The Nashville Statement Is an Attack on L.G.B.T. Christians

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The Nashville Statement, released by the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood on Tuesday, says that only heterosexuality is permissible, calls people born with intersex conditions “disordered,” derides transgender identities as “transgenderism” and makes clear that anyone who is an L.G.B.T. person is immoral.

.. The statement can’t be written off as the regressive stance of a fringe group: More than 150 influential conservative evangelical leaders, half of whom belong to the Southern Baptist Convention, signed the statement. Steve Gaines, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, and James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family and member of Donald Trump’s faith advisory board, endorsed it. Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s public policy arm, also signed on. Presidents of seminaries, editors and writers at the largest conservative publications, as well as presidents and directors of conservative think tanks added their names.

.. L.G.B.T. youths have disproportionately high rates of suicide and of anxiety and depression — problems that are undoubtedly worsened by the condemnation of those who hold beliefs like the ones in the Nashville Statement. Those whose families reject them, most of whom are from religious backgrounds, are 8.4 times more likely to attempt suicide than their straight peers. L.G.B.T. youths also suffer from high rates of homelessness. Because of conservative churches’ teachings about sexuality, some parents prefer their L.G.B.T. children sleep on the streets instead of in their homes.

.. Evangelicals’ promotion of “reparative therapy” that tries to change L.G.B.T. people’s sexual orientation or gender identity, which has been condemned by every major medical organization, has also brought harm and death.

.. More broadly, the type of theology underlying the Nashville Statement is used to defend the denial of goods and services to same-sex couples. The political power evangelicals hold in the United States allows them to codify their beliefs in law.

Russell Moore, Baptist Leader Who Shunned Trump, Splits His Church

Head of denomination’s public-policy arm triggered a backlash by criticizing the candidate’s supporters; no access to White House

  Mr. Moore, 45 years old, is at the center of a generational struggle over the denomination’s future. The outcome could determine whether Southern Baptists continue to be a leading conservative voice in cultural disputes over abortion and gay rights—and whether evangelical Christians remain a reliably Republican voting bloc.
.. His approach won him support among a younger, more racially diverse generation of evangelicals who are more suspicious than their parents of political parties.
It also led to a backlash from Southern Baptists who helped build the denomination into a political force within the Republican Party. Many of them saw Mr. Trump, despite his three marriages and ties to the casino industry, as the only realistic hope for the socially conservative agenda they have been pushing for decades.
.. But Mr. Moore has no access to Mr. Trump, fueling questions about how effectively he can do his job.
.. Mr. Moore’s predecessor, Richard Land, played a leading role in that denominational battle. As head of the public-policy arm, Mr. Land had turned the Southern Baptist Convention into a conservative political juggernaut. He helped push the Republican Party to the right on issues such as abortion and became a regular in the George W. Bush White House.
.. “The fact that he was targeted was very chilling,” Mr. McKissic said. “It sends the signal that anybody who speaks a word that is not in line with traditional Southern Baptist, Republican thought will face opposition, to the extent that their jobs will be threatened.”
.. In a denomination that likes to settle disputes quietly, some were rankled that he criticized Trump supporters on national television and didn’t speak to them directly.
.. “I’d have gone to a Jack Graham” before publicly criticizing Trump supporters like him, said Jay Strack, president of Student Leadership University and member of Mr. Trump’s evangelical advisory board

Muslims, Christians, & Religious Liberty

“There has been this tendency to racialize Muslims,” he noted, “for Muslims to adopt this civil rights discourse for themselves and clearly that has moral traction because if you can think of yourself as the newest group that’s been stigmatized then you can use the language of civil rights, which has a lot of currency. But that has theological implications because Muslim is not a race, it’s a set of beliefs that you subscribe to.”

.. As Russell Moore has stated clearly, a government powerful enough to deny a Muslim congregation the right to build a mosque is a government powerful enough to deny the same to Christians. When you defend the right to religious liberty for Muslims, you are defending the same for Christians. I would even say it’s to the strategic advantage of Christians to have Muslims in their corner, precisely because the liberal establishment doesn’t like going up against minorities of which they approve.

.. If the left is eager to protect the rights of Muslims to live as Muslims outside of the mosque, then it needs to come to terms with the fact that this means Christians are covered by the same principles. And if the right is eager to protect its own freedom of religion, it had better not let daylight get between itself and Muslims on this issue.

.. I am amazed at Christians who say stuff like “We cannot allow them to get established here because they will take over and set up a caliphate”. Do they not realize that this is basically what people with Christianophobia say about us. They will use that same reasoning to justify the removal of our religious freedom.

.. People with Christianophobia tend to be white, wealthy, highly, educated and male. In other words they are very powerful and well connected.

Why Baptists Should Support Muslims’ Right to Build Mosques

Some at the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) called for the firing of any SBC official who supported the rights of Muslims to build mosques, and they recommended the removal of the ERLC’s name from the amicus brief. Some even went so far as to posit that Muslims do not deserve the same religious freedoms as Christians.

.. Those Baptists continuing to oppose Moore should take time to consider the history of their spiritual forefathers.

.. While today we tend to think of America as the world’s beacon for religious liberty, a city on a hill, 17th- and 18th-century Baptists would have begged to differ. In the colonies, Baptist rejection of infant baptism was considered abhorrent by the established churches. To Anglicans, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians, this deviation from tradition was demonic and divisive.

.. Baptists endured harassment, including, fines, prohibition against their services, flogging, and even jail time. Massachusetts outlawed Baptists altogether in 1645, calling them “the troublers of churches in all places.” As a result of the government’s response, much of the populace developed a distinct hostility toward the Baptists.

.. This motivated many Baptists, and other non-Protestant minorities, to remain loyal to England throughout the American Revolution. It was hard to support a rebellion for “equality” of representation when many of the revolutionaries didn’t regard Baptists as religious equals. Baptists’ loyalist leanings only brought them further political animosity.

.. John Adams even told Backus that a shift in the solar system was more likely than an end to the established church of Massachusetts. Thus, persecution against Baptists endured throughout the American Revolution. They continued to be taxed to support the established churches but received none of the revenue for themselves (a.k.a. taxation without representation).

.. They preferred to depend upon the power of God, rather than government, to accomplish the purposes of the church.

.. Backus noted that religion was “a voluntary obedience unto God which therefore force cannot promote.”

.. Everyone, including Muslims, is made in the image of God, possessing inherent dignity that is expressed in and through human capacity to hold sincere religious beliefs.

.. The hypocrisy of those who criticize interfaith alliances for common purposes, like the alliance in the New Jersey mosque case, is that while they accuse such coalitions of putting politics before God, their underlying motive is to use the government to bolster and secure the faith of their choice. In reality, they are dishonoring the Baptist tradition of religious liberty established by those before them. What’s more, their position is short-sighted. Given the present shift in American demographics, it might not be too long before the Baptists are once again a powerless minority.