J.D. Greear is looking to lead the largest Protestant denomination in the United States away from partisanship.
The new president of the Southern Baptist Convention became the youngest member (45) elected head in decades last month, winning 69 percent of a convention vote with unusually high turnout from young and first-time attendees. Greear defeated Ken Hemphill, an older, more traditional candidate endorsed by Robert Jeffress, the ardently pro-Trump pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas.
While still conservative, Greear has criticized the Republican party, lately decrying family separations at the border. He laid out paths for how Christians could vote for either party or not at all in 2016. (Who did he vote for? The pastor joked during the election, “I have publicly called for both of them to step down. That is about all I will tell you, OK? I’m wondering if we can just go with nobody in November. Stay single for the next four years. You know, find ourselves.”)
Defying broader cultural trends towards polarization, Greear has built his platform by emphasizing a need for unity. In a blog post accepting the nomination for SBC president, he wrote, “We should be neither defined nor characterized by a certain church style, method of ministry, political affiliation, or cultural and racial distinctive.” In particular, he’s gone after political partisanship.
“As an organization, the church is neither called nor competent to declare a particular political strategy as ‘God’s,’” Greear wrote in an email to THE WEEKLY STANDARD. “I often quip to my church that I might be wrong on my approach to global warming, but I’m not wrong about the gospel. And I refuse to let my opinions on the former keep people from hearing me on the latter.”
This could be a challenge in a denomination as closely associated to conservatism as is the SBC. But Greear has already begun to push back against that perception. Vice President Mike Pence spoke at this year’s SBC gathering. Pence’s speech was transparently political, focusing on Trump’s accomplishments, including the North Korea deal and moving the American embassy to Jerusalem. The newly elected Greear tweeted after the speech that it “sent a terribly mixed signal.”
Greear wrote that the invite “was most likely intended to be a simple show of good will to a visiting politician, but it turned into a campaign speech almost immediately. The message this sent was, ‘To be a good Southern Baptist, you have to support this administration.’ And while I am committed to honoring and praying for our political leaders—the Bible commands it—I never want us to endorse candidates, whether overtly or implicitly.”
Younger Southern Baptists
Greear’s concern about misplaced priorities is not unusual among Protestants, particularly younger ones. A 2016 Lifeway poll of Protestant pastors found that while a majority still embraced patriotic displays and services, 53 percent of pastors were also concerned that their congregations sometimes seemed to love America more than God. Southern and younger pastors were more likely to see this as a concern, while younger pastors are also less likely to value patriotic displays in churches.
Trevin Wax, a Gospel Coalition blogger and visiting professor at Wheaton College, wrote in 2014 that in his experience, the new generation of Southern Baptists is warier of political alliances. “Older Southern Baptists are more likely to see the U.S. as Israel. Younger Southern Baptists are more likely to see the U.S. as Babylon,” he wrote.
Russell Moore, the president of the SBC’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), said moving away from partisanship wasn’t merely a reaction to the 2016 election.
“That’s a transition that’s been happening for some time within the SBC and the broader world of evangelicalism,” Moore explained. “In previous generations, one could assume a generically Christian America … That’s not the world that younger evangelicals are living in. Or have ever been living in. They have had to extend and articulate a Christian understanding of reality all of their lives. So it’s a different cultural moment than some people have experienced in the past.”
He added that he didn’t think it was just a church problem, but in “the totality of American culture … there’s a sense in which political alliances have become almost transcendent in American life whether on the left, the right, the center, wherever … My main burden is to call us to have a long-term view. And by long term I mean the next trillion years.”
Moore said that being outsiders in the culture was a “familiar environment for Baptists,” recalling the days when the denomination consisted of English nonconformists. Moore himself faced some backlash for being a vocal critic of prominent evangelical Trump supporters during the election. “The religious right,” Moore warned, “turns out to be the people the religious right warned us about.”
A group of 100 churches threatened to stop sending funds to the SBC over Moore’s outspokenness, and for a while it seemed like Moore’s job may have been in danger. At this year’s convention, however, a motion to defund the ERLC was defeated, even provoking laughter.
Younger leaders like Greear and Moore stand as a stark contrast to the old guard of the SBC, not only in style and theology (both are Calvinists, part of the movement Christianity Today termed the Young, Restless, and Reformed generation), but in rejecting the close relationship the denomination has had with the Republican party.
