There is a good question that presents itself when I am doing a lot of “combative” blogging about the things I perceive as going dreadfully wrong with the Southern Baptist Convention over the past 25 years. That is: Is it proper or even healthy for me to “expend so much energy” in confronting what I consider to be “injustice”, “blasphemy” and “heresy”, as well as making me feel downright ashamed of the name “Southern Baptist”, and causes me to immediately qualify my having gotten an MDiv from “Southern Baptist Theological Seminary” by quickly adding (“but that Seminary was very different in 1981 than it is today”).

Earlier today I mentioned a misgiving I had about the dominance of the conflict theme in the story of Koinonia told by the video “Briars in the Cotton Patch”, that it did not give enough coverage to the REASONS behind WHY they chose to endure the opposition. It was the things that happened among them, and what they were CALLED TO DO, and DID, like provide better housing and farming (Clarence Jordan had majored in Agriculture at the University of Georgia before his Seminary days, with the intention of using that to help poor farmers become more productive). It was also the fact that they had a community in which mission was possible becuase they met together to discern and held all things in common. Funny how Church people lept to associate that kind of living with “Communism” rather than the New Testament.

So , is all this argument “worth it”? I have to believe thatit is, as long as it doesn’t drown out the opposite side of the coin, which is the VALUES I see myself protecting by mounting a defense against what I perceive as “squelching of the Spirit by blurring the lines we should be seeing between Cultural Values and Biblical Values”. I don’t profess to have all those lines drawn perfectly, but I know they must be drawn, and that part of our didactic responsibility as a Christian Community is to perceptively discern those lines.

The present SBC jumps completely into bed with the Republican party and with the Bush administration. They attack other Christian groups as “too Anti-American” when they dare to question on moral grounds the various actions of the Bush administration in their handling of and pre-emptive occupation of Iraq. There is almost a complete absence of recognition that Republican platform policies are “adopted” by the Church as the most pressing moral issues of the day.

My “remedy” though, is NOT to turn around and do the same thing with the democrats. My tendency toward democratic candidates is based soley on the language, and hopefully some fulfillement of those promises, around social justice, slowing down the tendency to rush to war as the first solution, and some responsible effort to do something about our abuse of the environment. I became a democrat when I went to seminary. I became further convinced of that when I observed how people who did work with social agencies and the poor found their work becoming increasingly difficult and depressing under Republican inititives that often seemed to place economic values — usually the preferences of the Powerful corporations — above the CALL to work for a narrowing of the gap between rich and poor.

I saw that “leaving such forces” to the whims of “the market” as Republican policies tend to want (or inevitably accpomplish) is not often a result that values the things that lead to more equity and justice. As I worked in a Church in Arizona, and heard stories from people at the Lutheran Social Ministry, and to people involved in the “Sanctuary Movement”, and heard about the burdens placed on them by Regan adminstration social program cuts, and heard Jim Wallis of Sojourners tell similar stories, and saw an increasing amount of “Moral Scorecards” being kept on political candidates to rate them on their “Christian acceptability”, I saw candidates whose compassion and faith and work for social causes “rewarded” with low scores. The unholy alliance of Conservative Christian groups (represented most publicly by Ralph Reed and the Christian Coalition) with Republican politics — “unholy” not becuase it was Republican but because it became dangerously intertwined and “confused” as to which one drove the other.

Jim Wallis wrote a book during the 90’s entitled “Who Speaks For God?”, as a response to the almost automatic association of “Christian” with Republican. He proposed that there is a large Christian constituence who see “other criteria” against which to judge the “moral character” of political platforms and policies, ones which place emphasis on those policies and programs that work for social justice, social betterment, and work for peaceful solutions as an alternative to the rush to war. Wallis was far from being “all head over heels” for Clinton during that administration’s reign. He has always struck me as a “Biblical Christian” first and foremeost, unwed with either political party. Wallis often holds up a Bible which has certain passages “cut out” with scissors, and calls it the “American Bible”; an interpretative approach that “removes offending” passages and allows the Christian culture to “bless” the government as an instrument of God’s own hand.