A Baptist theologian who left the SBC during the so-called “Conservative Resurgence” and joined the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship is saying aloud what every clear-headed grown-up has known for a long time: The Southern Baptists are a destructive presence in our national life.
Baptists are doing a lot of harm in today’s society, emergent church leader Brian McLaren said in a podcast posted recently on a Cooperative Baptist Fellowship blog.
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McLaren said he believes the Christian faith is undergoing an identity crisis more profound than the Reformation 500 years ago.
“Watching the success of Donald Trump win over especially white people, and especially white Christians and especially white evangelical and Baptist Christians, in my opinion this is a pivotal moment,” he said.
Not only has science revealed, and created, a world that doesn’t comport with conservative Christian claims about reality — e.g., evolution — the entire Abrahamic narrative is disintegrating before the onslaught of scholarship which shows that much of the Old Testament’s history of the Jews is make-believe.
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Few scholars believe that Moses and Abraham were historical figures.
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There were no 40-years in the Wilderness.
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There was no Egyptian captivity.
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King David was probably no more than a prominent regional thug.
And that’s just for starters.
This is exactly the crisis of legitimacy that Nietzsche foresaw as long ago as the late 1800s, and explains why Christianity per se has ceased to enjoy any intellectual or ethical credibility and has degraded into cultural tribalism. But Christianity and Islam are the foundations of Western and near-Eastern cultures, and their inability to explain the world has brought us to a paradigm shift in human thought as dramatic as the death of paganism before the rise of monotheism.
I am convinced, that is, that much of the world’s instability, and disputes like these among Baptists, are not transient so much as symptoms of a vastly greater, epochal, change that is underway. East and West are organized on the basis of religious marketing lies — and those lies have failed. The question then becomes the oldest in philosophy: How, then, shall we live?