LGBTQ

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Painful issue of SBC culture – is the word 'Southern' more important than 'Baptist'?

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Painful issue of SBC culture -- is the word 'Southern' more important than 'Baptist'?

When megachurch pastor J.D. Greear became the 62nd president of the Southern Baptist Convention he saw all kinds of statistics headed in all kinds of directions.

After decades of growth, America's largest Protestant flock faced steady decline as many members joined thriving nondenominational evangelical and charismatic churches. Ominously, baptism statistics were falling even faster. On the other side of the 2018 ledger, worship attendance and giving to SBC's national Cooperative Program budget were holding strong.

But one set of numbers caught Greear's attention, he told the SBC's executive committee, as he nears the end of his three years in office.

"Listen, I made diversity … one of my goals coming into this office, not because it's cool, or trendy, or woke," he said. "It's because in the last 30 years the largest growth we've seen in the Southern Baptist Convention has been among Black, Latino and Asian congregations. They are a huge part of our future. … Praise God, brothers and sisters."

Greear's blunt, emotional address came during a Feb. 22 meeting in Nashville in which SBC leaders ousted two churches for "affirming homosexual behavior" by accepting married gay couples as members and two more for employing ministers guilty of sexual abuse.

Those issues loomed in the background during Greear's remarks, which ranged from a fierce defense of the SBC's move to the right during 1980s clashes over "biblical inerrancy" to his concerns about "demonic" attacks from social-media critics who are "trying to rip us apart."

"I've read reports online that I was privately funded by George Soros with the agenda of steering the SBC toward political liberalism," he said. "My office has gotten calls from people who say they've heard that I am friends – good friends – with Nancy Pelosi and that we text each other regularly, that I am a Marxist, a card-carrying member of the Black Lives Matter movement and that I fly around on a private jet paid for by Cooperative Program dollars."

Greear urged a renewed focus on evangelism and church planting, with a steady drumbeat of references to the Great Commission – the command by Jesus that Christians should spread the faith worldwide. The SBC's 2012 national meeting approved use of "Great Commission Baptists" as an unofficial name, a move hailed by those seeking distance from the term "Southern" and the convention's roots in an 1845 split over slavery.

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National Cathedral invites evangelical to preach, triggering fierce storm of protest

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National Cathedral invites evangelical to preach, triggering fierce storm of protest

Halfway between Norway and the North Pole, scientists have buried a million seeds and crop samples under a mountain in the Svalbard archipelago – in case an environmental doomsday comes to pass.

That strategy rings true during "this crazy, chaotic season" when so many are anxious about the coronavirus pandemic, global warming, lost jobs, surging debts and the bitter state of public life, said evangelical megachurch leader Max Lucado, in a recent sermon streamed online by the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.

“Most of us can't hide out in a bunker, yet threats of calamity may make us try to do so," he said. "If the wrong person pushes the wrong red button – it's enough to make a person purchase a plane ticket to Svalbard."

But there was a problem. While pre-service publicity stressed that Lucado's books have sold more than 120 million copies and Christianity Today has called him "America's pastor," this invitation alarmed legions of Episcopalians opposed to his history of orthodoxy on sex and marriage. His sermon about God offering comfort in the midst of chaos avoided hot-button topics, but his cathedral appearance triggered an online storm.

Before the event, the Very Rev. Randolph Marshall Hollerith linked the Lucado invitation to the cathedral's history of hosting a variety of religious leaders. This has included evangelicals such the late Billy Graham, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby and megachurch leader Rick Warren of Saddleback Church in Southern California.

"When we only engage with those with whom we agree on every issue, we find ourselves in a dangerous (and lonely) place," wrote the cathedral's dean. "That means this cathedral, and this pulpit, are big enough and strong enough to welcome pastors, rabbis, imams, clergy of every faith. … It does not mean we agree with everything they might believe, but it does mean that we exhibit and inhabit a sense of open handed welcome."

However, Hollerith issued a formal apology in response to the online backlash, noting: "In my straight privilege I failed to see and fully understand the pain he has caused. I failed to appreciate the depth of injury his words have had on many in the LGBTQ community. I failed to see the pain I was continuing. I was wrong."

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Years of 'McCarrick doctrine' fights among U.S. bishops go public – on Inauguration Day

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Years of 'McCarrick doctrine' fights among U.S. bishops go public -- on Inauguration Day

Speaking to an Italian family association in 2018, Pope Francis compared the abortion of children with genetic problems to "what the Nazis did to purify the race. Today, we do the same thing but with white gloves."

