Delegates at the denomination’s convention approved a stricter ban on female pastors and rejected the appeals of two churches led by women to remain in the denomination.
Yikes. There is quite a pattern developing in the religious right, in the US at least. We are turning back the clock folks.
I want to go back to the ‘50s to berate the post war town planners in the UK, as the saying goes at least the Luftwaffe had the decency to replace our buildings with nothing uglier than rubble.
This is why religion is indoctrinated. While I can accept, even while not believing, the argument that spirituality is innate, organized religion is entirely a human construct.
"Spirituality is innate" is such a copout for me. In my opinion, it just means people have an imagination and emotions, but I don't want to admit magic isn't real so I'll call it spirituality.
SBC also voted to affirm the explusions of two churches, including Saddleback Church, which was founded by highly respected author Rick Warren and is one of the largest baptist churches in the country. They claim nearly 25,000 people in weekly attendance. And Warren's books, including "The Purpose-Driven Life," are used all over, including in my then-relatively liberal Lutheran church.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddleback_Church
They were expelled because a woman acted as a youth pastor.
Wow. That's like kicking the Yankees out of MLB because the league thinks that players should be able to have long hair.
This is not surprising as SBC membership has been steadily declining and this, alongside the overall decline of Christianity in America, is leaving only the most conservative and extreme views behind. This act will only serve to ensure the decline continues as they are really just digging their own grave.
This is such a great observation that it seems obvious as soon as I read it, but it didn't occur to me at all, especially in the sense you have framed:
The decline of Christianity isn't a dissipation, it's a contraction towards the hard core.
Gaming that out leads to some pretty alarming scenarios, and that's relative to the alarming scenario we are currently living through!
As a former SBC kid, I'm more shocked they would kick out one of their highest grossing businesses out, purely from financial standpoint. Typically, they used to just gloss over this stuff and pretend they didn't know.
I just want to point out that a group of people are gathering to ensure that they don't agree to follow a person that they don't have any obligation to follow anyway.
Part of me wonders if this is just me getting older and well into the "back in my day" stage of life when I worry that things are getting significantly worse. But it really feels like this poor country is in a serious backward arc and I'm genuinely worried for my kids.
What do you expect from an ideology so doggedly sectarian they do mental gymnastics to justify why a loving god would create people predestined for eternal conscious torment in Hell rather than admit they might be wrong?
These people ‘solve’ the problem of evil like a bag and a river solves the problem of too many kittens.