Faction warfare as the SBC admits its Conservative Resurgence largely failed

Recently, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) released a long report that functions as a referendum on their Conservative Resurgence. Most SBC-watchers already knew it was a failure, but now it’s official knowledge. Here’s why it was a slap in the face to that hijacking movement—along with some speculation about why it was created and released last week.

Some of the links between the people we’ll be discussing today surprised even me. The rot and cronyism run very deep in this situation! Buckle up for a wild ride!

(Quick note about terminology: The Old Guard is my name for the ultraconservative faction led by men like Ronnie Floyd. Their enemies are a group I call the Pretend Progressives because they act like they want the SBC to make actual progress on crises like racism, sexism, and sex abuse. Bart Barber and J.D. Greear stand out as two of their leaders. There’s little difference between the factions otherwise. Also, a “messenger” is someone attending the Annual Meeting. Messengers vote on stuff and bring up new business.)

(This post went live on Patreon on 6/4/2024. Its audio ‘cast lives there too and is publicly available now!)

A quick review of the Conservative Resurgence

The Conservative Resurgence was an ultraconservative hijacking of the SBC. It began in the late 1970s and was more or less completed by the 1990s. In 2000, the denomination formally adopted its main points. In a major update to their beliefs, they published the Baptist Faith and Message 2000 (archive).

If you ask Southern Baptists why the Conservative Resurgence happened, they’re likely—to a man, if you’ll pardon the pun—to tell you it was a civil war fought over inerrancy, just as racist white Americans can be counted upon to say that the American Civil War was fought over states’ rights.

We ask those racist white Americans about what Southern states wanted the right to do—which was to allow white people (like themselves) to own Black slaves. Similarly, we must ask Southern Baptists why they needed inerrancy so much.

The answer is just as simple and repulsive as the one we get from racist white Americans. SBC agitators needed inerrancy to put the lid on the coffin of women’s advancement to pastoral positions within their denomination. Here’s Al Mohler in 2021 (archive), as the president of one of the SBC’s seminaries—and one of the most loyal bootlickers and made men in the entire SBC:

The issue of women serving as pastors and preachers in churches roiled the Southern Baptist Convention from the 1970s until the Conservative Resurgence in the Convention clarified the question conclusively in the Baptist Faith & Message revision of 2000. [. . .]

In truth, the issue of women serving as pastors fueled the Conservative Resurgence in the SBC. The question was instantly clarifying. The divide over women serving in the pastorate served as a signal of the deeper divide over the authority and interpretation of the Bible.

Remember him, by the way. He’ll come up again in a minute—and it will be amazing to see that circle completed.

Southern Baptists had lots of reasons to be deeply unhappy in the 1970s. Sure, the hippie movement of the 1960s had produced a lot of wild-eyed converts, as we discussed recently. But they weren’t to the taste of the stolid, stalwart fuddy-duddies of the denomination.

Worse, women had begun to make major inroads to positions of power in SBC churches.

Out of every single cultural change wrought by the 1960s and 1970s, that one upset SBC leaders the most. It struck at every single sexist notion they had about the proper running of the universe, planet, human society, and family. They could countenance—barely—seeing Black men holding power in churches. But women? Never.

This change had to be stopped in its tracks.

More than that, though, it absolutely had to be reversed.

The Zeroth Error fueled the Conservative Resurgence

Recently, we talked about the Zeroth Error in evangelicalism. This error forms the substrate soil of all of their attempts to turn ideology into lived practice.

It’s simply this: If something sounds super-duper-Jesusy, evangelicals assume it works as promised by its salespeople. The more Bible verses evangelical salespeople can summon to support their product, the better it’ll sell. As you can see from this 1997 essay (archive), inerrancy had a lot of ’em.

In dysfunctional authoritarian systems like evangelicalism, leaders teach that their system is not only infallible, but perfect. Therefore, any failures caused after putting its demands and teachings into play must be occurring somewhere else. Usually, that’s the people trying to make it work. When the marks try to make it work and it just doesn’t, they will blame themselves, not the salesperson. It would not occur to them to question the system they bought. It can’t be the system, after all. Look at all those Bible verses supporting it!

Inerrancy must seem like pennies from Heaven to bad-faith salespeople. When you get down to it, inerrancy is a really childish belief system. It does the Bible a grave disservice by reducing this complex document to a bunch of bumper-sticker catchphrases. This bowdlerization blatantly serves the basest desires of the very people Jesus condemns most in the Gospels, while also granting them permission to ignore all the stuff he literally told his followers to do!

