Monday, June 29, 1998

Save us from those who know truth

By Donald Kaul

A lot of people seemed shocked -- shocked! -- a couple of weeks ago when the Southern Baptist Convention anointed Man as official leader of his family and called on Woman to "submit herself graciously" to her husband's leadership. Actually, it rates no more than a 1.5 on the Shocking News of the Week Richter scale.

This is the same convention, after all, that last year tried to mount a boycott of Disney because it felt the company was in danger of being fair to homosexuals. You expected maybe it was going to come out for equal rights for women?

I don't think so. In any case, there is hardly a major religion that does not, at its fundamentalist edge, place women in a lesser position to men. Catholics, Jews, Protestants, Moslems, Hindus -- they all make women sit in the back of the bus one way or another. (In a particularly egregious example, religious leaders in Afghanistan recently decreed that no girls be educated after the age of 8.)

The progressive elements of most religions, of course, do not buy into this arrangement. The Roman Catholic bishops in the United States, for example, issued a pastoral message a few years ago saying that marriage required a "mutual submission" of husband and wife to each other.

Not so the Southern Baptists, whose leadership has grown increasingly conservative over the past 20 years. According to their reading of the Bible (and for them that is the only reading), God mandates the leadership of men even as He does the leadership of Christ within the church.

"The secular world may hear it as strange," said R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., "but it is, we believe, God's pattern."

The message would be a matter of little moment except that the 16-million-member Southern Baptist movement is becoming evermore influential in our society. There was a time in our history when the church of the ruling classes here was Episcopal, America's version of the Church of England.

Now, however, the president of the United States, the vice president, the speaker of the House and the Senate majority leader are all Southern Baptists, of one stripe or another. That's not disquieting, exactly -- there are Southern Baptists and there are Southern Baptists -- but neither is it comforting. Contemporary history does not offer many examples of nations who have profited from falling into the hands of religious fundamentalists.

If I could sum up my reaction in one phrase, it would be this: God save us from religious zealots. The deeply religious mind tends toward narrowness and an inability to see the other fellow's point of view. When you've got an exclusive franchise on The Word, after all, what is there to argue about? You're right; everyone else is wrong.

That's why the Founding Fathers, in their wisdom, gave us separation of church and state. They realized the most religious among us were generally unfit to govern because of their inability to compromise. As the nation has grown more complex and diverse through the years, and the need for compromise more acute, their decision looks better and better.

The Baptists did do one thing at their convention I found vastly amusing. The convention was held in Salt Lake City, the citadel of the Church of Latter Day Saints.

Don't get me wrong; I think Mormons are great people, salt of the earth -- clean, thrifty, reverent, honest and able to brush after every meal. But they do get in your face, don't they?

Who has not been confronted by a Mormon (or, more characteristically, a pair of Mormons) at some time in his or her life, Mormons who insist on calling you to their faith?

I am sometimes irritated by this, almost always vaguely insulted. I have my own set of beliefs, such as they are, and I'm comfortable with them; how dare they (or any other proselytizers) accost me in my home to challenge those beliefs?

Anyway, what the Baptists did while they were in Salt Lake City was to print up pamphlets critical of Mormon theology, then fan out over the city by the hundreds to knock on doors and see whom they could convert.

It gave the Mormons a taste of their own evangelical medicine and, I hope, an insight into how many of us feel about their efforts to rescue us from sin.

E-mail Donald Kaul at otcoffee@aol.com or write to him c/o Tribune Media Services. Inc., 435 N. Michigan Ave., Suite 1400, Chicago, IL 60611.