Religious Right + SBC Fundamentalists = flight of millennials from the church?

Oklahoma’s Bruce Prescott ponders the conjunction of dates. The millennials, “who were born after 1980 and came of age around the millennium,” certainly grew up amid the ardent voices of the Southern Baptist Convention’s fundamentalists and the others of the Religious Right. As Prescott observes:

The fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention began in 1979. The rise of the Religious Right in America dates from the same year.

Certainly Prescott is not the first to see “a link between in-your-face religion in the public square and declining interest in organized religion among young people.”

While not focused precisely on the issue Prescott addresses, Michael Gerson, senior research fellow in the Center on Faith & International Affairs at the Institute for Global Engagement, made a show of discovering the relationship for himself late last year.

Somewhat similarly, Tullian Tchividjian, grandson of Billy Graham, responded to the shift in public attitudes away from right-wing political zeal and turned Ft. Lauderdale’s Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church away from its hyper-political, right-wing activist heritage.

Of course he had to fight off an attempt by the old hands to remove him from the pulpit there.

In the necessity of that fight is one answer to Prescott’s closing question: Will those who helped bring the alienation about “ever realize“?

Apparently not.

The online demise of The Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood [Update]

The Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood Web site is back. They explain their long absence as follows:

Approximately three weeks ago, it appears that someone hacked into our server and severely damaged the CBMW website. Not only did this prohibit use of the site but is also kept us from even being able to send out a mass email to even explain the challenge we were facing to some of you.

We have been working around the clock to fix the problem. In addition to this, we moved our entire site to a different server that will give us access to more technical help in the future and will save us quite a bit of money as well. I am deeply grateful for the people who helped us rectify the situation and enable us to once again serve you with material that will help your home and church.

Not persuasive reasons for an extended outage, unless you stir in large helpings of other management issues. Whatever the case, they did not fulfill Wade Burleson’s wish [explained below].

The Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW) is as of this writing missing from the Web and Internet at large. The domain name has apparently not been lost to them, but it isn’t attached to a server.

They lent their fundamentally Southern Baptist clout to the Danvers Statement on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, which was subsequently affirmed as a key document of faith by Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary and by Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Wade Burleson today says in his comment on the CBMW’s perhaps temporary Internet invisibility:

Over the course of the past three years I have written a few times about The Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW). Southern Baptists, including Dorothy Patterson, Al Mohler, Danny Akin and others, serve on the Board of Directors of the Council. Randy Stinson, Dean of Church Ministries at Southern Seminary, serves as the Executive Director of the CBMW. I have written about CBMW teaching various forms of patriarchy, calling Irving Bible Church elders’ decision to allow a woman to teach the Bible “a grave moral concern” (comparable to homosexuality), advocating the eternal subordination of women to men, encouraging abused women to merely “pray for their husbands,” and stating that opposing “male authority” is the same as opposing Christ’s authority.

He proposes that CBMW return as a site of “scholarly exegesis.”

Rather than, say, continue as a living caricature of Christian paternalism.

Caner apologizes for calling Rankin a liar

The president of a Baptist seminary has apologized for a personal attack on the head of the International Mission Board.

Ergun Caner, the president of Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary, said he got carried away while criticizing the Camel Method of outreach to Muslims, according to a report by Associated Baptist Press. Caner said the deceptive strategy meant IMB president Jerry Rankin is lying.

Caner said he admitted in a chapel service at the seminary that he made a mistake. He also sent Rankin a letter of apology.

“If you’re dumb enough to say something like that, you’ve got to be man enough to own up to it,” he said.