Saturday, June 20, 1998

Surviving the sad spectacle of the Southern Baptists

By TOM EHRICH / Religion News Service

Salt Lake City survived the Southern Baptists. So, no doubt, will the nation.

But what a sad spectacle. In the name of one who loved his enemies, the nation's largest Protestant denomination devoted their annual meeting to heaping scorn on everyone from gays to feminists to the president to their Mormon hosts.

They declared family styles of the Titanic era as divinely inspired, and offered a selective reading of Scripture as proof that women should get back in the kitchen.

Then, having threatened political retribution against their enemies, 8,500 delegates closed their annual meeting by donning the martyred victim's robe. "We will be vilified," said family-values guru James Dobson. "We will be marginalized. But we answer to a higher authority."

How convenient. But, also, how bogus.

First, the Bible has more than one take on family values. Polygamy appears in Genesis, as do violent forms of sibling rivalry. When King David engaged in adultery, he paid a price but remained God's anointed king. Family in the biblical era was a harsh world, centered in property and economic necessity.

Paul himself argued celibacy was preferable to marriage -- indeed, that needing to be married was a sign of personal weakness. A strict hewing to biblical family values led many early Christians to leave families and enter monastic communities.

Second, exactly which golden era do Southern Baptists wish would return? Old times weren't such an ideal state. Incest was rampant, masters demanded sex from underlings, children were beaten and forced into sweatshops, and the aspirations of women were stifled. Cities had crime and gangs. Immigrants were brutalized. Racism dominated politics, as well as daily life. Divorce may have been less common, but lifeless and violent marriages still corroded human souls.

Southern Baptists seem to idealize an era when women stayed home, poured their lives into raising children, and happily allowed men to take the lead. Did that era ever exist outside the world of 1950s advertising? Prior to World War II, women worked outside the home in large numbers. Farm women worked all the time. To be sure, many occupations were closed to women, but keeping women in typing pools and out of executive suites hardly sounds like a biblical commandment.

During the war, women poured into factories and offices. Afterward, many women stepped aside so men returning from battle could have their jobs back. But that wasn't a godly admonition. It was developers and marketers inventing a new American myth: having conquered fascism, the American man strode out the front door to do battle in business, while Molly and the baby waited for their hero's return.

Some women saw managing a tract house as the "heaven" depicted in developers' ads, but many hated the return to artificially narrow horizons. It was the daughters of that post-war generation who, seared by the sight of their mothers' frustration, vowed to fight submission to men, and it is their daughters, in turn, who are populating businesses and professions in such numbers that American commerce would collapse if women were sent home.

Southern Baptists seem to believe God wants male domination. In fact, Jesus scandalized the people of his era by treating women as equals. Paul's point in Ephesians was that all Christians should "be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ." Wives to their husbands, and husbands to their wives. Submission wasn't seen as a yielding of power to a superior gender, but as loving and serving others.

Finally, Southern Baptists seem to believe that cultural decay can be traced to improper sex and to women getting out of line. A more biblical stance would be to blame the mass exodus from rural life that post-war economic expansion made possible.

The tension that dominates the Old Testament isn't about sex, it's about country vs. city. The prophets of ancient Israel believed moral decay happened when proud men built cities and towers climbing to the sky. The "cows of Bashan" despised by Amos were idle rich women with too little to do.

Cultural conservatism has its place in the American dialogue. But claiming biblical authority for one set of cultural norms is the very legalistic hypocrisy that Jesus denounced in his opponents.

(Tom Ehrich is a pastor, writer and software developer living in Winston-Salem, N.C.)