But its cheerleaders and salespeople don’t care. They can persuade evangelicals of anything by simply sprinkling a bunch of Bible verses over their sales pitches.

And that is how hardline Calvinists sold the Conservative Resurgence to gullible, power-hungry, aggrieved sexist white dudes in the Southern Baptist Convention. Through the magic power of inerrancy, women could never, should never, would never become pastors.

You can just about taste Al Mohler’s indignation that this question managed to crop up again in 2021:

Southern Baptists are now, yet again, at a moment of decision. This is no longer a point of tension and debate. These moves represent an attempt to redefine and reformulate the convictional foundation of Southern Baptist faith and cooperative ministry. The theological issues have not changed since the year 2000 when Southern Baptists spoke clearly and precisely in the Baptist Faith & Message.

However, the Conservative Resurgence’s hucksters didn’t only lean on sexism to sell their doctrine. They made some powerful promises about what the adoption of inerrancy would accomplish.

The promises of the Conservative Resurgence

In 2005, Thom Rainer—yes, that Thom Rainer—wrote a scholarly paper about those promises. You can get the full PDF of it at this link. In his paper, “A Resurgence Not Yet Realized,” Rainer refers to a 1972 book called Why Conservative Churches are Growing by Dean Kelley. Its title tells you why Rainer thought it was important. He tells us that SBC-lings were very sure, therefore, that the Conservative Resurgence would lead to very earthly successes:

Southern Baptist conservatives pointed to that book and other studies to rally members and messengers to turn the convention to a more conservative direction. And one of the primary benefits of the resurgence, we were told, would be an unprecedented evangelistic harvest in the denomination.

In a 2005 story, Baptist News Global echoes this sentiment:

It’s been a quarter century since conservatives, alarmed that liberal views of the Bible were dulling the SBC’s fervor for evangelism, wrested control of the SBC from moderates. But evangelism statistics have declined while conservatives have been in charge — hardly a badge of honor for the SBC messengers who gather June 21-22 for their annual meeting.

Years later, however, proponents of this takeover still claimed that the SBC needed to be inerrant to grow. Here’s Chuck Lawless (archive), who wrote this in 2012 on behalf of the SBC’s International Missions Board (IMB):

At any given point in this task, however, a faulty theology will lead to diversion from the Great Commission and disobedience to God. If, for example, the Bible is not the Word of God, why follow its teachings at all? If there is more than one God, why should we assume a need to proclaim the God of the Bible?

Yes, because obviously the only groups that ever grow are inerrancy-addled evangelicals.

Segue: A cruel dilemma for the flocks

Also, get a load of those false dilemmas:

If, for example, the Bible is not the Word of God, why follow its teachings at all? If there is more than one God, why should we assume a need to proclaim the God of the Bible?

Absurd reductionism informs much of inerrancy. IF the Bible isn’t completely and 100% truthful and accurate, THEN one might as well chuck out the whole thing. More importantly, note that they use this manipulation to grant themselves permission to evangelize. It’d be fine to evangelize in a world with lots of gods. But evangelicals need their god to be the only god on Earth before they feel the need to sell their religion? Strange.

I’m on board with the idea of chucking out the Bible for its lack of historical veracity, by the way. I get into way too much trouble when I stray from 100% true foundation beliefs. But many millions of faithful Christians have found a way to have faith despite the Bible’s shortcomings. For that matter, Jews have struggled in exactly that way for millennia over the Torah, which Christians turned into their religion’s Old Testament.

I don’t have to understand how believers do it to accept that yes, they do do it. By the truckload. For many centuries now. Evangelicals just love setting up these sorts of dilemmas, is all. For decades, the tactic worked. The flocks were so scared of the idea of losing their faith that they’d reliably veer far wide of questioning their indoctrination. I’d like to think that these days, they’re less frightened of these idiotic ultimatums their leaders keep handing them.

The Conservative Resurgence tries to do a big evangelism push

In 2005, the then-president of the SBC, Bobby Welch, started a huge evangelism push called “Everyone Can.” The phrase refers to the idea that all SBC-lings are capable of selling their religion. He set a goal of achieving 1 million baptisms within a year. And he alluded to why this goal was so important—along with the consequences of failure:

If Southern Baptists can’t turn around the baptism decline after more than a year of “extraordinary effort,” he said, “we are going to have to face some reality out here in the convention.”

