In 2004, my wife and I left our church of 17 years because it had become clear to us that a Fundamentalist mentality had a death grip on it. The first “red flag” of a Fundamentalist bent, however, had come 12 years earlier. In a 1992 Sunday morning sermon, the pastor had bragged of receiving a call from Adrian Rogers – who 13 years earlier had been elected SBC president as the Fundamentalists fired the first shot in their fight for control – asking him to help set up a campaign rally in Dallas for the elder George Bush in his reelection campaign against Bill Clinton and Ross Perot. I wouldn’t be surprised if the pulpit were a little damp that morning from the drool dripping from the pastor’s lips as he couldn’t contain his excitement over getting a call from the Fundamentalist icon.
Last week, in my post entitled “Closing Logsdon Seminary: A ‘financial’ decision, or not?” I mentioned the 2015 attempt by David Hardage, executive director of the Baptist General Convention of Texas (BGCT), to build a relationship between the BGCT and Southwestern Seminary. When David told me how delighted he was to receive Paige Patterson’s invitation to speak to Southwestern’s students, and of being welcomed into the Pattersons’ home, it reminded me of my former pastor’s excitement over getting a call from Adrian Rogers.
In explaining his decision to reciprocate by inviting Patterson to speak to the BGCT staff, David told me, “Well, he was nice to me, and I like to be nice to people who are nice to me.” However, the Baptist Building was not David’s home; in extending this invitation, he was representing Texas Baptists and their interests.
Somehow, it just seems to me that an invitation from the man who destroyed the fellowship of the SBC and then tried to do the same thing to the very convention (BGCT) that you now lead – well, that should raise suspicion, not excitement.
I love the Baptist General Convention of Texas – I still have many friends among the staff there; I love its many ministries, institutions, and especially its schools. (See my blog post of February 21, 2017, on the old TBC blog – When family doesn’t want you anymore.)
But I don’t like what the BGCT is becoming under the leadership of David Hardage – an arm of the Fundamentalist Southern Baptist Convention.
I don’t like the tactics I see being used. When the Fundamentalists embarked on their quest to seize control of the Southern Baptist Convention, it wasn’t their theology that was the problem. It was their refusal to recognize the God-given right of other Baptists to disagree with them. But it wasn’t just that – it was their underhanded tactics, their utter lack of ethics. Secret meetings . . . busing & flying messengers in for the presidential vote, after which the vast majority would return home. And their underhanded methods of counting votes – registering toddlers as messengers, giving their parents an extra ballot or two; a vote total in 1985 that exceeded the number of people in the hall by 4,000! Presidents issuing rulings that purposely misquoted the by-laws, and afterwards revising the by-laws to match the phony ruling. And the bullying! Cutting off microphones of those who opposed them, for example. (See The Fundamentalist Takeover in the Southern Baptist Convention: A Brief History, by Rob James and Gary Leazer; Going for the Jugular: A Documentary History of the SBC Holy War, compiled & edited by Walter B. Shurden and Randy Shepley; and Bill Jones’s Baptist Briefs videos The Fundamentalist Takeover of the SBC: 1985 – An Opportunity Denied, part 1 & part 2.)
Now I see similar tactics being employed at the BGCT.
This past Tuesday afternoon, I spoke on the phone with David Currie about the closing of Logsdon Seminary and the revelations of retired Dean Don Williford about the political maneuverings that led to it. We agreed that there has been a resurgence of Fundamentalism among Texas Baptists in recent years.
David and I both served as executive director of Texas Baptists Committed (TBC), the organization formed to prevent a Fundamentalist takeover of the Baptist General Convention of Texas. Under David’s leadership (1987-2009), TBC did just that.
Once the Fundamentalists had gained control of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1990, they turned their attention to the largest state convention – the BGCT – and used a similar strategy, running candidates for president at each Annual Meeting. But – contrary to their unrelenting success in SBC elections – they lost every election at the BGCT. In 1998, they formed their own state convention – the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention (SBTC) – and quit running candidates in the BGCT elections.
The reason Fundamentalists lost in Texas, year after year, was that David Currie tirelessly traveled the state throughout the 1990s, speaking in churches, educating Baptists on the Baptist principles at stake; exposing the Fundamentalists’ lies and their destruction of those precious Baptist distinctives; and motivating & mobilizing traditional Baptists to go to the BGCT Annual Meetings as messengers and vote for the Moderate candidates who would preserve the distinctively Baptist heritage of the BGCT.
Unfortunately, once the SBTC formed, and there was no longer a Fundamentalist presence vying for the BGCT presidency at the Annual Meeting, many of TBC’s supporters decided the threat was ended once and for all. Fundamentalists had gone “underground,” so to speak; the SBTC focused its efforts for control on the local church, picking off one church after another from the BGCT over the past two decades, and turning them over to the authoritarian control of pastors hand-picked by the SBTC. Most of those churches didn’t even realize what was happening to them until it was too late, and many of them found their unity and fellowship destroyed by the Fundamentalists who had gained control of them.
