The Southern Baptists will assemble for their annual meeting in Phoenix next week. They still can’t help saying stupid things, because that’s who they are, but I don’t find them so entertaining as I once did — mainly, I guess, because they cause so much undeserved harm to others. For that reason, it’s been a couple of years since I last tracked the #SBC20nn tweets and published the most ridiculous/embarrassingly stupid/offensive et cetera, et cetera.
For some reason, the SBC hasn’t published, or at least isn’t publicizing, the annual report of membership, attendance, baptisms, and so forth. I’m guessing those all are down, because evangelicals went strongly for Trump, and the few remaining grown-ups doubtless fled the denomination once for all. If anybody knows where the numbers are, let me know.
For masochists who need degradation and brain pain, I’ve put a (temporary) hashtag monitor in the sidebar.
But … what do you know? A group that fashions itself Faith in America plans to be there and to protest the SBC’s continued degradation of LGBT people.
Last week I became aware that Faith in America (FIA), a pro-LGBT advocacy group, plans to protest the 2017 annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention being held next week in Phoenix, AZ. Yesterday a story regarding their plans was published in Baptist Press. This group desires to have homosexuality and transgenderism “removed from the sin list.” However, it’s as Bart Barber said on Twitter and Facebook, “Presuming that human beings get to edit ‘the sin list’ is pretty much the top item on the sin list.”
But, of course, what is and is not acceptable changes from one generation to the next, according to the growth of knowledge and the evolution of the public consensus about the behaviors that are and are not conducive to coexisting peacefully; that’s where morality comes from. Southern Baptists demand moral stasis and cannot admit that, and that is why they increasingly find themselves at the margin of community life — and angry at a world that has left their backward-looking views behind.