Via Street Prophets, it appears that more and more Southern Baptist colleges are cutting ties with the Southern Baptist Convention, over issues ranging from the administrative (control of boards, use of funds) to the theological (literal interpretation of the bible). The latest is Georgetown College in Kentucky, according to the New York Times.
When we last checked in with Street Prophets there was some discussion about how media narratives about various religions affect the fate of those religions: the mainline churches are declining in influence, according to the news media, and there fore (according to Street Prophets) those churches are less likely to gain new members.
I wonder how that story ties in with this one. In a church as big as the SBC, there are bound to be some internal struggles over precisely the kinds of things the Times is picking up on. Are there, perhaps, even more internal splits within the SBC that the news media doesn't really report on frequently? The coup at the national SBC meeting last month certainly suggests it's possible.
If so, is the fact that we're not hearing about these splits very much just another example of conservative media bias, and moreover, what can we do about it? After all, disaffiliation of a string of colleges from the SBC has arguably a much greater impact on the larger world - in terms of secondary effects in popular culture and politics - then does the disaffiliation of a handful of churches from the UCC over gay marriage.
There's another angle to all of this, which is actually more important: the divisions between SBC and colleges like Georgetown largely revolve around academic freedom, or the lack thereof, provided by the state Baptist conventions. The interests on both sides are easy to understanding: the state convention wants the college to toe a theological line, and the college wants a bit more freedom to let its students and professors explore other thoughts. Of course, this tension is at the heart of a religious education. Then again, the increasingly hard-line nature of SBC leadership over the past decades may have sharpened this tension to the breaking point.
This tension is an opening for Baptist liberals to start to unravel the conservative dominance over their denomination. Could liberal Baptist groups like the American Baptist Churches start to provide supplementary funding to off-set losses in money from the state conventions? They might start small, by, say, endowing a professorship or funding a number of scholarships. I'm not sure that either the colleges or the American Baptists would want to go down that road, of course. But it's something to think about.