Conservative Resurgence
Southern Baptists have been a bastion of conservatism for decades. Jimmy Carter was the last Democratic president to speak at the SBC, though Russell Moore invited Hillary Clinton to address an ERLC forum in 2015 (she declined). Part of the reason for this is the Conservative Resurgence, an effort conceived in the 1960s by Baptist stalwarts Paige Patterson and Paul Pressler. Its purpose was to reorient the SBC away from progressive theology by leveraging the SBC president’s appointment power to bring about a change in leadership.
The Conservative Resurgence, titled the Fundamentalist Takeover by its critics, helped to insulate the SBC against liberal trends which overthrew mainline denominations. Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President Albert Mohler said in 2004, “You have the Episcopalian church ordaining an openly homosexual bishop. The United Methodist Church refused to even admit that homosexuality is dealt with clearly in their standards. Do you have the sense that if the conservative resurgence had not happened, that’s exactly where we would be? I am absolutely certain it’s right.”
However, both architects of the Conservative Resurgence were missing from this year’s convention due to scandals. Then Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary President Patterson was fired by the SWBTS board and stripped of retirement benefits for lying about the way he addressed a female student’s rape allegation when he was president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. Former Texas state judge Pressler faces accusations of sexual misconduct from three men.
These revelations have provoked introspection in the denomination. Mohler penned a grieved letter, “The Wrath of God Poured Out — The Humiliation of the Southern Baptist Convention”, expressing his dismay over the scandal. The convention passed motions condemning abuse and infidelity. An ERLC panel on #MeToo drew a packed crowd, said Moore.
It’s important to note that the recent scandals clearly did not propel Greear to victory (he almost won the presidency in 2016, but withdrew his candidacy so as to not split the denomination in a close election). That said, Greear assumes leadership at a moment when the denomination has just dismissed two icons responsible for turning the SBC into the conservative stronghold it is today.
And what does that mean for the denomination? Greear says politicians “are welcome in our churches. But they must not be allowed to change the narrative about what these events are about. The Southern Baptist Convention exists to spread the gospel of Jesus to the ends of the earth. That’s not a political calling, and the moment we blur the lines between our calling and the calling of the government (which is good in its own right), we create problems.”
An Emphasis on Missions
It would be a mistake to assume that an SBC divorce from partisanship means a retreat from the public sphere. Greear wrote that Jesus’ message was “ultimately not realized or accomplished through political strategies,” but he added that, “Christians must be politically active, because political activism is one of the most basic ways that we love our neighbors.”
Moore said, “I think sometimes secular media misunderstands … ‘a priority of the Gospel’ as meaning a withdrawal from everything else.
“I often say that if some people had heard Jesus say ‘man shall not live by bread alone,’ they would have concluded that Jesus called for a pullback from nutrition. Which is of course not at all what he’s talking about, he’s talking about priority.”
As for priorities, Moore and Greear remain conservative on major issues. Their names can be found in the Nashville Statement, a letter reaffirming signers’ commitment to traditional positions on issues like gay marriage and transgenderism. While encouraging compromise on peripheral concerns, Greear also argues that there are essentials.
“Christians can and should agree on [issues like] the sanctity of human life, on the importance of fighting for justice for all, on the biblical definition of marriage, on the importance of religious liberty in a pluralistic society, and on our responsibility to care for the poor,” he wrote. “Christians can disagree, however, on the best strategies to empower the poor, the best ways to promote the common good, the best approaches to immigration, or the best ways to care for the environment.”
Greear also places a strong emphasis on outreach through missions, which is reflected in the burgeoning attendance at his North Carolina megachurch. According to numbers from the SBC’s Annual Church Profile, “During the 16 years Greear has pastored The Summit [Church], worship attendance has grown from 610 in 2002 to just under 10,000.” Meanwhile, the SBC as a whole has lost 1.3 million members since 2006, bringing its numbers to 15 million, so Greear’s focus on evangelism is welcome.
“We should expect to be seen more as outsiders in our country. That doesn’t mean Christians should huddle and fight some kind of defensive battle,” Greear wrote. “It means we need to approach our society through a missionary lens, realizing that more and more people around us aren’t coming from a church background … We’ve been acting like this country is our final home and political power is our greatest hope. They aren’t. Heaven is our home and our hope is the resurrection of Christ. The more we believe that, the less panic we’ll see when political situations run amuck around us.”