“When we get to the end of that year, if something significant hasn’t happened in baptisms, we’ll have to look ourselves in the face and say, ‘Something is wrong.’ If it does show improvement, it will demonstrate that, if the convention goes to the people with a message that’s near and dear to their hearts, then you can expect the people to respond.”

He’s probably referring to the Conservative Resurgence. At the time, the dust was still settling after that fight.

Alas for the SBC, his campaign failed spectacularly. Not only did SBC-lings not bag 1 million baptisms that year, their number of baptisms actually declined. They went from 387k in 2004 to 342k in 2008!

But this wasn’t the only big evangelism push going on. For many years in the 1970s and 1980s, the SBC’s leaders had been yammering about their Bold Mission Thrust. (Starting on p. 41of their 1979 Annual Report, you can get an idea of how it worked.) This multi-phase, multi-year evangelism project mostly missed all of its stated goals. But SBC leaders were just so excited about it.

However, it got lost in the shuffle over the Conservative Resurgence.

Around 2009, the North American Mission Board (NAMB) launched “God’s Plan for Sharing,” or GPS. You can read about it in the 2010 Annual Report starting on page 199. The state-level conventions accepted it and seemed to like it, as you can see from this 2010 exhortation about follow-through (archive). But the mother ship had some other plans. GPS fell by the wayside, slain by a new and infinitely more Jesusy-sounding initiative.

SBC leaders—now all safely ultraconservative and inerrancy-addled—started a brand-new evangelism push. It would function as an implicit referendum on the Conservative Resurgence. Heck, it even had part of that civil war’s name in its name! It would be called the Great Commission Resurgence, or GCR. In 2010, they released a big official-looking report about what it would do and why it was needed.

The GCR was the new hotness for a while. And the mother ship just released a paper examining its effectiveness.

The GCR really does testify to the value of the Conservative Resurgence

Oh, this paper was damning. I read the entire thing and cringed in sympathy more than a few times. I don’t even like the SBC as a whole and think its leaders are hucksters at best and predators at worst. And I still cringed. A lot of people put a lot of faith into this terrible idea. A lot of people worked hard on the GCR. I’m guessing that some of those people were good people with good hearts. And they got repaid with failure after failure.

In essence, this evaluation determined that the GCR was an overall failure.

To evaluate the GCR, the committee interviewed a whole bunch of SBC leaders from that era. Even a casual SBC-watcher will recognize a lot of these interviewees’ names: J.D. Greear, Ed Stetzer, Al Mohler, Ronny Floyd, and more. All of the committee members were male, as were all of the interviewees.

The evaluation committee examined all seven of the GCR’s objectives. Most were categorically ignored, even if they were just busy-work that didn’t actually do anything. Some got fulfilled partially, and one likely succeeded accidentally.

Scoring the GCR

Here’s how the evaluation committee judged the seven objectives of the GCR.

1. Adopt and publish a specific mission statement. Ignored.
2. Adopt and publish a specific list of “core values.” Ignored. (The committee notes that modern SBC-lings do not exhibit many of these qualities at all, particularly in their conduct on social media.)
3. Encourage Great Commission giving and other evangelism donation efforts. Poorly adopted. For the state-level conventions that accepted the idea, it created a lot of confusion for the flocks by introducing poorly-explained categories for donations. Worse, the new category likely became a thing due to some pastors’ desire for their church to look better than other churches.
4. Streamline NAMB and make it more effective. Somewhat successful, but it probably would have faced reorganization and streamlining regardless due to its bloat and poor use of resources. Unfortunately, many local churches and state conventions now feel NAMB is stepping on their turf. This caused all new problems, many of which have yet to be solved.
5. Reach the unreached and underserved in North America. This one required the cooperation of NAMB with the International Mission Board, or IMB. Of all of the objectives, this one seems to be going great. Again, I don’t know why the leaders of these two subgroups needed the GCR to team up.
6. Promote the Cooperative Program (CP) and add stewardship requirements to it. In Christianese, stewardship means taking good care of Jesus’ property. In this case, CP money belongs to Jesus. The SBC’s leaders and Executive Committee use this money on Jesus’ behalf to fund denominational efforts like seminaries and missionary stuff. Unfortunately, this objective was neither necessary nor possible for most state-level conventions to achieve.
7. Increase the CP’s IMB budget by 1% (to 51%) by taking that 1% from the Executive Committee’s allocation budget. However, the IMB already gets 51% of the CP budget. It gets 50.41% of the allocation budget. This item was somewhat fulfilled, but it doesn’t sound like anyone needed the GCR to make it happen.

