What was at Stake in the Takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention?

What was at Stake in the Takeover of the SBC? from Bruce Prescott on Vimeo.

This six minute video gives excerpts from interviews Bill Moyers did with Daniel Vestal and Paul Pressler in the mid-1980's. He asks each of them "What is at stake" in the takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention.

For Vestal the stakes were entirely spiritual, pertaining to relationships within the denomination and how the breakdown would affect the mission and witness of Southern Baptists.

For Pressler the stakes are primarily political, pertaining to the influence that the denomination would exert on the moral (meaning legal) and political life of the nation.

Moyers probes Pressler's relationship to the Council for National Policy (CNP). Pressler is reluctant to discuss it, but admits he a member of the board of directors.

Pressler was elected President of the CNP in 1989 -- the year the takeover of the SBC was complete. Jerry Falwell, Ed McAteer, Paige Patterson, and Rick Scarborough along with R. J. Rushdoony and a host of other Religious Right leaders have all been members of this very exclusive club.

The CNP is the primary organization by which a coterie of Religious Right leaders exert influence on secular politics. A good introduction to their work can be found in the 2004 New York Times article, "Club of the Most Powerful Gathers in Strictest Privacy." A more thorough treatment will be found in Russ Bellant's "The Coors Connection: How Coors Family Philanthropy Undermines Democratic Pluralism."