Baptist News Global

Baylor wins a key victory (somehow or another) defending its stand (sort of) on sexuality

Baylor wins a key victory (somehow or another) defending its stand (sort of) on sexuality

This has been true for decades: Journalists just love headlines that include Baylor University and anything having to do with sex.

More than two decades ago, it was Baylor coeds posing for Playboy. Two decades before that, it was student journalists getting fired for disagreeing with a Baylor policy that students shouldn’t pose for Playboy. Ironically, that controversy was an echo of earlier controversies about student journalists (including moi) publishing stories about sexual assaults near campus (and other hot topics).

The big idea is that sin exists at Jerusalem on the Brazos and that Baylor leaders are naive in thinking that they can do anything about that. Trust me: Some of these headlines are more important than others. Now we have this double-decker headline from Religion News Service:

Baylor University wins exemption from Title IX’s sexual harassment provisions

The private Baptist school argued discrimination complaints made by LGBTQ students were ‘inconsistent’ with the university’s religious values

As always, there are two questions that journalists need to answer when covering this fight and both of them involve religious doctrines that define this private academic community.

Question 1: Are Baylor’s “beliefs” backed by legal ties to a specific denomination and its teachings?

Question 2: Are Baylor students required to sign a “doctrinal covenant” in which they agree to support this private school’s “student code" or, at the very least, not to publicly oppose it?

The answer to both: Maybe, maybe not. Clarity on both of these questions is crucial to the Baylor left (and that is a real thing), the Baylor establishment and to Baylor’s conservative critics. It would help if journalists at RNS and other mainstream news outlets asked those questions and published the results. It’s no surprise that the best information can be found in niche Baptist-news sources.

Meanwhile, here is the RNS overture, atop a story that does not include a single sentence of material drawn from interviews with experts backing Baylor’s point of view.


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What's up with the Rev. Bart Barber's easy win as SBC president? Don't ask the Gray Lady

What's up with the Rev. Bart Barber's easy win as SBC president? Don't ask the Gray Lady

One of the most interesting stories from the 2023 meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention was the easy win by the Rev. Bart Barber, a low-key Texas Baptist who was elected to a second term as president.

Under normal conditions, SBC presidents are elected to a second term without opposition.

However, words like “normal” do not apply to Southern Baptist life in the Internet age — in which there are ordinary conservative Southern Baptists and then there are those gathered in the Conservative Baptist Network tent.

Barber faced opposition from the right, which was a newsworthy fact in and of itself. I would say that the opposition came from the “theological” right, but I haven’t seen strong evidence that this conflict is about theology.

Still, Barber’s easy win in the New Orleans convention was a blow to the rebel conservatives and a win for the establishment conservatives. I found it interesting that some in the elite press didn’t seem to realize this, or appeared predestined to ignore it.

Check out the top of the New York Times wrap-up report on the SBC meeting. The massive double-decker headline tells the readers what really matters:

Southern Baptists’ Fight Over Female Leaders Shows Power of Insurgent Right.”

Moves this week to oust women from church leadership in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination offer an early look into the psyche of evangelical America ahead of 2024.

Whoa. “Ahead of 2024?” Is this a reference to the next SBC election or a suggestion that what happened in New Orleans is important because it was some kind of symbolic foretaste of what really matters to the religion-desk at the Times — which is the 2024 White House race?

As always, remember: Politics is what is real. Religion? Not so much.

That journalism question, once again: Is this Times sermon “analysis” or “news”?


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Tremors in a 'fundamentalist' empire: What kind of news story is unfolding at Bob Jones U?

Tremors in a 'fundamentalist' empire: What kind of news story is unfolding at Bob Jones U?

Attention religion-beat journalists: What we have here is a chance to use the hot-button word “fundamentalist” in way that is consistent with years of guidance from the Associated Press Stylebook.

Honest. Give it a try.

I am referring to news coverage of a rather mysterious power struggle at Bob Jones University in Greenville, S.C. At this point, there has been next to zero national coverage of this inside-baseball conflict, perhaps because it’s a fight between conservative Christians that does not appear to involve the words “Donald Trump.”