The hilarious stonewalling from the victors of the Conservative Resurgence

Remember Al Mohler from earlier? In addition to being a Conservative Resurgence bootlicker, he was an instrumental part of the entire GCR. In the GCR evaluation report on page 26 (relink), we learn that he was a busy little bee:

June 23, 2009 Messengers approve a motion from Dr Al Mohler to appoint a task force to study how Southern Baptists can work more “faithfully and effectively together in serving Christ through the Great Commission. “

Over 2009 and early 2010, Al Mohler’s hand-picked task force met and talked about strategies and ideas. They made recordings of these sessions.

But uh oh: At their Annual Meeting in 2010, as the attendees voted to adopt the GCR task force’s ideas, someone wanted to know what got said at those meetings.

A pastor named Jay Adkins asked for the task force’s audio recordings to become publicly available. He’s probably this guy. If so, then he’s rising to prominence in the Pretend Progressives faction. Last year, Fred Luter—the SBC’s only Black president so far—nominated him for the first vice-president position (archive). He won.

In 2010, Adkins was just a pastor. But one who wanted accountability for the SBC.

How dare someone force accountability on the Old Guard!

What would soon become one of the SBC’s major factions, the Old Guard, roared to life over this assault to their sovereignty. And its king knew exactly what windbag to call upon as his knight:

June 15-16, 2010 Jay Adkins makes a motion to unseal the records of the GCRTF. Ronnie Floyd introduces Al Mohler to speak against the motion, and after much discussion on both sides the motion is defeated.

Al Mohler certainly seems dedicated to the idea of not letting those recordings see the light of day! Now, this entire kerfuffle is largely vanished from the internet. But you can see it still in one church newspaper. On page 2, they cover the adoption of the GCR. All the way on page 10, they cover the defeat of Jay Adkins’ request.

At the time, it appears that Al Mohler’s excuse involved confidentiality promises the committee had to make to various parties, as well as some word salad clearly intended to bolster that excuse:

“We promised them confidentiality during deliberations,” said Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and a task force member. “This recommendation would require this task force to break its word.” It also would “rob us of our own historical record” and have a chilling effect on future committees, he added.

I’m sure Mohler and his masters thought they’d never have to worry about anybody listening to those recordings. But then again, he didn’t think he’d ever have to worry again about women invading his Good Ole Boys’ Club.

Stonewalling accountability, part 2

As part of a long string of losses taken by the Old Guard, Bart Barber became the SBC’s president twice, in 2022 and 2023. I’m sure it horrified the Old Guard even more when he appointed none other than Jay Adkins to chair the GCR evaluation committee.

Naturally, Adkins still wanted to get his hands on those recordings.

First, he wrote to Taffey Hall. She is the Director of the Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives. She’s held the position since 2016. And you will never guess who was involved in her hiring: Al Mohler. He leads the SBC’s seminary leaders, who are largely all Old Guard. That group appointed her.

I don’t know if Adkins knew that when he wrote her. Perhaps she only represented the first real link in the chain of command.

Either way, he wrote to her to ask for the recordings.

And she turned him down flat. She told him that the recordings could be unsealed in June 2025. They would not be unsealed a moment earlier than that.

So then Adkins wrote to Al Mohler. Was Mohler’s previous defeat of his motion on his mind? We don’t know, but it seems so. He buttered Mohler up a bit, then launched a long explanation of why he wanted the recordings. He also mentions that at some earlier point, he informally asked Mohler for the recordings—and got turned down flat.

Mohler gave him the same answer Hall had. No dice. For good measure, Mohler cc’d all the other seminary presidents. This way, they all knew to refuse any similar requests from Adkins and his committee. Their Duke had spoken.

Oh, I cannot wait for next June. The Old Guard protects these recordings with their very lives, it seems. Or perhaps they simply refuse to help their faction enemies in any way whatsoever. Either way, I cannot wait.

So the GCR evaluation proceeded without the recordings.

