Baptist Blogger has written a piece on the power grab going on over the past 20 years in the Southern Baptist Convnetion. Of course, he gets slammed by many in comments (as well as congratulated and affirmed by a few).

What I noticed, though, as much as I admire how he is able to see such things , stepping out of the cloud of hubris and blindness, is how he fails to mention the role the Southern Baptist leadership is playing in the full-scale support of war and Bush. Of course, this didn’t surprise me, but it is ironic that here is the best test of whether one is out to serve or to seek power. To seek power, one must side with the dogma, and no dogma is more important to the cultural success of a movement as the affirmation of the national allegiance. This way, the deeply ingrained “loyalties” and patriotic pride can be assimilated into the movement, and made to feel that they belong together, and that “God would have it so”. No other denomination has made it so clear that they support the American empire. And the absence of dialogue in Southern Baptist circles on this issue is absolutely scary. So easily have they dispensed with grappling with the moral disasters that continue to happen in the name of the nation state, and get justified in the name of one who told us to love our enemies. The reality of modern war and nation states now is that the people of the nation don’t have to behold any of it and be confronted with the toll of human lives, particularly those other than themselves, or those suffered by a different people.

While it is a little encouraging to see how blogging has begun to expose some of the tactics of the leadership in SBC life,  I hope it can also bring about some recognition of the way in which Southern Baptists have replaced Christ with the empty shrine (hat tip to William Cavanaugh, mp3 here of ‘Empire of the Empty Shrine‘)

I hope there remains a little leaven among the people of the SBC so that not only the ethical behavior issues in their leadership can be brought to the fore,  but also that there begin a movement of realization that the worldly assumptions of the nation have become particularly aggressive and dangerous in this time of Bush’s administration, and that this realization can begin to grow an awareness that the people of God are truly alien to this culture,  and begin to treat it as such.