Circa1865

Southern Baptist Public Relations Stunt

“Last summer [2016], the Southern Baptist Convention [SBC] leadership sparked controversy within the church’s declining ranks by erecting a Golden Calf of political correctness. [It] launched an all-out offensive against many of the church’s members by repudiating the Confederate Battle Flag. The attack was orchestrated by two of the SBC’s clergy . . . Dr. James Merritt and Dr. William Dwight McKissic, Jr . . . I have no reason to doubt that these two men truly love God; but they are lousy historians.

Instead of [Dr. McKissic suggesting] a moment of silence or performing an act of Christian charity (e.g., making a monetary donation to the family of the victims), he came to the conclusion that it would better to insult tens of thousands of faithful members of the SBC.

The connection between Resolution 7 [“On Sensitivity and Unity Regarding the Confederate Battle Flag”] and the murder of the Charleston Nine is this thin: Dylann Roof posed for a photograph with a Confederate flag.

Of course, it is ridiculous to think that any SBC member, including those who honor their dead and the cause of Southern independence, would hesitate to condemn Roof’s actions in unequivocal terms.

Charlton Heston gave a speech at Brandeis University in 2000 in which he observed, “Political correctness is tyranny, just tyranny with manners.”  I think if Mr. Heston were alive today, he would agree that the proponents of political correctness have lost their manners.

Present-day ideologues forget that the act of secession was peaceful. However, President Lincoln’s call for 75,000 volunteers to invade the South was indeed an act of war – a hostile act that caused other States to secede.

Nearly all of the documentary evidence indicates that Southern men volunteered in order to fight a second American revolution against a tyrannical centralized power. And the average Union soldier fought to save the Union.

In reviewing the evidence, even James M. McPherson, a prominent, mainstream Civil War historian, admitted that “the letters and diaries of many Co0nfederate soldiers bristled with the rhetoric of liberty and self-government and the expressions of a willingness to die for the cause.” Novelist and historian Shelby Foote was more direct: “No soldier on either side gave a damn about the slaves.”

I called many of [the SBC leadership to give an interview and discuss the details of the resolution], but only one was willing to speak to me . . . if he was granted anonymity. When I asked him what he thought about the resolution, he told me he thought it was just a public-relations stunt, an attempt to get attention. Since the resolution was not binding on the churches, it amounted to nothing more.

If the SBC refuses to obey the commandment to “Honor thy father and thy mother,” in order to appease people who have no desire to understand the SBC’s living connection to the South, what other compromises will its leaders be willing to make? What sort of gesture would please anyone who would demand that Southern Baptists dishonor their ancestors?

We only want to recognize the sacrifices of our family members who fought simply to defend their homes. For them and for us, the battle flag has been a symbol of rebellion against an overweening centralized government. It has nothing to do with racism.”

(Southern Baptists Versus the South, S.A. Litteral, Chronicles, March 2017, excerpts pp. 39-40)