What the GCR evaluation reveals by accident

Besides telling us that the SBC is actually just a Jesus-frosted business, the GCR evaluation revealed some interesting confirmations of suspicions I’ve had for years about how the denomination reports its numbers.

On p. 11 of the report, the committee complains:

Unfortunately, most of our formal and informal interviewees were in agreement that the genesis for the newly named category ultimately came about due to the low Cooperative Program giving percentages of some of our largest churches. We were told that a few of our large church pastors wanted to put forth a higher percentage of giving numbers published in Baptist Press, so that the numerical value was more palatable when nominated to convention office or elected as an entity head.

Maybe that info surprised the committee. But not me.

Fiddling with numbers is just part of the Conservative Resurgence’s MO

Over the years, I’ve noticed that the SBC’s Annual Reports’ metrics section keeps getting reorganized. Here’s their most recent report. On page 7, they print their metrics. “Total members” used to live in the previous section (here’s 2016, where you can see it on p. 122; image archive). That’s the most SBC-important section. They put their most important metrics there, like baptisms and attendance and the number of churches they have.

Perhaps more importantly, that section contains columns for “numeric change” and “percent change.”

When membership began looking really bad, the 2020 report (p. 64; image archive) suddenly began putting it under “Other Items.” These items don’t contain those change columns. They just report last year and this year’s numbers.

Ta-da! Now they don’t have to print anything except the bare numbers themselves!

If that looks suspicious, brace yourself. I haven’t even gotten started yet. Here’s the 1994 report. On page 125 (image archive), you’ll notice a whole bunch of now-unfamiliar entries under the first section. A lot of those items got moved to “Other Items” in the years between then and now.

For a while, Cooperative Program (CP) giving wasn’t reported at all. Where its numbers used to live, the report would simply list a URL. There’s nothing there now. And the 2024 report puts CP giving in a whole other section this year. It’s on page 6, where we learn it declined a bit (from $457M to $449M).

It’s weird that CP money reports jump around like this. For that matter, “Total Receipts,” a former mainstay of SBC metric reports, is simply gone lately.

Now consider this: In January, the SBC’s leaders began to fiddle with their all-important baptism ratio (archive). It reflects the total number of baptisms compared to total membership. But it’s still not looking good, so they’re starting to present the flocks with a new way to evaluate their effectiveness “Baptisms adjusted for attendance.”

I really and truly have no idea how any SBC member paying any attention at all to these reports and squabbles can come away thinking an omnimax god has anything to do with this denomination. If it weren’t part of the SBC’s bylaws that a report must be made (p. 11, #5 and 6 of this year’s report), I don’t think their leaders would tell the flocks anything.

The Committee’s official recommendations about the failed Great Commission Resurgence

The GCR committee promised that before the big Annual Meeting, they’d offer official recommendations about what to do with that information.

Today, that’s exactly what they did. Baptist Press ran an article about it (archive). Here’s the PDF of it, and the committee’s recommendations (and my commentary):

1. Drop “Great Commission” language entirely. (Good idea, but it’s largely gone anyway.)
2. Vastly simplify the questions asked of church leaders in their Annual Church Profile (ACP). (They hope this’ll encourage more participation and more questions total answered. It won’t, because of their overall dysfunctional authoritarian system, but it’s nice they’re trying. Those questionnaires are ridiculous. If they really wanna push my thrill buttons, they can try to make the mother ship tell us the percentages of churches responding to each question.)
3. Make NAMB keep track of church plants for ten years instead of four to get a better idea of how successful their efforts are, and moreover get NAMB to report those numbers each year. (LOL, this’ll happen over NAMB’s dead body.)
4. Make the Executive Committee increase CP allocation to the International Mission Board (IMB). “This will finally correct the Executive Committee’s lack of responsiveness to the will of the messengers [SBC meeting attendees].” (I can’t add anything here except helpless laughter. They’re right.)
5. Get the denomination’s history librarians started indexing the original GCR’s meeting recordings so they will be ready for outsiders to use the day they become available. (See above kerfuffle: Laughing again.)
6. Require all SBC task forces, committees, agencies, etc. to formally report on their progress on all assignments given by meeting attendees. (Also LOL nope, not gonna happen.)

Almost none of this is gonna happen.

