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Cartoons & The Latest Bad/Good Southern Baptist News

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 News Update: Debt ceiling “negotiations” continue . . .


And Rep. George Santos Keeps Working With His Mentor . . . .

A preview of the campaign strategy . . .

Speaking of George Santos, he was carefully accessorized when he arrived  at his office on Tuesday. But when arrested shortly after, the AR-15 pin was gone . . . .

As this new binder cover was rolled out, unconfirmed rumors swirled that three justices were holding up its completion, demanding that the text be printed on Charmin Ultra Strong. Asked how this dispute could be resolved, a court spokesperson said, “Depends . . . .”

The winner of Wednesday’s CNN Town Hall Star Lookalike contest, outside the studio, working for autographs to add to their collection …

Another full-color nightmare about 2024 .. .

[NOTE: The following is not satire. For many Baptists it will be read as bad news; for this observer, it’s all good. The SBC is the heir to the American church tradition that championed slavery to the bitter end, blessed treason and secession, then stood as a bulwark of segregation, continues to exclude women from equal status and leadership, is promoting coverups of abuse scandals involving many prominent pillars of its brand of piety, and is a major stronghold of the religious authoritarianism that threatens all the best in our republic’s history and future. To see it shrinking steadily should warm the heart of sincere Christians there and everywhere.]

(Religion News Service) — The long, slow decline of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination continues.

Membership in the Southern Baptist Convention was down by nearly half a million in 2022, according to a recently released denomination report. Nashville-based Lifeway Research reported Tuesday (May 9) that the SBC had 13.2 million members in 2022, down from 13.68 million in 2021. That loss of 457,371 members is the largest in more than a century, according to the Annual Church Profile compiled by Lifeway.

Once a denomination of 16.3 million, the SBC has declined by 1.5 million members since 2018, and by more than 3 million members since 2006. The COVID-19 pandemic played a role in the downturn, as did the reality that as older members die off, there are fewer young people to replace them.

"SBC membership falls to lowest number since late 1970s" Graphic courtesy of Lifeway Research

“SBC membership falls to lowest number since late 1970s” Graphic courtesy of Lifeway Research

The denomination has also been in a constant state of crisis in recent years, including a major sex abuse scandal, controversies over race and an ongoing feud over the denomination’s leadership and future direction.

Church membership rolls had also likely been filled with people who were no longer part of the congregation.

“Much of the downward movement we are seeing in membership reflects people who stopped participating in an individual congregation years ago and the record keeping is finally catching up,” said Scott McConnell, executive director of Lifeway Research, in a statement about the report.

"SBC membership continues decline, attendance rebounds post-COVID" Graphic courtesy of Lifeway Research

“SBC membership continues decline, attendance rebounds post-COVID” Graphic courtesy of Lifeway Research

The denomination also lost 416 churches and another 165 “church-type” missions, according to the report.

Even as membership dropped, attendance at worship services continues to recover from pandemic lows. Attendance was up 5% to 3.8 million in 2022, after falling from 4.4 million in 2020 to 3.6 million in 2021, due largely to COVID-19 disruptions.

Churches reported 180,177 baptisms for 2022, up 16% from 2021. Like attendance, baptisms took a steep hit during the pandemic, from 235,748 in 2019 to 123,160 in 2020. Baptism numbers then began increasing in 2021.

"SBC baptisms rebound some after COVID-19 collapse" Graphic courtesy of Lifeway Research

“SBC baptisms rebound some after COVID-19 collapse” Graphic courtesy of Lifeway Research

Despite the decline in members, giving to the SBC remained steady. Receipts at SBC churches totaled nearly $10 billion, up 2% from 2021.

The SBC will hold its annual meeting June 13-14 in New Orleans. There, delegates — known as messengers — from local churches will hear an update from a task force charged with implementing abuse reforms and elect a president for the denomination. The current president, Texas pastor Bart Barber, faces a challenge from Georgia pastor Mike Stone, who narrowly lost the presidential election to Ed Litton in 2021.