But there has been quite a bit of coverage at the regional level and in “Christian market” news, because this is a powerful and symbolic institution in the Bible Belt. You can see some major-league buzz words in the overture of the main story at The State: “SC Christian university president resigns, cites problems with governing board.” This is long, but essential:

The president of Bob Jones University has resigned amid long-simmering disagreements with the chairman of the board and grandson of the university’s founder over the discretion of the fundamentalist Christian school in Greenville.

Steve Pettit was named president in 2014, the first non-Jones family member to hold the job since the school was founded by Bob Jones Sr. in 1927. He was succeeded by Bob Jones Jr., Bob Jones III and then his great-grandson, Stephen Jones. Bob Jones IV elected not to work at the school.

In a four-page letter to the board, Pettit said board chair John Lewis had created disunity on the board, held a meeting without telling staff and was not taking seriously a comment made by a board member that “female students’ clothing and female student athlete uniforms accentuate their ‘boobs and butts.’”

Pettit said he had heard the board member took photos of women without their permission. He said he did not know if the information was true, but by law should have been turned over to the Title IX coordinator for investigation.

Ah, a Title IX fight. For those who have followed Bob Jones trends, that would lead straight into the crucial issue of whether this school will play ball with government agencies or outside educational authorities of any kind.

A big word here is “separatism,” along with “ultra-separatism” (click here for background). The key is the degree to which true “fundamentalist” would work with mere evangelicals who have associated, in any way, with liberal and modern trends in Christian faith.


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Podcast: Now what, after SBC 'messengers' have waved their yellow voting cards?

Podcast: Now what, after SBC 'messengers' have waved their yellow voting cards?

Here’s a warning to reporters who are preparing for future national meetings of the Southern Baptist Convention: Never call these folks “delegates.”

They are not delegates at some kind of political event. They are “messengers” from their local autonomous churches. You see, this isn’t some kind of cocktail-hour mainline Protestant denominational whatever, and many Baptists don’t like the word “denomination,” either. This is a “convention” and it only meets for three days each year.

Use the wrong language and Southern Baptists will give you a steely gaze and then say something nasty, like “Well, bless your heart.”

Quite a few journalists attended this year’s SBC meeting because there were headline-worthy — from their editors’ point of view — topics on the agenda, like clergy sexual abuse, Critical Race Theory and an election to determine if some new-breed conservative “pirates” (that was their term from 2021) were going to wrest the wheel of the ship away from the allegedly “woke” establishment conservatives.

As you would imagine, host Todd Wilken and I dug into all of this during the “Crossroads” podcast this week (CLICK HERE to tune that in). One of the big themes was that the hard-news coverage of this convention — especially by “Location, location, location” pros from major SBC centers, like Houston and Nashville — was top-notch.

Veteran GetReligion scribe Bobby “Positive” Ross, Jr., will offer pages of URLs in his Plug-In feature this week, so I will not try to do that (I’ll post a link when it goes public). But this is what happens when major newsrooms send religion-beat professionals to cover a major event. Readers don’t have to agree with every single thing that they saw in the #SBC2022 coverage, but what we had here was a tsunami of serious coverage from professionals, backed by the skilled Baptist Press team running the on-site newsroom.

With that in mind, let me note a Big Ideas from this podcast.

* If you study attendance numbers at previous “hot” SBC meetings, you will notice a logical trend linked to a map of the Bible Belt. In this online list, note the 1985 Dallas convention drew 45,519 messengers and the 1986 Atlanta convention drew 40,987.

Yes, these were the pivotal years in the historic “conservative resurgence” in SBC life. But, truth is, those numbers also reflect how far ordinary messengers can drive in one day jammed into the buses or vans owned by “ordinary” SBC congregations.


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How is SBC supposed to work? Executive Committee ignites firestorm with sex-abuse logjam

How is SBC supposed to work? Executive Committee ignites firestorm with sex-abuse logjam

Welcome to Nashville, Liam Adams.

Enjoy the journalistic whiplash.

Adams, The Tennessean’s new religion writer, has received quite an introduction to the Godbeat in Music City.

Upon starting his new job last week, Adams immediately found himself covering two days of high-profile meetings by the Southern Baptist Convention’s executive committee.