The legacy of the Conservative Resurgence is avoiding accountability in all its forms

Over the past few decades, the SBC has become a rotting hulk of dysfunctional authoritarianism. Its leaders focus entirely on growing and guarding their power. That is why, when they found out about predators in ministry, they prioritized silencing abuse victims and shuffling the abusers to other pulpits. The sheer number of predators in ministry warranted the keeping of a secret database about their doings—which is what happened instead of protecting the vulnerable or getting them justice.

Whatever the Conservative Resurgence’s supporters thought they were achieving decades ago, the real legacy of that movement is its long-lasting crony network. That network prioritized party loyalty and victory over anything else, which in turn drew in people who are very good at party loyalty and victory.

Unfortunately, often those people aren’t as good at following the group’s rules. But that’s not the priority anyway. So their top leaders protected known sexual predators like Darrell Gilyard for years—because he made them look good with his charismatic and successful evangelistic preaching (and he helped defuse accusations of racism, since he’s Black).

Ironic, perhaps, since Republicans—dominated utterly still by evangelicals—still call themselves the “party of accountability.” Also ironic, since many evangelicals accuse those who reject their recruitment pitches and control-grabs of seeking escape from accountability. For years now, the rule of thumb with these guys has been simple: The more they accuse others of shirking accountability, the more allergic to it they are themselves.

Faction warfare in the trenches

I feel certain that this GCR evaluation is a product of the Pretend Progressives’ faction warfare. It dropped last week, which is plenty enough time to erode messengers’ confidence in the Old Guard. It spits in the face of the Old Guard leaders’ favorite arguments.

I wasn’t 100% sure of this until I saw Jay Adkins’ letters to Taffey Hall and Al Mohler. Sure, Adkins is Pretend Progressive nowadays. His nomination by Fred Luter told me that. Luter wouldn’t nominate an Old Guard. If he ever tried, the Old Guard’s own members would destroy that person as a faker before seeing a Pretend Progressive candidate win anything. However, Adkins wasn’t nominated in 2010 when he first asked for the unsealing of the GCR task force’s recorded meetings. Thus, I entertained some reasonable doubt for a hot minute.

As I mentioned earlier, the Old Guard has taken a lot of damage in recent years. For years, they’ve watched their enemy faction erode their power base bit by bit. Right now, Pretend Progressives even sit on the Executive Committee’s (EC) advisory council. For many years, that top-ranked committee belonged entirely to the Old Guard!

Their new president, Jeff Iorg, is likely another Old Guard, though. I’m saying that because he led a Southern Baptist seminary for years. As Peter Lumpkins has written, those seminaries were “ground zero” in the inerrancy war. Last year, the Old Guard successfully staved off their enemy’s attempt to take the EC throne, which cleared the way for Jeff Iorg.

But the Old Guard’s empire shrinks every time they turn around. The EC is very powerful, but they don’t have much besides that and most of the seminary presidents. And I’m sure they remember that the chief strategy of Conservative Resurgence involved installing friendly presidents in it for several years consecutively, then getting those winners to fill committees and appoint leaders as the proto-Old Guard directed.

Well, they haven’t won a presidency since the late 2010s.

Those Old Guard guys have got to be having kittens by now! They know what that string of losses means better than anybody.

Welcome to the new SBC Annual Meeting; it’s just like the old SBC Annual Meeting

As for the SBC’s Annual Meetings, I hope its attendees realize that all their voting amounts to a dog-and-pony show. Their Dear Leaders put these shows on to trick the flocks into thinking they’re doing important work and guiding their denomination. I hope they see the rot and infestation at the heart of their denomination and choose to walk away from Ocabos.

Despite the circus surrounding SBC elections lately, the SBC’s real leaders are not elected every year—what a ridiculous notion! There’s no time, no time at all for such a person to get much done besides filling committees and nominating for various roles. No, the real rulers of the SBC work on the everlasting committees and roles like NAMB and the Executive Committee, the very ones those presidents appoint and fill—and for that matter the denomination’s archives library. This situation has led to all sorts of interesting infighting as each grabs for as much power as possible without offending too many people above or beside them on the ladder of power.

These cronies’ ties of loyalty run very, very deep. They do not brook interference from interlopers with delusions of meaningful input.

If only evangelicals’ marriages could run as long and as intimately as these informal associations do!

NEXT UP: Finally, the SBC’s Annual Meeting is nigh! We’ll check out their big arguments and doings next time. See you soon!

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