What do you know? The New York Times’ Ross Douthat has taken note of the SBC’s meltdown.
Late last year I wrote an essay speculating about the possibility of an “evangelical crisis” in this era, driven by the gap between the older and strongly pro-Trump constituency in evangelical churches and those evangelicals, often younger, who either voted for the president reluctantly or rejected his brand of politics outright. But I didn’t anticipate that the crisis would take a specific sex-and-power form — that the Trump presidency and the #MeToo era between them would make the treatment of women the place where evangelical divisions were laid bare.
YAY! Me and a great many others have been goggle-eyed for years at the egregious hypocrisy of the SBC leadership, and it’s good to see the chickens come home to roost.
But let’s not overthink what is going on, parsing generational, complementarian and other theological differences too finely. The narratives are different, but the Southern Baptists are as screwed-up and cult-like as the Scientologists, and the zeitgeist has left their degrading schtick behind. The great days are over.