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Tom Ascol seemed frustrated. His previous attempts to get the Southern Baptist Convention to denounce critical race theory were unsuccessful.

At the convention’s two-day annual meeting in Nashville in June, Ascol first tried to amend an existing resolution to do so. That didn’t work. Then the Florida pastor made a motion to rescind a resolution on the topic from a previous annual meeting. Officials ruled that out of order.

“What recourse do we have?” Ascol exclaimed in response, standing at a microphone in an auditorium filled with thousands of Southern Baptists. Ascol aimed his comments directly at then-President J.D. Greear, who was standing on stage.

But Greear stood his ground.

Southern Baptist Convention President J.D. Greear speaks during the annual Southern Baptist Convention meeting at Music City Center in Nashville, Tenn., Tuesday, June 15, 2021. Andrew Nelles / The Tennessean

The resolution that convention messengers — voting delegates representing local churches — passed never mentioned critical race theory by name. 

Instead, it simply said messengers "reject any theory or worldview that finds the ultimate identity of human beings in ethnicity or in any other group dynamic.”

The delicate wording was the result of a deliberative effort before the annual meeting by convention leaders who were trying to hold the denomination together. On the flip side of Ascol’s argument, Black pastors were threatening to leave the country’s largest Protestant denomination if it denounced critical race theory directly.

Newly obtained documents provide a behind-the-scenes look at how convention leaders handled such a tense moment. 

The documents, included in a binder that once belonged to James Merritt, the chair of the 2021 resolutions committee, include resolutions submitted on the subject of race and emails between top Southern Baptist leaders, including Greear.

The resolutions committee is a group of 10 volunteer messengers appointed by the SBC president that solicits and vets submissions from messengers to then bring them to the full convention for a vote.

Merritt’s binder reveals a careful exercise, in which Merritt and his committee sought to balance various perspectives on the heated debate over critical race theory while avoiding decisions that could further alienate Southern Baptists of color.

“I think it would have been suicidal for them to have done so. I think the Black constituency, it would have been close to a mass exodus,” Dwight McKissic, a Black pastor from Texas who was among those considering leaving, said in an interview.  

“It was a stroke of genius on their part to do it that way."

But for Ascol, it was a sign of decline in the SBC. Ascol did not respond to multiple phone calls and emails requesting comment. But he shared his thoughts after the annual meeting in an online post published^[1] by his nonprofit, Founders Ministries.

“There were two types of Southern Baptists in the convention hall … those who wanted the voices of hundreds of Southern Baptists to be heard (through the submission of this resolution by more than 1,300 church members) vs. those (primarily the Resolutions Committee chaired by James Merritt) who wanted those voices silenced.”

'Resolutions about CRT but not about CRT'

Southern Baptists have long battled over issues of race. The Nashville-based denomination was founded in 1845 in support of slaveholding missionaries and it wasn't until 1995 that messengers took formal action to apologize for backing slavery.

Since then, debates emerged over the Confederate battle flag, white supremacy and most recently, critical race theory. 

The theory, an academic framework largely taught in colleges and law schools, teaches that racism is ingrained in U.S. institutions and white people benefit from it. 

Southern Baptists had tackled the topic once before but as it began to burst into the national consciousness last year, they found themselves in the middle of debate again. Six Southern Baptist seminary presidents denounced the theory in late 2020, helping set the stage for the debate church leaders and messengers found themselves in as they prepared to gather in Nashville. 

On April 21, Greear and Merritt, himself a former president of the SBC between 2000 to 2002, met to discuss resolutions on race for the upcoming annual meeting.

Patrick Sawyer, a professor at the University of North Carolina Greensboro who had written about critical race theory and evangelicalism, also joined them.

“Gents, I appreciated our time today,” Greear wrote the two after their meeting in an email with the subject line, “Resolution about CRT but not about CRT." The email was in Merritt’s binder, which was obtained independently by The Tennessean.

People had already started submitting resolutions for about a week at that point, but the debate over critical race theory in the SBC had been going on for two years. Greear and Merritt were well aware of the current climate, and they wanted to get ahead of it all.

“I didn’t feel the pressure. But I knew the reality. I’m not that naïve," Merritt said in an interview. "I knew that no matter what we did, some would be upset.”

Greear suggested in his April 21 email what a prospective resolution on race should affirm ideas such as “white nationalism and white ethnocentrism are not biblical” and “the concept of systemic injustice.”

James Merritt, the chair of the 2021 resolutions committee

I didn’t feel the pressure. But I knew the reality. I’m not that naïve. I knew that no matter what we did, some would be upset.

The resolution should also stand against ideas such as “white identiarianism and Black identitarianism," Greear's email said.

The final resolution wasn’t identical to the version that Greear suggested, but the two were thematically similar.

By meeting with Merritt and sending that email, Greear wasn't trying to control the resolutions process, the former SBC president explained in an interview.

"The leadership I was trying to give there is really from a 50,000-foot level trying to say, ‘Here’s what I think would be a win for unifying our convention,'" Greear said.

‘The issues that divide us are fundamental’

The same day Merritt met with Greear, the resolutions committee chair also emailed Ascol to ask for his perspective.

