Quote:
Originally Posted by microbet
A bit unfair of a headline and article. You have to read all the way to find that they nearly unanimously passed a condemnation nearly as quickly as possible that was slightly different but was satisfactory to the author (a black pastor) of the original resolution and the only chaos mentioned was the uproar by both white and black members about how important it was to pass the resolution.
They were anti-white supremacy enough that Richard Spencer called them cucks.
If you look around on Twitter, you can see the battle here is real enough. I find it interesting because I think it's a microcosm of larger social, economic forces.
So: predominantly white Southern Baptists churches are shedding membership, number of baptisms are down, church attendance is down, etc.; the number of churches with mostly minority membership is the only segment of the Southern Baptism that's growing. Leadership is very aware of this and it's exerting a sort of pressure that was probably unimaginable 20 years ago let alone 50 years ago when the Southern Baptist church was like front and center white resistance to Civil Rights. And for sure, no doubt, tons of members and surely some leadership are still overt or unreformed white supremacists. But a lot of the leadership recognizes that sands are moving underneath them and their future necessarily involves black members and they can't afford to alienate them.
One of the potentially very interesting facets of modern American life is that while the Christian label and the evangelical label remains popular, church membership and participation is eroding. But it's eroding most precipitously among certain classes: poorer and middle class whites. Wealthier white participation in church in the South is basically steady; and if anything it's increasing among African Americans.
The intersection of politics is important from here: the people who are left still attending church and participating are not as strong of Trump supporters as the irregular or non-participants. The people still attending mainline religious services are on the whole better educated and wealthier.
In a real sense then church has become gentrified. It's obviously a little bit of an intentionally provocative point but the Southern Baptist church of all ****ing places is basically not much different from the social forces of segregation and social separation effecting all of America; not much different from a story about modern urbanization: mainstream church denominations are becoming wealthier, better educated and allying themselves with aspirational racial minorities who are seeking to become part of the system and in a large sense are being welcomed; and at the same time, a certain class of people -- largely less educated, in more precarious economic situations -- are withdrawing and disengaging from the institution.
These events like these fights at this convention and that convention are ultimate just minor data points on the plot but the collective data points becoming stunning the way we see, time and again, the way our identity, our institutions, our behaviors right down to people worship is increasingly stratified and segregated along new lines. Church is supposed to be like the eternal bedrock of the south, forever and unchanging (I realize in reality this has never been quite true). But in many ways is quickly following along the lines of the rest of Americans institutions with the same forces effecting it that we see effecting our schools, our work, our political parties, our cities.
Back to Trump, then, the elephant in every room including apparently this Southern Baptist convention thing: I am perhaps bad at predicting the specifics of the future particularly in the near term but left unchecked, you can see how this all feels a little dangerous. I of course applaud the Southern Baptist leadership in some respects because while I am sure they remain horrid dip****s about gay rights and a whole panoply of other issues, their attempts to be explicit and reform against racism is to be applauded. But put glibly, without the Southern ****ing Baptist church behind them, the number of institutions and structures underlying and buttressing downtrodden and angry white America are becoming vanishingly few. They've got the Republican Party and a sprawling media complex but even Fox seems a little wayward on the whole. They do not have my pity nor my sympathy but as I said, the number of predictable structures like churches, or civic life, or school, or work, or unions or really anything that might govern their behavior and give them a social purpose besides stewing in piles of rage are slowly eroding over time. That might not end well, and Trump is perhaps something like the canary in the coal mine.
