Glancing around the internet, I've seen a number of people denying that Southern Baptists teach the supremacy of the husband within the family. For these ill-informed nay-sayers, I have provided a link to articles in the April 1999 issue of SBC Life. SBC Life is an official publication of the Executive Board of the Southern Baptitst Convention.
These articles in the April 1999 issue of SBC Life appeared after I published the November 1998 issue of the Mainstream Messenger.
My response to the SBC Life articles appeared in the April 1999 issue of the Mainstream Messenger
The Baptist Press story about Huckabee affirming the SBC's marriage stance is a blatant attempt to mislead both Baptists and the American public. As Aaron Weaver points out on a Baptist Life Forum, Baptist Press adds an interpretative explanation to Huckabee's statement about husbands being submissive. They add "presumably meaning 'to Christ'" to his statement about husbands submitting. That's because the Southern Baptists who affirm the SBC's family statement do not believe that husbands should ever be submissive to their wives. Southern Baptist families are supposed to uphold a rigid chain-of-command. They believe husbands are rulers over their wives. In their view, Southern Baptist husbands should only be submissive to Christ.
For previous blogs I've written regarding Huckabee's endorsement of the SBC family statement, look here and here.
Here's a link to Ethics Daily's coverage of Huckabee's statement.
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5 comments:
Bruce:
I brought all this to a post at baptistlife.com
I think you may be missing a larger opportunity here in the conversation Huckabee's bid gives us.
Rare opportunity here to bring Garry Wills and other's review of the Rove era as it relates to Richard Land and the SBC; great opportunity to bring that to national attention; and to this date I think you and Bob Allen have missed it full throttle; though I continue to be encouraged by the places where you have gotten close to the bigger argument.
I didn't express myself well.
If you and ED.com don't make the can opener point, then the likes of Howard Fineman and his strong reservations about Huckabee this week in Newsweek are askew.
Please engage the conversation at bl.com as you entertain responses here.
Sfox
Fox,
You're going to have to point me to Garry Wills interpretation of the Rove era, I'm not familiar with it.
As far as I can tell, religious doctrine mixed into politics does nothing but give politicians the sense that their own denominational understanding of their particular religion is the Truth that, one way or another, they're committed to figuring out how to impose on America.
Unhealthy in a pluralistic society. I've been taking this up on my blog in recent posts and haven't yet heard a good argument to the contrary.
Bruce:
Get a rush order, or see if it is in your nearest Barnes and Noble.
Google up a review.
Wills is singing our song in his concluding Chapter or American Christianities, Head and Heart.
Great blog fodder for you; in fact out of the gate do a Review for Ethicsdaily.com using Wills as context to nuance Huckabee and Richard Land.
I took it as a given you were already on top of it.
Do get to it immediately; you'll be glad you did.
Sfox
Check Jacques Berlinner in today's Newsweek Religion blog. I got the link up in the Bl.com discussion titled Huckabee and Prescott
And this from the LA Times Review of Wills:
Wills moves chronically through U.S. history, outlining the ebb and flow of enlightenment and evangelism through the decades and centuries, pausing throughout to provide thumbnail sketches of the significant personalities involved.
Eventually he comes to the Bush administration: "The right wing in American likes to think that the United States government was, at its inception, highly religious, specifically highly Christian, and -- and more to the point -- highly biblical." This was not true of that or any later government -- until 2000. Wills is particularly shrewd in delineating Karl Rove's part in bringing this about: While crediting the former White House advisor's mastery of electoral technologies, Wills argues that "his real skill lay in finding how to use religion as a political tool . . . . He shaped the hard core of the Republican Party around resentments religious people felt over abortion, homosexuality, Darwinism, women's liberation, pornography and school prayer . . . . Rove made the executive branch of the United States more openly and avowedly religious than it had ever been, though he had no discernible religious belief himself. His own indifference allowed him to be ecumenical in his appeal to Protestants, Catholics and Jews."
The Protestant wing of this coalition, Wills writes, was predisposed toward Bush, but Catholics were the big electoral prize. Pollsters have noted that Catholics who regularly assist at Mass are more socially conservative and open to GOP candidates. Moreover, Father Richard John Neuhaus, editor of the influential journal First Things and a convert from Lutheranism's evangelical wing, was a fixture in the Bush White House.
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