Merritt told Ascol he wanted to “hear all sides,” but communicated that the resolutions committee had a goal of “unifying rather than dividing our convention.”

But for Ascol, that shouldn't be the goal, he said in an email. “Saying negative things is not always bad,” he said in an email reply to Merritt.

“The one thing your committee cannot afford to do is to ignore those encouragements (to denounce critical race theory) in hopes that doing so will promote unity. The simple truth is that Southern Baptists are not unified,” Ascol added in his reply. “The issues that divide us are fundamental.”

The reasons for Merritt reaching out to Ascol, and for Ascol’s unwavering opposition to critical race theory, is because Ascol was a foreman in a two-year-long campaign against critical race theory in the SBC.

The 2019 annual meeting had been the last time the critical race theory debate came up because there was no 2020 annual meeting due to COVID-19.

In 2019, the resolutions committee brought forward a resolution, which the messengers ultimately approved, saying critical race theory and intersectionality “should only be employed as analytical tools.”

The convention’s more conservative faction saw the 2019 resolution, commonly referred to as “Resolution 9,” as an endorsement of critical race theory and intersectionality, an academic framework about the connectedness between different forms of discrimination, such as race, gender and class. Ascol said during a session at the 2019 annual meeting in Birmingham that the academic frameworks “are ideologies incompatible with Christianity.”

The messengers' approval of Resolution 9 only fueled it. Founders Ministries, Ascol's nonprofit, published at least 40 posts on its website between June 2019 and June 2021 on critical race theory and intersectionality, warning of its dangers, and critiquing Resolution 9.

Meanwhile, between the 2019 and 2021 SBC annual meetings, at least four state Baptist conventions passed resolutions explicitly condemning critical race theory in protest of Resolution 9: Tennessee, Georgia, Ohio and the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention. In December 2020, the presidents of all six Southern Baptist seminaries signed a statement against critical race theory^[2], resulting in at least four Black pastors deciding to break away from the SBC, according to the Washington Post^[3].  

Many Southern Baptists believe the seminary presidents’ statement was a direct result of the conservative campaign in the SBC against critical race theory.

J.D. Greear, who served as Southern Baptist Convention president from 2018 to 2021.

The leadership I was trying to give there is really from a 50,000-foot level trying to say, ‘Here’s what I think would be a win for unifying our convention.'

Founders wasn’t the only group leading the charge. The Conservative Baptist Network — an activist group in the SBC trying to pull the denomination further to the right — talked about critical race theory in a video sent to one church in Texas. The video came with “a request for funding for the Conservative Baptist Network,” a member of the Texas church said in an email dated May 17, 2021. The email was in Merritt's binder.

The video featured a Conservative Baptist Network leader, Brad Jurkovich, “expressing concern over ‘left-leaning’ elements within the convention and expressed specific concerns over CRT and Resolution 9, with a request to help elect a conservative president at the convention in June (2021),” the church member wrote.

Jurkovich said in an interview that the description of the video sounds accurate. 

The church member sent the email to the six seminary presidents, one of whom forwarded the letter to Merritt, to express concern about the fierce opposition to critical race theory, and how it was affecting the church's climate and creating further division.  

Alluding to a story about fellow parishioner who is a Black woman, the author of the email wrote, “She says she is not alone in her concern among Black attendees – some have already left, and others are considering doing so.”

Commenting on the Conservative Baptist Network's active opposition to critical race theory and its effect on the climate in the SBC, Jurkovich emphasized there is not a monolithic perspective on critical race theory. 

"Some are offended, some totally reject it, some are rising up, saying, ‘this is wrong,'" Jurkovich said in an interview. 

‘Societal racist groups,’ Lost Cause theory and Red-baiting

Efforts to rally critical race theory opposition before the 2021 annual meeting were effective. The 2021 resolutions committee received nine submissions on the subject of race. Seven submissions, some of which had multiple people sign onto them, denounced critical race theory directly.

One submission opposing critical race theory equated the Ku Klux Klan to Black Lives Matter, saying they are both "societal racist groups."   

Two other submissions fell on the other side of the spectrum, including one from McKissic condemning Lost Cause mythology, or the historical romanticizing of the Confederacy.

Another submission criticized some of the opposition to critical race theory as “red-baiting, the act of discrediting the validity of another person by accusing, denouncing, or attacking them as Marxist or sympathetic to Marxist ideologies.”

Ultimately, the resolution the committee brought forward wasn't identical to any of the submissions the committee received. But that's why it worked, its supporters say. 

“I thought it was Solomonic wisdom in denouncing any particular racial theory by name. It was almost impossible, in my judgment, to denounce critical race theory and not denounce Christian nationalism or the Lost Cause theory,” McKissic said in an interview. “It was the boldest resolution they (the convention) ever adopted on the subject of race.”

The debate behind

The 2019 and 2021 resolutions weren’t the first resolutions on race debated in the SBC.

To many, the first pivotal resolution was in 1995, which apologized for the convention's history of slavery^[4]. The denomination was founded in support of slaveholding missionaries in 1845.