Messengers at the meeting will also discuss the role of women in church leadership. Earlier this year, the SBC’s Executive Committee voted to expel several churches for having women pastors, including Saddleback Church, a California megachurch and one of the denomination’s largest congregations, for having women pastors. Saddleback is expected to appeal that decision.

A Virginia pastor has also proposed an amendment to the SBC’s constitution that would bar churches with women pastors from being part of the denomination. The SBC’s statement of faith limits the office of pastor to men — but churches disagree on whether that limit applies only to the role of senior pastors or to all pastoral roles at churches.

Black & White & Other Colors, Racism, Slavery, Stories - From Life & Elsewhere, Stories-Quaker

A Story. Could I get it published in Florida this year? Probably not. Maybe Not New York Either?

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According to some of what I read and hear these days, I definitely should not have written this story, about a young slave girl and the Quaker saint John Woolman.

Why not? Mostly because of what I wasn’t: I wasn’t a girl (& never had been); wasn’t a slave (or even an enslaver, for that matter); wasn’t Black, and (late entry) had no plans to have the tale vetted by an ethnic/cultural sensitivity reader.

But also because of what I was: white, male, urban, not young, more or less middle class

I still am that last batch, except considerably more not young. Continue reading A Story. Could I get it published in Florida this year? Probably not. Maybe Not New York Either? →

Bible Study, Books & Book Reviews, Good News, Remarkable People, Sacred, Slavery, The Spirit

Bible Study: Two Subversive Parables

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[NOTE: This is the substance of a message offered at Spring Friends Meeting this morning, March 5 2023.]

“[T ]he one thing about Jesus that can be known with certainty,” wrote the late New Testament scholar William Herzog II, “was that he was executed as an enemy of the state and the Temple.”

Yes. We’re talking about the Roman imperial state, and the Second Temple of priestly Judaism. Continue reading Bible Study: Two Subversive Parables →

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Cartoons for an “Unfunny” Time

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Upside down much?

It doesn’t seem there’s any way around it: so far, 2023 is a Big Bust as far as editorial cartoons go.

We now have proof of that, at least in the form that counts for the educated classes, a statement by an elite college professor, Continue reading Cartoons for an “Unfunny” Time →

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A Great, Substantive Read: Henry Louis Gates Jr. on the Return of the “Lost Cause” Censorship, and the Need for Real Debate on Black Issues in America

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[NOTE: Henry Louis Gates could well be the best professor I never had.

I was first knocked over by his intellect and insight when I found his 1993 article that challenged the use of what was then newly-called “Critical Race Theory” as justification for repression of free speech by essentially private, often mob action, now often referred to as deplatforming or the “heckler’s veto.”

The title of his article essentially sums it up: Why Civil Liberties Pose No Threat to Civil Rights. Let Them Talk. It was calm, thorough, clear, erudite and for me utterly persuasive. It was published in The New Republic, but an unpaywalled version of it is online here. 

Gates predicted failure for this CRT movement,  and one could debate whether that failure has come about thirty years later. For me his most prophetic note was struck in this concluding paragraph:

And yet the movement will not have been without its political costs. I cannot put it better than [law professor] Charles Lawrence himself, who writes: “I fear that by framing the debate as we have–as one in which the liberty of free speech is in conflict with the elimination of racism– we have advanced the cause of racial oppression and placed the bigot on the moral high ground, fanning the rising flames of racism.”
In 2023, news from many states would seem to be confirming this ominous forecast daily.
Gates has also courted controversy with articles that critically portray the deep complicity of many African groups and peoples in the Atlantic slave trade, which was accurate but elicited howls of invective. 
“People wanted to kill me, man,” Gates says of the reaction to that op-ed. “Black people were so angry at me. But we need to get some distance from the binary opposition we were raised in: evil white people and good Black people. The world just isn’t like that.”
He was also pilloried for suggesting that the issue of reparations brings with it many complexities, few yet worked out satisfactorily. Gates last year waded into the debates over reparations, stating in a New York Times Op-ed that “There are many thorny issues to resolve before we can arrive at a judicious (if symbolic) gesture to match such a sustained, heinous crime,” in particular the pervasive involvement of other indigenous Africans in kidnapping and selling as much as ninety per cent of those who forced into the Middle Passage nightmare.