He’s back at it this week, reporting on the committee again delaying “action on a third-party investigation into the committee’s handling of sexual abuse claims.”

“So I’m going to take a guess that this isn’t normally what happens in the Southern Baptist Convention, right?” Adams joked on Twitter. “Asking for a friend who just so happens to be in his second week reporting the news on all of this.”

Elsewhere, Religion News Service’s Yonat Shimron and Bob Smietana report that the “presidents of all six Southern Baptist seminaries have issued statements or tweets expressing their dismay at the Executive Committee’s unwillingness to act at the convention’s direction.”

According to Baptist News Global’s Mark Wingfield, new details have emerged about the committee’s handling of the investigation, “as outrage mounts among other Southern Baptist leaders.”

Read additional coverage by The Associated Press’ Holly Meyer (Adams’ predecessor at The Tennessean) and Christianity Today’s Kate Shellnutt.

For more context, see our past Plug-ins — here, here and here — focused on the Southern Baptist controversy.


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Your journalism tip sheet for next week's annual Southern Baptist Convention extravaganza

Your journalism tip sheet for next week's annual Southern Baptist Convention extravaganza

If you decide last-minute to visit the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual extravaganza at Birmingham, Ala., June 11–12, you may need a hotel in Montgomery, if not Atlanta, since something like 10,000 “messengers” (please, never say “delegates”) will be cramming 37 local hotels. Whether in-person or from long distance, some coverage tips. 

Media should recognize that alongside its vast Sunbelt flock,  America's largest Protestant denomination claims, for instance, 42,000 adherents in New York State, 68,000 in Illinois, 76,000 in Indiana, 84,000 in Kansas-Nebraska and 206,000 in California. This influential empire has 51,541 local congregations and mission outposts, with $11.8 billion in yearly donations.

Long gone are the years when pulses pounded over high-stakes political machinations as hardline conservatives were winning SBC control. But news always abounds. 

Notably, this is the first meeting since the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News blew the lid off SBC sanctity with data on 350 church workers accused of sexual misconduct with 700-plus victims since 1998.

That crisis reaches the floor Wednesday afternoon, June 12, when SBC President J.D. Greear’s sexual abuse study gets a ridiculously tiny 20-minute time slot. Greear’s address Tuesday morning may offer grist. And the June 10-11 convention of local and state SBC executives gets a proposed policy to protect minors (.pdf text here).

Another related effort was last month’s survey on perceptions of the abuse problem, which critics will think exposes naïve attitudes.  Sources who monitor SBC depredations include evangelical blogger “Dee” Parsons of The Wartburg Watch and the 10 SBC victims and victim advocates featured in  the current Christianity Today (behind pay wall).

Greear, a North Carolina pastor, is up for re-election Tuesday afternoon to a second year as SBC president. Should be automatic, though he’s under some right-wing fire for saying women can be speakers at Sunday worship despite the SBC’s 2000 “complementarian” stance that only men should be pastors.


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Is this a news story? A new challenge for pastors: Smartphones that just won't leave them alone

Is this a news story? A new challenge for pastors: Smartphones that just won't leave them alone

If you know anything about the lives of pastors and priests, you know that — when it comes time to help hurting people — they really want to be able to pull aside, slow things down, look into someone’s face and talk things over.

Life does not always allow this, I know.

But my father was a pastor and, at the end of his ministry life, a hospital chaplain who spent most of his time with the parents of children who were fighting cancer.

On the few times I was with him during those hospital shifts, I saw him — over and over — sit in silence with someone, just being there, waiting until they were ready to talk. He was there to help, but mainly he was there to talk, to pray and to wait — for good news or bad news.

It would be hard to imagine a form of human communication that is more different than today’s world of social media apps on smartphones.

That’s why an article that I ran into the other day — via the progressive Baptist News Global website — stopped me dead in my tracks. The headline: “Pastors and other church leaders: Give up social media. Not for Lent, but forever.” I posted the article as a think piece here at GetReligion and then decided that I really need to talk to the author, the Rev. John Jay Alvaro, the lead pastor at the First Baptist Church of Pasadena, Calif.

That led to an “On Religion” column this week for the Universal syndicate and, now, to a “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in).

Why did this topic intrigue me so much?