A year later, Francis bluntly asked a journalist from Mexico if it's "fair to eliminate a human life in order to solve a problem? The answer to which is, 'No.' Second question: Is it fair to pay a sniper to solve a problem? No. Abortion is not a religious problem. … It is a problem of eliminating a human life. Period."

But the pope was careful in his Inauguration Day message to America's second Catholic president, assuring Joe Biden that he would "pray that your decisions will be guided by a concern for building a society marked by authentic justice and freedom, together with unfailing respect for the rights and dignity of every person, especially the poor, the vulnerable and those who have no voice."

The pope's text was examined closely after reports that the Vatican – on behalf of progressive American bishops – tried to stop the circulation of a sobering statement from the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The letter from Archbishop Jose Gomez of Los Angeles addressed the challenge, and blessing, of working with "our first president in 60 years to profess the Catholic faith."

Clearly, Biden's piety had offered "solace in times of darkness and tragedy," said Gomez, leader of America's largest diocese and a crucial voice among Hispanic Catholics. He also praised Biden's "longstanding commitment to the Gospel's priority for the poor."

Nevertheless, Gomez noted that "our new President has pledged to pursue certain policies that would advance moral evils and threaten human life and dignity, most seriously in the areas of abortion, contraception, marriage, and gender. Of deep concern is the … the freedom of believers to live according to their consciences."

Cardinal Blasé Cupich of Chicago fired back on Twitter, attacking this "ill-considered statement on the day of President Biden's inauguration" while claiming "there is seemingly no precedent" for this action by Gomez.

The Pillar, a Catholic news website, reported that the Vatican Secretariat of State intervened to "spike" the statement from the U.S. bishops after objections from Cupich, Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark and some other bishops.

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Groundhog Day for Episcopalians: Brutal report says pews may be empty by 2050

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Groundhog Day for Episcopalians: Brutal report says pews may be empty by 2050

With America facing a bitterly divisive election, Episcopal Church leaders did what they do in tense times — they held a National Cathedral service rallying the Washington, D.C., establishment.

This online "Holding onto Hope" service featured a Sikh filmmaker, a female rabbi from Chicago, the Islamic Society of North America's former interfaith relations director, the female presiding bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, a Jesuit priest known for promoting LGBTQ tolerance and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

"Our ideals, values, principles and dreams of beloved community matter," said Episcopal Presiding Bishop Michael Curry, the church's first African-American leader. "They matter to our life as a nation and as a world. Our values matter!"

This was the kind of rite – think National Public Radio at prayer – a church can offer when its history includes 11 U.S. presidents and countless legislators and judges from coast to coast. Episcopal leaders also know President-elect Joe Biden is a liberal Catholic whose convictions mesh with their own.

That's the good news. Episcopalians have also been hearing plenty of bad news about their future.

For example, Curry became a media superstar after his soaring sermon at Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's wedding. But wedding trends in his own flock have been pretty bleak. Ditto for baptisms.

A stunning 2019 report from Episcopal parishes showed 6,484 weddings (down 11.2%). Baptism rites for children fell to 19,716 (down 6.5%) and adult baptisms dropped to 3,866 (down 6.7%). Baptisms are down 50% since 2003.

Office of the General Convention statistics reported 1,637,945 members (down 2.29%) and average attendance fell to 518,411 (down 2.25%). Median attendance dropped from 53 worshippers to 51, while 61% of parishes saw attendance declines of 10% or more.

All of these statistics predate the coronavirus pandemic.

Episcopal News Service offered these blunt words from the Rev. Dwight Zscheile, an expert on church renewal and decline: "The overall picture is dire – not one of decline as much as demise within the next generation. … At this rate, there will be no one in worship by around 2050 in the entire denomination."

Episcopal Church membership peaked at 3.4 million in the 1960s, a pattern seen in other mainline Protestant bodies. This decline has accelerated, with membership falling 17.4% in the past 10 years.

As a rule, the crisis is worse in the Northeast and the Midwest, while losses have been slower in the Sunbelt and some parts of the West. In terms of worse-case scenarios, the Diocese of Northern Michigan remains open for business, but reported an average attendance of 385 in 2019. That's the whole diocese.

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Joe Biden and the U.S. Catholic bishops: Tensions remain about Holy Communion

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Joe Biden and the U.S. Catholic bishops: Tensions remain about Holy Communion

While doing groundwork for the pivotal South Carolina primary, Democrat Joe Biden went to a local church to do what he does on Sundays – go to Mass.

What happened next made headlines, raising an issue that looms over the president-elect's personal and political lives. The priest at St. Anthony's Catholic Church in Florence declined to give Biden communion.