But, because it wasn’t as visible as a fight for the convention presidency had been, we Moderates didn’t even make a “battle” out of it. TBC’s support dwindled increasingly, as some of our long-time supporters grew older and died, and others simply were weary of fighting and didn’t want to believe there was still a fight to be had.
That seems to always be the case – those who defend freedom eventually grow weary of fighting and want to move on and spend their time enjoying the freedom they’ve fought to defend. But those who seek power and control never grow weary . . . they are relentless. Think of Hitler’s forces – swallowing up first this country, then moving on to seize another, and on and on and on. It’s that quest for total control that continually drives them.
And now Fundamentalism is not only back – it’s in the driver’s seat at the BGCT. Fundamentalism, you see, isn’t a theology. It’s an unquenchable thirst for power and control . . . in religious matters, it’s an insistence that they have the full truth, the ONLY truth. When they speak of the Bible being inerrant, what they mean is that their interpretation of scripture is inerrant. When they call others ‘liberal,’ it’s because those standing accused interpret scripture differently than they do OR that the accused recognize the freedom of others to interpret scripture differently.
David Hardage has brought Fundamentalism to the leadership of the BGCT, and the majority of the BGCT Executive Board – as well as the majority of BGCT messengers and their pastors – have been complicit in this hostile Fundamentalist takeover of the BGCT.
When David Hardage was named executive director in 2012, he immediately declared – without being asked – that the BGCT would never, on his watch, compromise its traditional stance that homosexual behavior is sinful. He later sent a letter to pastors throughout the BGCT, warning them that – if their churches crossed the line that he had drawn on this matter – he would see to it that they were removed from BGCT fellowship and affiliation.
Ultimately, he persuaded a majority of BGCT messengers to the 2016 Annual Meeting, and then a majority of the Executive Board, to affirm his quest to drive out churches – beginning with Wilshire Baptist in Dallas (my home church) and First Baptist Austin – that had crossed the line he had drawn.
Then there was the Paige Patterson matter. One of David’s stated reasons for building such a relationship was to encourage Southwestern Seminary students to be amenable to pastoring BGCT churches. When I observed that it was odd for him – as the leader of the BGCT – to want to encourage students who had been indoctrinated to think of women as being in inferior roles to men both in the church and home, and indoctrinated in a church model in which the pastor exercises power over the thinking of his staff and congregation, Hardage’s back stiffened in his chair, and he said he resented my questioning him about this.
Now we learn from Don Williford that, following Williford’s retirement as dean, Hardage met with Hardin-Simmons President Eric Bruntmyer and directed him to “take the helm of Logsdon Seminary and steer it to the right”; and that, according to Eric Bruntmyer’s own remarks to the HSU faculty, Hardage later hosted a meeting that included Bruntmyer and three west Texas pastors – Howie Batson (FBC Amarillo), Bobby Dagnel (FBC Lubbock), and Darin Wood (FBC Midland) – at which Hardage, followed by the others present, attacked Logsdon as “liberal” and began plotting how to turn the majority of the HSU trustee body against Logsdon. In his attack, Hardage accused Logsdon faculty of endorsing homosexual behavior, which was a flat-out lie. (Closing Logsdon Seminary: A ‘financial decision, or not? by Bill Jones, 2/15/2020; and Response to President Eric Bruntmyer’s Letter to HSU Alumni and Members of the News Media, by Don Williford, 2/18/2020)
What really made Logsdon “liberal” in the eyes of Hardage, Bruntmyer, and the three pastors was that Logsdon faculty and administration defended Baptist principles, particularly the principle of local church autonomy, against Hardage’s effort to deny the autonomy of churches to determine how to interpret scriptural attitudes toward homosexual behavior, and to determine where LGBTQ people stood in terms of both membership and service within their local congregation.
This week, the SBC’s Baptist Press quoted SBC President J.D. Greear as saying, “Southern Baptists can hold different opinions on matters not essential for salvation.” So is where we stand on homosexual behavior a doctrine “essential for salvation”? If you answered “yes,” please tell me how you arrived at that!
We Moderates do not hold, contrary to the accusation often leveled at us, that you can believe “anything” and be a Baptist. But we do believe that, according to our Baptist heritage AND according to scripture, we have the freedom to interpret scripture under the Holy Spirit’s guidance, without the interference of others. There are, to be sure, scriptures that relate to the deity of Jesus, salvation through Jesus’ death on the cross and resurrection, that are “essential for salvation,” in the words of J.D. Greear.
Fundamentalists are not being “faithful to the Bible,” as they claim. They are being faithful to their own narrow interpretations and demanding that others adhere – not to the Bible – but to their preferred understanding of it.
There has been a hostile Fundamentalist takeover of the BGCT. What say ye, Texas Baptists? Is this truly what you want? If so, you’ve got it. If not, what are you going to do about it?