Well, first of all, it would be hard to name a more powerful trend in human communication today than social media and our omnipresent smartphones. That’s news. And Alvaro is convinced that these social-media programs are seriously warping the work of pastors. That’s a claim that would affect thousands of pastors and millions of people. So, yes, I think this topic is a news subject in and of itself.

Here is a large chunk of my column:

His thesis is that the "dumpster fire" of social-media life is making it harder for pastors to love real people.


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Thinking about social media: Baptist progressive says pastors should pull the plug -- period

Having watched the entire social-media era, from beginning up to the current craziness, I have a confession to make. I have been shocked that we have not heard more neo-Luddite sermons from the conservative side of the religious world.

I’m not talking about making a case for a full-on Amish withdrawal from the Internet and from social media.

As someone who has taught mass-comm courses in a traditional Christian content — at a seminary and then in two liberal-part colleges — I realize that we are talking about a classic theological puzzle linked to culture. Traditional Christians believe we live in a creation that is both glorious (as created by God) and fallen (touched by sin and The Fall).

Social media can be wonderful or totally evil — sometimes on the same website in the same thread in material submitted by two different people within seconds of one another. We’re talking about a medium a very high ceiling and a very low floor.

I am starting to hear more debates about the role of smartphones (and addictions to them) in a truly religious home.

However, there is another social-media question that I have expected to read more about; Should pastors be active participants in social media?

That brings me to this weekend’s think piece, care of the progressives at Baptist Global Media. The author — John Jay Alvaro — is a Baptist, in Southern California, with a degree from Duke Divinity School (not a normal Southern Baptist seminary education option, to say the least). Click here to visit his website (yes, he has one) about religion and technology.

The headline on this piece: “Pastors and other church leaders: Give up social media. Not for Lent, but forever.” The basic thesis is that pastors need the time to be pastors and that this is, well, an analog, face-to-face calling. This is a pastoral issue, not a theological issue with technology.

Any benefit you perceive social media is giving you pales when compared to the real losses of cultivating your online social presence. It is as simple as that. Or take it from the other direction. If everyone in your congregation got off Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, etc., your ministry and your pastoral life would improve immediately. Well, not immediately. First there would be withdrawal, anger and other addictive reactions. Drugs don’t leave your system peacefully. But it will be worth it.


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Some flocks grow, while others shrink: Yes, that's a big, complex, religion story. So there!

Some flocks grow, while others shrink: Yes, that's a big, complex, religion story. So there!

This week's Crossroads podcast is all about connecting the dots.

Warning: This is a rather confusing podcast (click here to tune that in). Host Todd Wilken and I wander all over the map, touching on topics ranging from shuttered Episcopal cathedrals to declining (and growing) Southern Baptist statistics, from Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod arguments about worship to declining numbers of students in Catholic seminaries, as well as in some (repeat some) urban Catholic parish pews.

Along the way, there's lots and lots of talk about religious real estate (as in my recent post, "There may be faith angles in all those stories about fading flocks in urban America"). Lots of this once-sacred real estate is for sale in prime urban locations, from sea to shining sea.

Do you see any connections yet? Basically, we are talking about some of the biggest stories in American religion. The thread that connects them is demographics and the tricky subject of why some religious congregations (and denominations) die while others grow.

Ah, you say, that's all about where these institutions are located! How did The New York Times team -- not the religion desk, by the way -- put it the other day, in the latest of many Times stories about religious sanctuaries sporting "for sale" signs? That headline proclaimed: "Struggling to Survive, Congregations Look to Sell Houses of Worship." The key paragraph looked like this:

This situation is playing out again and again across New York City. Upward mobility, suburban growth and the dissolution of traditional ethnic enclaves have all contributed to empty pews, said Robert P. Jones, chief executive of the nonprofit Public Religion Research Institute. Twenty-seven percent of New Yorkers identified as religiously unaffiliated in 2014, compared with 17 percent in 2007, according to the Pew Research Center.

Now, in my post I noted that the final sentence there points off the secular real estate map, with a reference to the "Nones" trend that has been one of America's biggest religion-beat themes in recent years.

But, you see, even in New York City there are booming religious movements and congregations, as well as those that are fading. Did you know that?


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