Southern Baptists are at it again. Meeting in Dallas last week, the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, passed several resolutions addressing the critical issues of our time. They resolved to ban pornography, oppose sports betting and outlaw abortion pills.
Well, okay. I think many decent people can agree that pornography is not a good thing, and sports gambling is out of hand. I have no interest in betting, but I gather from listening to commercials during NFL games that you can now wager on virtually anything related to a sports contest.
The abortion issue is a bit trickier for Southern Baptists. The messengers (delegates) to the Southern Baptist Convention in 1971 passed a resolution calling for the legalization of abortion, a resolution they reaffirmed in 1974, the year after Roe v. Wade, and again in 1976. So the resolution to outlaw abortion pills would seem to contradict earlier resolutions.
Southern Baptists appear to love resolutions, so what other important issues did they address? They dispatched congregations with woman preachers last year, after all, so having dealt with that urgent moral evil, they cleared the deck to take on other pressing issues this year.
How, for example, did the messengers feel about the forcible detention and deportation of immigrants? The Bible, after all, has a lot to say about welcoming the stranger and treating the foreigner as one of your own.
No resolution on that, I guess.
What about the assaults on the First Amendment and the separation of church and state? This is historically a Baptist issue; Southern Baptists, at least until 1979, have always been dogged defenders of the disestablishment clause of the First Amendment.
And now we see that the First Amendment is under unprecedented attack with the use of taxpayer money for religious education, the posting of the Ten Commandments in Texas and Louisiana public schools—all abetted by a benighted Supreme Court eager to uphold the Second Amendment and with no regard for the First Amendment.
Surely the Southern Baptists had something to say about protecting the faith from intrusions by the state.
Crickets.
Well, let’s move on.
Republicans in Congress are even now pushing through what they call their “Big, Beautiful Bill,” which will raise after-tax incomes for the highest-earning Americans at the expense of the poorest 30 percent of American households. According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, between 9.7 million and 14.4 million people are expected to lose health coverage due to cuts to Medicare. In addition, “The agency estimates that in general, resources would decrease for households toward the bottom of the income distribution, whereas resources would increase for households in the middle and top of the income distribution.”
According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the proposed cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act would deprive roughly 16 million Americans of medical coverage by 2034. Cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) would be devastating to many low-income families.
“The dramatic federal cuts to SNAP will hurt our children, our neighbors and the economy,” Kate Bauer, associate professor of nutritional sciences at the University of Michigan, said. “Every dollar that a SNAP user spends to buy food supports local businesses and food producers. The budget proposal takes billions of dollars from our communities only to make the most rich in our country even richer.”
This issue surely caught the attention of the Southern Baptist messengers in Dallas. Jesus healed the sick, after all, and he instructed his followers to care for “the least of these.” I’m confident that the messengers would want to weigh in on the dire consequences of the “Big, Beautiful Bill,” not to mention its affront to decency and morality.
Hmmm. I guess not. The war in Ukraine? The genocide in Gaza?
So what did the Southern Baptists deem worthy of their attention? The news coming out of Dallas highlighted the resolution to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 Supreme Court decision that legalized gay marriages.
Now, there’s an important issue. Jesus indeed had a great deal to say about marriage, especially divorce—although, curiously, Southern Baptist leaders have been remarkably muted in their criticisms of an authoritarian, thrice-married president.
And can some Southern Baptist remind me what Jesus had to say about homosexuality or same-sex marriage?
Just as I thought. Crickets again.
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An Episcopal priest, Balmer is John Phillips Professor in Religion at Dartmouth College and the author of more than a dozen books, with commentaries appearing in newspapers across the country. He is a contributing correspondent at Good Faith Media.
