Last week’s annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) was as newsworthy as usual, but unusually significant. Despite its regional moniker, the SBC is active nationwide and across the globe, and “closely watched as a barometer of evangelical sentiment,” in the words of Ruth Graham at The New York Times. Liam Adams of Nashville’s The Tennessean depicted the deliberations in Indianapolis as “a turning point for the nation’s largest Protestant denomination” with its 12.9 million members.
If so, will this turning turn out to be Southern Baptists’ migration toward neo-fundamentalism, a growing force within America’s complex and sprawling Evangelical movement at a time when conservative Protestants become more conservative, and more militantly so?
Read Full Article »