in the American South. Sometimes ancient people voluntarily sold themselves into slavery in order to receive an education or to have a better quality of life, such was the precarious nature of life in the ancient world. For Furman however, these distinctions and contexts did not matter, nor did Christ’s teachings on the golden rule. He claimed that white supremacist chattel slavery was moral because it was in the Bible, which is of course patently absurd. There are a lot of things in the Bible that are completely immoral and many of them are not prescriptive, but descriptive. Furman wrote, “The Christian golden rule, of doing unto others, as we would they should do to us, has been urged as an unanswerable argument against holding slaves. But surely this rule is never to be urged against the order of things, which the Divine government has established; nor do our desires become a standard to us, under this rule, unless they have a due regard to justice, propriety, and the general good.” He went on to absurdly claim that “slavery, when tempered with humanity and justice, is a state of tolerable happiness; equal, if not superior, to that which many poor enjoy in countries reputed free.” (2)

What a load of horseshit. African descended peoples didn’t sell themselves into slavery to have a better life the way people in the ancient world did. Rather, many they did everything they could to escape their enslavers at the risk of horrific beatings, dismemberment, and death. Furman and those of his ilk were deluded by notions of racial superiority which fueled their paternalistic racism, their barbarism towards the enslaved, and gave lie to the notion of a “free country.” The Southern white supremacists who pushed for the split which eventually formed the Southern Baptist Convention have practiced slaveholder theology since before their inception. This week’s SBC annual meeting in Dallas, TX, just down the road from where I grew up, simply confirms that because slaveholder religion is about dominance.

Enslavers wanted to dominate and control those whom they enslaved. They also wanted to dominate politics in order to perpetuate their “peculiar institution.” The horrors of slavery in the U.S. are well known — rape by white enslavers and viscous overseers, constant inhumane treatment, family separations, brutality, and loss of cultural identities were rampant. The modern SBC continues to want to dominate others and enforce their hierarchical views on everyone else. There are a lot of racists to this day in SBC churches. There are many gender essentialists and anti-LGBTQIA bigots in the SBC. There are a lot of Christian nationalists in Southern Baptist churches. Christian nationalism and artificial hierarchies are about dominance. Dominance looks nothing like Jesus. It looks nothing like what he taught. Christian nationalism is also completely unconstitutional. Yet, even on the SBC website, they claim to cherish and defend religious liberty. At their convention they overwhelmingly stated that they will try to overturn the legality of gay marriage in the U.S., just as they were instrumental in getting Roe overturned. The latter has had disastrous consequences.

An organization and its people cannot simultaneously defend religious liberty while trying to force others to live according to their religion. That is the bait and switch the SBC is engaging in. There are LGBTQIA Christians. Many of them are married. Their Christian faith allows for them to be so. Taking away the rights of LGBTQIA people, whether they are professed Christians or not, does absolutely nothing to advance the kindom of God, but it absolutely does harm those whom Jesus would today call “the least of these.” There are many Christians and people of other faiths, or no faith, who do not subscribe to gender complementarianism. The SBC doesn’t care. They want men to be in charge and for women to be married and pregnant, whether those women want to be or not. They remain on the wrong side of history and made that crystal clear in Dallas. Because of their persistently regressive social views, their terrible theology and doctrine, and their propensity to support legislation that harms vulnerable people, I can no longer see the SBC as anything but a hate group led by goats.

(1-2) Exploring Christian Heritage, pp. 154-157.

For more on the SBC: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/048-trump-and-co-vs-los-angeles-newsome-and-california/id1754574318?i=1000712749348