Recent controversy over race escalated in 2016, when McKissic submitted a resolution denouncing the Confederate battle flag.

The resolutions committee agreed to bring the submission forward at the annual meeting in St. Louis. The messengers ultimately passed it with an amendment that specifically called on Southern Baptists to discontinue any display of the Confederate flag.

Members attending the Southern Baptist Convention vote to formally condemn the political movement known as the "alt-right" in a national meeting, Wednesday, June 14, 2017, in Phoenix. Associated Press

But after the vote, Paul Pressler, who was a leader in the convention's "Conservative Resurgence" movement, protested that officials deliberately prevented him from speaking against the Confederate flag resolution because officials knew about his remarks beforehand. It was an early example of those considered more conservative in the convention claiming that less conservative leaders were stifling their voices in the debate over race. 

Then in 2017, McKissic submitted a resolution condemning the alt-right, the name associated with far right-wing political views often linked to white supremacist ideologies. The resolutions committee initially didn't bring the resolution forward at the annual meeting.  

McKissic tried re-introducing his resolution on the floor during a session at the 2017 annual meeting in Phoenix but was unsuccessful. The decision to reject McKissic’s effort garnered praise and commentary from alt-right figures on social media, leading the resolutions committee to convene for a special meeting that night to draft a new resolution that denounced the alt-right. 

In a session the next day, after the 2017 resolutions committee chairman formally apologized to the convention, the messengers overwhelmingly approved the new version.

“Each year of those three years that I served, there was something related to race. We can’t ignore the fact that it came up every year,” Rolland Slade, a Black pastor from California, said in an interview about his time serving on the resolutions committee between 2015 to 2017. 

Rev. Rolland E. Slade prepares to give his 7:30 a.m. sermon on July 19, 2020 at Meridian Baptist Church in El Cajon, California, Pastor Slade preaches two sermons each Sunday whether the congregation can attend or not due to COVID regulations. Pastor Slade typically has a few volunteers to help broadcast the sermon and a few others who attend in-person services. Tara Pixley / For The Tennessean

Slade now chairs the SBC executive committee, which handles denomination business when the full convention isn’t in session. He is the executive committee's first Black chairman. 

Though Slade was relieved at the outcomes of the 2016 and 2017 resolutions, he said it’s disheartening to see the debate happen over and over.

“I think there is harm in the expectation that we are going to continue to grow in our relationship but yet are going to continually be disappointing people of color," Slade said. “It’s ‘keep hanging in there, it’s going to get better.’ But then the following year, we are addressing the same division.”

The debate ahead

From the 2016 annual meeting to the 2021 annual meeting, Southern Baptists have spent a total 273 minutes discussing and debating resolutions. Eighty-five of those minutes, or about a third of the total time, have been spent on resolutions about race, according to an analysis of video recordings.

To Southern Baptist leaders, the math is neither a coincidence, nor is it surprising.

James Merritt, who chaired the Committee on Resolutions, speaks during the annual Southern Baptist Convention meeting at Music City Center in Nashville, Tenn., Tuesday, June 15, 2021. Andrew Nelles / The Tennessean

“Follow those resolutions and I believe you will see a tension in our country. It’s not an absolute Southern Baptist thing, it’s a tension in our culture,” Slade said, referring to the national political climate surrounding Donald Trump’s presidency. McKissic and Merritt made similar remarks in interviews.

McKissic hopes the debate in the SBC will calm down with the 2021 resolution. “I would be happy if the acronym ‘CRT’ (critical race theory) never came up in Anaheim," he said. 

The next SBC annual meeting is in June in the Southern California city.

“It would make no sense to debate this year this question, year after year after year. There’s no value to that,” McKissic said.

But recent events suggest otherwise.

At least four state-level conventions passed resolutions explicitly opposing critical race theory this year, Arkansas, Alabama, Louisiana and Colorado. The Conservative Baptist Network recently hosted events, including a panel and a screening for a new documentary, that featured more conservative Southern Baptist voices claiming that Southern Baptist seminary presidents and other convention leaders are getting too cozy with Marxism and critical race theory.  

Whether future resolutions on race come up is partly irrelevant, Slade contends. “The fact is that we have to come back to it a year later because our actions didn’t really meet our words,” he said.

Slade said he hopes to see more pastors prioritizing the diversity of their staff, for example, or facilitating more community events that draw church members across different neighborhoods.  

Messengers might say, “Okay, I’m for that, I agree with that resolution,” Slade said.

“But what are we doing to implement that within the Southern Baptist Convention? It’s a statement for the moment, that’s what we made in June," he said. "What have we done since June to push that forward?”

Liam Adams covers religion for The Tennessean. Reach him on Twitter @liamsadams^[5]. 

References

1. ^{^} online post published (founders.org)
2. ^{^} six Southern Baptist seminaries signed a statement against critical race theory (www.tennessean.com)
3. ^{^} to the Washington Post (www.washingtonpost.com)
4. ^{^} apologized for the convention's history of slavery (www.sbc.net)
5. ^{^} @liamsadams (twitter.com)

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from GANNETT Syndication Service https://ift.tt/3GIreEi