"It sounds like you don’t think that there are any real prospects for the SBC, or maybe even white American evangelicalism more broadly, to move away from its increasingly tight linkage with the Republican Party."
"I see no evidence of it. If anything, it only strengthened over the four years of Trump’s presidency. You still had
76 percent of white people who went to the polls and said “I’m an evangelical” [who] voted for Trump.
I think the people who are the dyed-in-the-wool evangelicals are the people that showed up to the polls and voted for Trump in the face of four years of utter vulgarity. They did so anyway, because that’s where they are. When you looked at January 6, and you looked at the crowd that stormed the Capitol, look at
how many prayer meetings there were before the storm happened? How many praise songs were being sung?
That’s who white evangelicals are, but they don’t want to be perceived that way. That’s why there’s this growing legion of young people and millennials leaving the ranks of the evangelical church — because I think that they saw the proof with the pudding was in the eating thereof."
"So here’s my question: To what extent can these numbers be termed a “crisis” for the SBC? And is there any good evidence that the SBC’s connection to the GOP, its politicization of Christianity, is actually causing people to leave the convention?"
"Well, they think it’s a crisis. [SBC Executive Committee member] Ronnie Floyd said at this convention that the baptism of teenagers is down 40 percent. He asked the gathered assembly: “Raise your hand if you were ‘saved’ when you were a teenager.” And most people’s hands went up. So they’re panicking, for sure.
Generation Z, they have TikTok, they have Instagram, where they’re talking and they’re debunking the claims that people like Southern Baptists or other evangelicals make about gay people, about unwed mothers, about sexuality, about trans people, about liberals, about people who have abortions. They’re doing the fact-checking in real time, in a way that no other generation has done before, and they’re reinforced by their heroes. Whereas in the 1960s it was Bob Dylan talking about Medgar Evers, today it’s Taylor Swift talking to homophobic, right-wing evangelical people in “You Need to Calm Down.”
So they’re going to go to church if their parents force them to, but the battle has been lost on the intellectual front, and on the emotional front. Those kids aren’t coming back."
Why the Southern Baptist Convention is in turmoil — and why you should care.
www.vox.com
A worth while read.
olk County Sheriff’s Office
www.rawstory.com