“The African role in the slave trade,” Gates wrote, “was fully understood and openly acknowledged by many African-Americans even before the Civil War. For Frederick Douglass, it was an argument against repatriation schemes for the freed slaves. [NOTE: These “repatriation” or “colonization” schemes were, by the way, long supported by many Quakers.]

“The savage chiefs of the western coasts of Africa, who for ages have been accustomed to selling their captives into bondage and pocketing the ready cash for them, will not more readily accept our moral and economical ideas than the slave traders of Maryland and Virginia,” Douglass warned. “We are, therefore, less inclined to go to Africa to work against the slave trade than to stay here to work against it.”

Now, only this week, Gates has taken up his Op-ed pen again, in a long but incisive exploration of two related concerns: one is the burgeoning zombie apocalypse of school and state censorship of serious educational exploration of racism and other freighted current issues. The other is the need for Black Americans, scholars, teachers and others concerned with justice and equity, to face up to the task, particularly in dealing with whites (both friends and critics) with the long and continuing history of vigorous, often intense debates among Blacks over many key issues they faced.

Gates says,

It is often surprising to students to learn that there has never been one way to “be Black” among Black Americans, nor have Black politicians, activists and scholars ever spoken with one voice or embraced one ideological or theoretical framework. Black America, that “nation in a nation,” as the Black abolitionist Martin R. Delany put it, has always been as varied and diverse as the complexions of the people who have identified, or been identified, as its members. . . .

Why shouldn’t students be introduced to these debates? Any good class in Black studies seeks to explore the widest range of thought voiced by Black and white thinkers on race and racism over the long course of our ancestors’ fight for their rights in this country.”

I’ll stop quoting here, and below let Gates make his own case, which he does best.

I believe there are very important implications in these passages for predominately white groups who want to be active allies to Blacks in their struggles. The call from Gates to these whites is for a reckoning with the deep shortcomings of too much of what has for too long passed as trendy “anti-racism” in their circles.

It’s time for serious attention to grappling with and relating to the long history and active presence of many sharp debates over differences and debate among Blacks. This is needed both because it is a mark of real engagement rather than token, masked condescension, and as a basis for overdue reassessment of the mixed and even counterproductive results of many so-called anti-racism or DEI (Diversity, Equity & Inclusion) programming, and not least, a reconsideration of strategy and priorities.

And not least, it’s a damn fine read. So sit back, put your feet up, and dive into this monumentally enlightening article

OPINION

Who’s Afraid of Black History?

Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Gates’s pioneering (and controversial) textbook describing and sampling the intense and extended debates on major issues of freedom and equity among Back Americans — many of which continue, abiding issues expressed in contemporary vocabulary.

“We believe in teaching kids facts and how to think, but we don’t believe they should have an agenda imposed on them,” Governor DeSantis said. He also decried what he called “indoctrination.”

School is one of the first places where society as a whole begins to shape our sense of what it means to be an American. It is in our schools that we learn how to become citizens, that we encounter the first civics lessons that either reinforce or counter the myths and fables we gleaned at home.

Each day of first grade in my elementary school in Piedmont, W.Va., in 1956 began with the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag, followed by “America (My Country, ’Tis of Thee).” To this day, I cannot prevent my right hand from darting to my heart the minute I hear the words of either.

Continue reading A Great, Substantive Read: Henry Louis Gates Jr. on the Return of the “Lost Cause” Censorship, and the Need for Real Debate on Black Issues in America →