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#SBC21: Press wrestles with Twitter-niche labels as Southern Baptists choose a new leader

June 16, 2021
9 min read

If you have followed mainstream coverage of religion (and politics) in recent decades, you know that many journalists tend to make liberal use of the vague term “moderate.”

This has certainly been true of coverage of warfare inside the Southern Baptist Convention.

Since “liberal” is kind of scary, journalists have long divided the SBC into “moderate” and “conservative” camps. With very few exceptions, your typical “moderate” Southern Baptist would be a “fundamentalist” in the world of mainline Protestantism.

Thus, in the great SBC civil war of 1979 and the years thereafter, the term “moderate” came to mean Southern Baptists that mainstream journalists thought were acceptable. These were the folks in the white hats who backed abortion rights, women’s ordination and, at first, were silent or vague on LGBTQ issues. Most of all, they were the enemies of those Southern Baptists who fit under the Religious Right umbrella.

With that in mind, consider the tweaked double-decker headline on The New York Times report after the fireworks at the SBC national meetings in Nashville:

Southern Baptists Narrowly Head Off Ultraconservative Takeover

Ed Litton, a moderate pastor from Alabama, won a high-stakes presidential election with the potential to reshape the future of the country’s largest Protestant denomination.

The original headline stuck with the old-school “moderate” vs. “conservative” language.

The leadership of the Conservative Baptist Network may have been sad about their candidate, the Rev. Mike Stone of Georgia, losing the election. But they had to be elated at how the Times described this event in terms that meshed with their views on SBC life. Here is the top of that report:

NASHVILLE — In a dramatic showdown on Tuesday, Southern Baptists elected a moderate pastor from Alabama as their next president, narrowly heading off an attempted takeover by the denomination’s insurgent right wing.

The election of the pastor, Ed Litton, was the result of what was effectively a three-way standoff for the leadership of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. In the first round of voting on Tuesday afternoon, Southern Baptists rejected a prominent mainstream candidate and onetime favorite for the presidency, Al Mohler Jr., who received 26 percent of some 14,000 votes.

The race then headed for an immediate runoff vote that pitted an ultraconservative pastor from Georgia, Mike Stone, against Mr. Litton, who has largely avoided the culture wars.

So what are Litton’s views on hot-button theological questions linked to cultural and moral disputes in America today? As i mentioned last week — “Will SBC politicos answer questions about doctrinal clashes in this new war?” — it was crucial for journalists to ask religious and doctrinal questions about the issues that were dividing Southern Baptists.

Without that information, readers were pretty much left to compare old political language in press reports with the heated doctrinal accusations by Conservative Baptist Network leaders. Litton was pro-racial reconciliation and he backed previous SBC efforts to fight sexual abuse. But where did he stand on other doctrinal issues? What about his claims that he was, in fact, an SBC conservative who viewed the Bible as inerrant and authoritative?

Sorry. That didn’t fit the political framework that was already in place. Here’s another bite of that Times report:

A newly empowered ultraconservative faction in the already conservative denomination is pushing back against a national leadership they describe as out-of-touch elitists who have drifted too far to the left on social issues. …

Conservatives, especially, had made an unusual effort to boost turnout. The Conservative Baptist Network, an increasingly influential group founded last year, released a video last week featuring images of an empty motorboat slipping loose from a pier and floating into the middle of a lake under cloudy skies. “On June 15, Southern Baptists can stop the drift,” the network’s spokesman, Brad Jurkovich, intoned.

Thus, the accurate label for these self-proclaimed SBC pirates was “conservatives.” The other side? That would be the “moderates.” That must have been music to the ears of Conservative Baptist Network leaders.

I’ll come back to the “labels” issues, because some other religion-beat pros found some more constructive ways to describe this battle inside the very conservative SBC tent.

However, I would also like to note that some of the “election day” coverage missed or downplayed what was a very important development.

When reading many elite media reports, did readers find out about this vote to change the foundations of SBC life? This is the official Baptist Press language:

An amendment to Article III of the SBC Constitution added to the definition of a cooperating church that it “does not act in a manner inconsistent with the Convention’s beliefs regarding sexual abuse” and “does not act to affirm, approve, or endorse discriminatory behavior on the basis of ethnicity.”

