Dog, elephant and Southern Baptist intolerance

Oklahoma Baptist bloggers like Wade Burleson aren’t all about animal-friends stories. Or, once upon a time when the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) was still larger, they weren’t reduced to a metaphoric tale about about a dog and an elephant who are best friends. Even as recently as Nov. 7, 2007, although he had already left the SBC, pastor David Flick met the issues of SBC conflict head-on with a bullet-point historic summation.

Like Burleson, he sees intolerance as an overarching problem. He wrote:

This week, Southern Baptist intolerance has raised its ugly head yet again. The International Mission Board could not tolerate trustee, Wade Burleson’s, principled dissent on several issues of little consequence. In the scheme of things, Burleson’s dissent amounts to little more than a hill of beans. Yet the IMB, led by chairman John Floyd and former chairman, Jerry Corbaley, censured him. In a wildly slanderous and lengthy report, Cobaley accused Burleson of slander and sin. Burleson’s censure says a lot about the credibility of the IMB. on a scale of 1-10, the IMB’s credibility is minus-6. It says a lot about Burleson’s credibility as well. On the same scale, Burleson’s credibility is a strong-9.

Yet more than intolerance is involved, Flick argues in a document here which deserves to be revisited while others attempt to arrest the well-foreseen inquisitorial process which has been grinding down the SBC. Flick details a history of manipulative conservative Baptist myth-making. Baptist-associated businesslike institutions — colleges and hospitals, for example — which are capable of reacting to the conservative takeover strategies have in general done so. They have progressively disassociated themselves from the SBC. Tony Cartledge chronicles North Carolina’s experience with those departures in The Changing Face of the BSC [.pdf].

Left behind are enterprises like the North Carolina Biblical Recorder, which was apparently too legally entangled to detach.

Yes, Burleson is late to the game, as John Pierce of Baptists Today observed in reviewing Burleson’s new book, Hardball Religion: Feeling the Fury of Fundamentalism.

Still it is Hardball, as Burleson said in the title of his book — not saccharine zoo-animal stories — and has been played for decades, with an accumulating destruction score.