SAINT LOUIS, Mo. — On Tuesday, the Southern Baptist Convention voted overwhelmingly to condemn the flying of the Confederate Battle Flag. Controversy over the flag has been constant, but heated up after the shooting of the AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina last summer.
The official SBC resolution states, “We call our brothers and sisters in Christ to discontinue the display of the Confederate battle flag as a sign of solidarity of the whole Body of Christ, including our African-American brothers and sisters; and be it finally that we urge fellow Christians to exercise sensitivity so that nothing brings division or hinders the unity of the Body of Christ to be a bold witness to the transforming power of Jesus.”
While opposed to most displays of the banner, the resolution also states that the flag belongs in a museum for historical preservation.
Russell Moore, president of the public-policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, wrote on his blog, “The Cross and the Confederate flag cannot co-exist without one setting the other on fire. Today, messengers to the Southern Baptist Convention, including many white Anglo southerners, decided the cross was more important than the flag. They decided our African-American brothers and sisters are more important than family heritage.”
Moore has also been critical of GOP Presidential Nominee Donald Trump. In a Yellowhammer Radio interview, Moore said that Trump is “scamming Christians” and lacks any semblance of Christian character.
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“You have somebody who has left two wives for other women; somebody who brags about all of the, as he puts it, ‘top women in the world’ that he gets to sleep with; somebody who speaks of women in ugly and degrading ways; that fits into that kind of Hugh Hefner sort of understand of women’s worth being in their sexual attractiveness and availability to men; somebody who has said, for instance, when we had evangelical missionaries with Ebola, that they shouldn’t be treated because they ought to pay for going overseas in the first place… And then somebody who has made a significant amount of his living in a gambling industry that destroys families, destroys communities, destroys lives, and at the end of all of this says, ‘I don’t have anything to ask forgiveness for.’ That’s a significant character issue,” he passionately told Yellowhammer’s Cliff Sims.
Southern Baptists remain the largest Protestant denomination in Alabama, with over 1 million members living in the state – roughly one out of every four Alabamians – and worshiping in one of over 3,300 active Baptist churches. However, the denomination is shrinking.
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The Southern Baptist Convention lost 200,000 members from 2014 to 2015 and now has 15.3 million members. Baptist leaders also reported that average weekly worship attendance declined 1.72 percent to 5.6 million. Baptisms have also declined 3.3 percent. The denomination grew quickly during the early 20th century, but its growth slowed during the 1950s and started to decline after hitting peak membership (16.3 million) in 2003.
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