Southern baptist convention interracial marriage

Williams, and many, many others, continually preach that racial segregation is a wicked sin — for white people, that is. They tell us that segregated neighborhoods, schools, and social groups are evidence that the vast majority of white people are guilty of hating their non-white neighbors, especially blacks, and that God is not pleased with this terrible situation, because He absolutely despises racism. No, far more shameful and disgusting is that our evangelical churches are largely segregated. These SBC leaders say that this dishonors Christ and denies the power of the gospel.

With a claimed 16 million members, has the distinctions of being the largest Protestant denomination in America and the largest Baptist denomination in the world. It has a particularly notable history of racism [1] although it does seem to be recovering the homophobia and sexism are both very much still evident. The Southern Baptist Convention was founded as a pro- slavery denomination in after a dispute over the appropriateness of letting slave-owners be missionaries to Africa. The Baptists never were as anti-slavery as were, for instance, the Quakers or the Methodists. Four of the Convention's founders were slave-owners who were "were deeply complicit in the defense of slavery". Neutrality, however, wasn't enough for the slave-owning elites they'd attracted and slave owners insisted on the Baptists condoning slavery by allowing slave owners to be missionaries; this was too much even for the Baptists and they refused.

In defending his postmodernist vision of Christianity truth is fluid; inerrancy is passe, and so forth , Tony argued that I actually was closer to his position than I realize, precisely because of my stance on interracial marriage. I told the caller that the Scripture nowhere forbids interracial marriage, that the distinctions to worry about should be of the Spirit not the skin-color. Tony, rightly, observed that my great-grandfather would not have said that. And, Tony is right, interracial marriage is actually a very good test-case for his position. Previous generations of Southern Baptists, as Jones pointed out, opposed interracial marriage, integrated churches, and even the abolition of human slavery precisely because they were historically-situated and cutlurally-shaped by prevailing notions of human nature and racial hierarchy.

Moore, a white man from Mississippi, was opening a meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention in Nashville, Tennessee, with an eminently tweetable, infinitely complicated call to end racial division within the church. Millennials care deeply about race and racial justice, so the church has to care, too. And they are part of a consistent, longstanding effort. Since at least , the church has been publicly repenting for its history of racial discrimination.