"Holy Communion signifies we are one with God, each other and the Church. Our actions should reflect that," said Father Rev. Robert E. Morey, in a press statement. "Any public figure who advocates for abortion places himself or herself outside of Church teaching. As a priest, it is my responsibility to minister to those souls entrusted to my care."

The priest, a former attorney with the Environmental Protection Agency, ended by saying: "I will keep Mr. Biden in my prayers."

Biden told MSNBC: "That's just my personal life and I am not going to get into that at all."

Nevertheless, Biden continued to make his faith – he is a "devout" Catholic in news reports – a key element of the campaign, as he has throughout his career. He also pledged to defend Roe v. Wade, to the point of codifying the decision into national law.

Catholic conservatives and liberals remain divided on how the church should respond, a tension demonstrated in a carefully worded statement by Los Angeles Archbishop José H. Gomez, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

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Justice Alito: If you're worried about religious liberty, follow news in higher education

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Justice Alito: If you're worried about religious liberty, follow news in higher education

Almost a half century ago, comedian George Carlin recorded his controversial "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television" monologue.

That was then.

"Today, it would be easy to create a new list entitled, 'Things you can't say if you are a student or a professor at a college of university or an employee of many big corporations.' And there wouldn't be just seven items on that list – 70 times seven would be closer to the mark," said U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, via Zoom, addressing the recent Federalist Society National Lawyers Convention.

Discussing religious beliefs, he argued, has become especially dangerous.

"You can't say that marriage is the union between one man and one woman," he noted. "Until very recently, that's what the vast majority of Americans thought. Now it's considered bigotry."

Consider, for example, the case of Jack Denton, a Florida State University political science major whose long-range plans include law school.

In June, he participated in a Catholic Student Union online chat in which, after the death of George Floyd, someone promoted a fundraising project supporting BlackLivesMatter.com, the American Civil Liberties Union and similar groups. Denton criticized ACLU support for wider access to abortion and the BLM group's "What We Believe" website page that, at that time, pledged support for LGBTQ rights and efforts to disrupt "nuclear family" traditions.

"As a Catholic speaking to other Catholics," he said, "I felt compelled to point out the discrepancy between what these groups stand for and what the Catholic Church teaches. So, I did."

Denton didn't expect this private discussion to affect his work as president of the FSU Student Senate. However, an outraged student took screenshots of his texts and sent them to the Student Senate. That led to petitions claiming that he was unfit to serve, a painful six-hour special meeting and his forced exit.

Backed by the Alliance Defending Freedom, Denton sued the university for violating his First Amendment rights, as well as campus policies against discrimination against religious believers. A student court returned him, briefly, to office in late October, after a federal judge ruled that FSU should pay him lost wages. Denton graduates in December.

"This whole experience has certainly perked my interest in studying constitutional law and First Amendment rights, in particular," said Denton, reached by telephone.

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While many Catholics feel politically 'homeless,' Biden Catholics managed a 2020 win

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While many Catholics feel politically 'homeless,' Biden Catholics managed a 2020 win

Conservative patriarch Edmund Burke died in 1797 in Beaconsfield, England.

This didn't prevent columnist Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal, a Catholic conservative, from making Burke her write-in choice in the 2020 White House race. She wasn't the only voter who felt politically homeless, due to religious and moral convictions that clashed with the political and personal choices of President Donald Trump and, the odds are overwhelming, president-elect Joe Biden.

Once again, there was no way to ignore issues linked to faith, morality and, yes, character. This was especially true with Catholic voters who frequent church pews.

Considering Trump, Noonan stressed the coronavirus crisis, where the president finally "met a problem he couldn't talk his way out of. I believe that's what happened: He played down the pandemic, lied, made uninformed claims at briefings that serious people were struggling to keep useful. He produced chaos. The country can't afford any of that in a crisis that is sudden and severe."

What about the Democrat, a lifelong Catholic? Noonan predicted Biden would be a "hapless and reluctant conductor" on a "runaway train," especially on moral and cultural issues.

"The progressive left," she argued, "endorses and pushes for the identity politics that is killing us, an abortion regime way beyond anything that could be called reasonable or civilized and on which it will make no compromise; it opposes charter schools and other forms of public school liberation; it sees the police as the enemy, it demonstrates no distinct fidelity to freedom of speech and, most recently, its declared hopes range from court packing to doing away with the Electoral College and adding states to the union.”

The bottom line: The political realities of 2020 left many Catholics and other active religious believers torn between political options that no longer seemed acceptable.

It was easy to read between the lines in key passages of a new cover letter the U.S. Catholic bishops added to their "Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship" document (.pdf here).