The amendment took effect immediately, having received its first required messenger approval at the 2019 SBC annual meeting in Birmingham, Ala.

The convention already has disfellowshipped three churches for improper handling of sexual abuse (one in 2019 and two more this February) and one for racism in 2018. The newly adopted constitutional amendment does not grant the convention new powers to disfellowship churches. Rather, it makes explicit the types of behavior that make a church liable to exclusion from fellowship.

EC President and CEO Ronnie Floyd said the constitutional amendment reflects “our stand against all forms of racism against all people.” He also noted an increase of 7,992 non-Anglo congregations in the SBC since 1990. “Of all people,” Floyd said, “Christians should love one another and be standing together against the sin of racism.”

Now, how did other newsrooms handle the difficult task of describing these two (or three) clashing SBC armies?

The Washington Post headline took this approach: “Southern Baptists elect Ed Litton as their president, a defeat for the hard right.”

Not bad. However, I thought that the Associated Press story — “Southern Baptists pick president who worked for racial unity” — did a better job of avoiding stereotypes and old landmines.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — The Southern Baptist Convention tamped down a push from the right at its largest meeting in decades on Tuesday, electing a new president who has worked to bridge racial divides in the church and defeating an effort to make an issue of critical race theory. 

Ed Litton, a pastor from Alabama, won 52% of the vote in a runoff against Mike Stone, a Georgia pastor backed by a new group called the Conservative Baptist Network that has sought to move the already-conservative denomination further right. 

Litton, who is white, was nominated by Fred Luter, the only Black pastor to serve as president of the United States’ largest Protest denomination. Luter praised Litton’s commitment to racial reconciliation and said he has dealt compassionately with the issue of sexual abuse within SBC churches, another hot-button subject at the gathering of more than 15,000 church representatives.

Nicely done. The Stone candidacy certainly was a “push from the right.” Oh, and the AP report — way down in the text — did note: that “Voters gave final approvals to constitutional amendments excluding churches that affirm ethnic discrimination or act against the convention’s ‘beliefs regarding sexual abuse.’ “

The Tennessean — backed with some other in-state talent on the religion beat — went wall-to-wall covering the hometown drama. However, I would like to focus on one specific passage in Holly Meyer’s report (which ran in several Gannett newspapers):

Theological conservatives control the convention today. But some are concerned there is a leftward drift within the evangelical network of churches. This group — some of whom are rallying around pirate imagery and a “take the ship” slogan — is calling for a course correction in keeping with the conservative takeover that began in 1979, which is when leaders ousted theologically liberal and moderate Southern Baptists from convention leadership and seminaries. 

Others disagree, saying this faction is pushing for a fundamentalism, and it could chase minority pastors and churches out of the denomination.

This showed, once again, that the safest, most accurate approach to “labels” was to avoid them. The best way to handle this challenge was to compare the language and claims of the competing camps, especially on issues of race (since Black churches in the SBC tend to be very conservative on theological and moral issues).

Let’s look at one final approach to this problem, demonstrated by Kate Shellnutt of Christianity Today in a story with this safe double-decker headline:

Southern Baptists Elect Ed Litton as New President 

The Alabama pastor, known for his inclusion of women and work on racial justice, beat out Mike Stone of the Conservative Baptist Network in a runoff.

The key word in the overture is “faction.” Read this carefully:

Pastor Ed Litton, championed by supporters as a force for gospel unity and racial reconciliation, was elected the next president of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), overtaking the candidate backed by a passionate faction of conservatives.

Litton’s election is seen as a signal of the direction of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, where infighting has broken out over approaches to race, abuse, and other issues while the Conservative Baptist Network raises alarms about liberal drift and “woke” theology. The close race also reveals how much ground the vocal group has come to hold in the SBC within a year and a half of its founding.

“This vote … shows we desire a leader whose character, humility, and voice for unity represents us a whole over those who call for division,” said Jacki King, who serves on the steering committee for the SBC Women’s Leadership Network.

In a race with no clear frontrunner at a convention with a 25-year-high turnout of more than 15,000 messengers, Litton won out over Mike Stone, a pastor endorsed by fellow Conservative Baptist Network leaders, and Albert Mohler, the longtime president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Now, after all of that heavy material, let’s end on a lighter note.

How hot was this convention?

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