Civil Commotion

The Wartburg Watch posted last evening a catalog of explanations for the continued decline of the Southern Baptist Convention, drawing especial attention to the reluctance of some pastors to even identify their churches as Southern Baptist.

As someone who has been saying for years that the brand has gone bad — and deservedly so, for all of the other reason enumerated in the piece — I’ve got to laugh at the thought of church planters unwilling to even identify the denomination of the church they’re planting. A pastor who is embarrassed to even speak the name of his product is a pastor who doesn’t believe in his product and isn’t going to be able to sell his product.

The Southern Baptist’s reality claims are untrue, and I think no better of their ethical teachings; anybody who believes, for instance, that pleasing an invisible friend is more important than their wedding vows is a fool who isn’t actually married at all — yet that is exactly what every last Southern Baptist pastor in Christendom demands. So … fine: If they want to piss away their money planting churches they don’t even believe in, it hastens their decline and I’m all for it.

The Wartburg Watch overlooks an important aspect of the SBC’s decline, though. It’s true that most Southern Baptist pastors go to seminary, and that the denomination has some specific theological distinctives, but it also is true that most of the folk in the pews have only dipped into the Bible and probably can’t identify those distinctives. ‘Southern Baptist’ is a tribal, cultural, identity far more than it is a theological identity — and the rural southern culture in which it is embedded is dying. If the denomination can’t make headway with urban minorities — and that’s more unlikely than ever after this week’s brouhaha over the alt-right white nationalism resolution — it will inevitably, unavoidably fail.

The Southern Baptists are fighting over a resolution condemning the so-called alt-right.

A national meeting of Southern Baptists will consider condemning the political movement known as the “alt-right” amid an uproar over the denomination’s commitment to confronting prejudice.

Leaders of the faith group initially refused to take up a proposal that they repudiate the political group that emerged dramatically during the U.S. presidential election, mixing racism, white nationalism and populism. Barrett Duke, a Southern Baptist leader who led a committee that decided which resolutions should be considered for a vote, said the resolution as originally written contained inflammatory and broad language “potentially implicating” conservatives who do not support the “alt-right” movement.

But the decision caused a backlash online and at the gathering in Phoenix from Southern Baptists and other Christians, especially African-American evangelicals.

Hoist on their own petard, et cetera, et cetera. Couldn’t happen to a more deserving bunch.

It needs to be borne in mind that ‘Southern Baptist’ is not merely a theological/denominational identification; it is more significant as a tribal/cultural identification. I very much doubt, in fact, that the average Southern Baptist could even identify the denominations three most important distinctives. But that sweet old lady who hasn’t missed a Sunday since that glorious day 65-years ago when she was saved? You don’t, you mustn’t, ever say a word against her — and never mind that as a young wife and at Pastor Bubba’s urging she carried picnic baskets of sandwiches to the brave menfolk standing at roadside and throwing rocks at the black freedom marchers.

Every church in the south has a few; they are cultural icons — and the resolution is a slap at her, a slap at a failed and dying culture.

The (amended) resolution will probably pass, and when it does the denomination will probably shrink some more as old white people mutter and shake their heads and complain, with some justification, that the denomination has left them. If it doesn’t pass, the denomination diminishes the likelihood of ever attracting the non-white believers they so desperately need if they are to survive in a more ethnically diverse America.

And hanging over all that, of course, is that most millennials have too much sense in the first place to believe the SBCs Jack and the Beanstalk make-believe.

I don’t mind admitting that I enjoy watching their slow-motion disintegration. The Southern Baptist Convention was founded on an evil ideal, and has never authored anything but misery. Good riddance.

Five more public officials have been criminally charged in connection with Flint’s tainted water.

Attorney General Bill Schuette on Wednesday filed an involuntary manslaughter felony charge against state health director Nick Lyon and four other state and Flint officials over the death of a man who contracted Legionnaires’ disease during Flint’s water crisis.

Genesee County District Court Judge G. David Guinn allowed the charges to be filed Wednesday morning, making Lyon the highest ranking state official in Gov. Rick Snyder’s administration to be charged criminally over Flint’s tainted water.

With problems that made an appearance in even last year’s presidential campaigns, Flint has become a high-profile disaster that’s going to destroy a lot of careers; unfortunately, that probably is going to interfere with learning the real lessons of this catastrophe.

First and foremost, this was a failure of project management and character. The Associated Press filed a story that captures the exact instant that it all went wrong.

Mike Glasgow, the plant’s laboratory supervisor at the time, says he asked district engineer Mike Prysby of the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality how often staffers would need to check the water for proper levels of phosphate, a chemical they intended to add to prevent lead corrosion from the pipes. Prysby’s response, according to Glasgow: “You don’t need to monitor phosphate because you’re not required to add it.”

Recalling the meeting Tuesday in an interview with The Associated Press, Glasgow said he was taken aback by the state regulator’s instruction; treating drinking water with anti-corrosive additives was routine practice. Glasgow said his gaze shifted to a consulting firm engineer in attendance, who also looked surprised.

“Then,” Glasgow said, “we went on to the next question.”

Civil engineers deliver tens of billions of gallons of potable water to consumers every single day; we know how to do that, and Flint posed no mysteries or even unusual problems. The management failure is that a regulator was permitted to make a design/operation decision — something that should never happen. Regulators should verify compliance with regulatory standards, and that’s all. Engineers make the design and operation decisions.

This is not merely turf-war stuff. There are protocols for who-does-what that are grounded in the more than 200-years of experience of success, progress, failure since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, and they are embedded in our laws and the most modern release of Microsoft Project. There are reasons for the very particular way that things are done, and those reasons range from assuring that competent people are in the right place to make needful decisions to easily identifying the responsible party if things go sideways.

The plant chemist and the engineer should never have submitted to Prysby’s usurpation of their responsibilities; that’s a management failure. And when Prysby impinged upon their responsibilities to make a really-really–really stupid decision, they should have fought back; that they didn’t was a character failure.

Those were the failures that set everything else in motion, including the coverups and deaths.

Sometimes, the stupid on the Evangelical Right is so egregious that it is painful to listen. Here is gen-u-ine pseudo-historian David Barton, for instance:

Weather patterns are often predicated on whether the people doing the right thing or the wrong thing. And if people sin against God, then you get floods, and you get storms, you get lightning, you get all your crops get destroyed, you get all sorts of things.

This would be funny if there weren’t so many people in this country who listen to nonsense like this.

I guess I’ve mentioned in the past how deeply anti-intellectual the Southern Baptists are, but they’re rarely so explicit about it.