"The threat of abortion remains our preeminent priority because it directly attacks life itself, because it takes place within the sanctuary of the family, and because of the number of lives destroyed," the letter stated. "At the same time, we cannot dismiss or ignore other serious threats to human life and dignity such as racism, the environmental crisis, poverty and the death penalty. …

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Memory eternal: The passing of a charismatic bishop with a big voice and an extended family

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Memory eternal: The passing of a charismatic bishop with a big voice and an extended family

Episcopal bishops in the 1980s were already used to urgent calls from journalists seeking comments on issues ranging from gay priests to gun control, from female bishops to immigration laws, from gender-free liturgies to abortion rights.

But the pace quickened for Bishop William C. Frey in 1985 when he was one of four candidates to become presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church. A former radio professional, Frey was known for his bass voice and quick one-liners. His Lutheran counterpart in Colorado once told him: "You look like a movie star, sound like God and wear cowboy boots."

Other Denver religious leaders sometimes asked, with some envy, why Episcopalians got so much ink.

"I can't understand why some people want the kind of media attention we get," he told me, during one media storm. "That's like coveting another man's root canal."

A Texas native, Frey died in San Antonio last Sunday (Oct. 11), after years out of the spotlight. In addition to his Colorado tenure, his ministry included missionary work in Central America during the "death squads" era and leading an alternative Episcopal seminary in a struggling Pennsylvania steel town.

While critics called him the "token evangelical" in the presiding bishop race, Frey was a complex figure during his Colorado tenure, where I covered him for the now-closed Rocky Mountain News. He called himself a "radical moderate," while also attacking "theology by opinion poll."

“We need a church that knows its own identity and proclaims it fearlessly," he said, in his 1990 farewell sermon. "No more stealth religion! … We need a church that knows how to answer the question, 'What think ye of Christ?', without forming a committee to weigh all possible options. We need a church that doesn't cross its fingers when it says the creed."

Nevertheless, a conservative priest called him a "Marxist-inspired heretic" for backing the 1979 Book of Common Prayer and the ordination of women. The bishop opposed capital punishment – and abortion – and welcomed stricter gun-control laws. He backed expanded work with the homeless and immigrants. Then gay-rights activists called him a "charismatic fundamentalist" because he opposed the ordination of sexually active gays and lesbians and preached that sex outside of marriage was sin.

Also, before the presiding bishop election, Frey fielded questions – and heard old whispers – about the informal charismatic Christian community he led with his wife, Barbara (who died in 2014).

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Al Smith dinner 2020: Trump and Biden make pitches to very different Catholic voters

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Al Smith dinner 2020: Trump and Biden make pitches to very different Catholic voters

During a normal White House race, the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner allows the candidates to don formal attire, fire snappy one-liners and make subtle appeals to Catholic voters.

But nothing is normal in 2020. Thus, Joe Biden and President Donald Trump used this year's virtual dinner to preach to Catholic voters in swing states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Florida. The event produced few headlines, coming a mere six hours before Trump announced his positive test for COVID-19.

Saluting Catholic progressive, Biden offered a litany about the pandemic, race, the recession and climate change. He warned that many Americans have lost faith "in one another, in truth, in science and reason."

The current pope, Biden stressed, embraced him during a 2013 White House visit, offering comfort shortly after brain cancer took his son Beau's life.

"Pope Francis took the time to meet with my entire family to help us see the light through the darkness," said Biden. "I live in an amazing country … where an Irish Catholic kid like me from Scranton, Pennsylvania, would one day befriend a Jesuit pope. But that's who we are as a country – where anything is possible when we care for one another, when we look out for one another, when we keep the faith."

While stressing that he is guided "by the tenets of Catholic social doctrine" – helping the "least of these" – Biden didn't mention his vow to codify Roe v. Wade if the Supreme Court overturns that decision or his promise to reinstate policies requiring the Little Sisters of the Poor to cooperate in providing birth control and abortifacients to staff. He didn't mention his decision to officiate at the same-sex wedding of two White House colleagues, an action clashing with church doctrine.

It was logical for Biden to avoid providing fresh ammunition for critics. But the speech, once again, trumpeted his Catholic credentials.

"Joe Biden's choice to run explicitly on the claim that he is a faithful Catholic squarely places on the table his claim to be a faithful Catholic," stressed legal scholar Robert P. George of Princeton University, writing on Facebook. He is a Catholic conservative who has also been a consistent critic of Trump.

“No way out of this, folks," he added. "It's not, or not just, Biden's critics who have raised the issue. It's the Biden campaign. …