Southern Baptist Connections

Kevin Phillips’ American Theocracy addresses the issue of fundamental religion in the United States. He draws from the nation’s unvarnished history and brings the arguments forward to today’s headlines. Phillips makes a strong argument that the culture supports the religion which best drives its political aspiration. There is no mistaking this. The Southern Baptist Convention still proudly puts forth distinctions that arose from a division that occurred in the Baptist Church in 1845. The primary issue was “Southern Uniqueness” (read that as the ownership of African-Americans as chattel). It was not that the northern church had taken a stance on abolition; it was ambivalent on the issue. It was that the South suspected that the northern wing would support abolition. Institutional slavery was already dying in the South.[1] One has to wonder what would have happened if reason had overcome fear and suspicion and the two sides of the church had remained one.

As the southern denomination grew in objection to the northern Christian efforts during Reconstruction, it became the refuge of the old Confederacy. It existed as a monument to the Confederate ideals, having authored much of the Confederate’s propaganda, theology, and mythology that drove the Civil War, enabled the Klan, and enshrines, as a badge of honor, the rebellion against the Federal Government of the United States of America. As one friend of mine pointed out, it is as if Germany erected shrines and memorials to Adolph Hitler.

As long as Liberals, Progressives, and the northern establishment continue to view the members of the Southern Baptist Convention as illiterate bumpkins, they will never come to terms with the true nature of the seduction that the SBC represents: The Southern Baptist Convention is the old Confederate States of America in religious garb.

The idea that the United States of America is a Christian nation did not come from the founders of the United States. They made it very clear that this was a secular nation. They wanted nothing to do with the patterns of government from which they had escaped. The idea that the United States of America is a Christian nation, or should be a Christian nation, comes directly from the preamble to the Constitution of the Confederate States of America. Their sons and daughters are now pushing that dead agenda onto the public stage once again.

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[1] The Civil War, Bruce Catton, American Heritage/Bonanza Books