I’ve remarked on a few occasions over the past week, as Paige Patterson flamed out for decades of misogyny, that the Southern Baptist Convention is in the midst of a severe public relations debacle. They’ve figured-out what to do about it: Adopt a resolution that’s friendly to women at the Annual Meeting next month!
It’s as tedious as you’d expect, but I’m enjoying this element of the resolution a lot:
WHEREAS, the evil one who steals, kills, and destroys is actively seeking to ruin lives, render asunder marriages, destroy ministries, tarnish God’s glory in the church, sow discord and disunity in the Southern Baptist Convention, and harm our collective mission and ministries; and
No. There is no “evil one” lurking around the corner, drooling at the prospect of sowing “discord and disunity” in the SBC, or destroying marriages. That is the work of self-serving power-mad preachers who have names.
Undoubtedly, Albert Mohler and the thousands of preachers he has trained over the decades have harmed more marriages than an entire zoo of phantasmagorical supernatural beings.
The third theological fact about the family is the continued affirmation of the family within the redeemed people of God – the church. As the Gospels make clear, loyalty to Christ exceeds that of any family commitment, even as the church becomes the family of faith, embracing within its life all who come to faith in Christ and into the life of the church. And yet, Christians are explicitly instructed to honor marriage, to raise their children in the faith, and to order their family according to the Scriptures.
As I’ve said repeatedly through the years, anybody who thinks that pleasing an Invisible Friend is more important than his or her wedding vows isn’t actually married at all. Basically, a healthy marriage is a threat to the preachers’ power, and long in the distant past they adopted a teaching which corrupts and undermines marriage. Most, however, are not so cynical as that remark may seem to suggest; they have grown-up listening to this claptrap, and are unreflective.
It’s no accident, however, that Evangelicals have the highest divorce rate in the country; that’s a direct and predictable consequence of the gaudy, degrading, and corrupt nonsense they howl and bellow in their churches.