UNITED STATES
Stop Baptist Predators
Last month, the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention wrote a letter to President Obama.
Whew. That’s a mouthful, isn’t it? But that’s what it says on the letterhead: “Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention.”
The Commission maintains offices at Southern Baptist Convention headquarters in Nashville and also on Capitol Hill in Washington D.C.
Richard Land, who is the head of this lofty-sounding commission was writing to the President to tell him that “we would like to take this opportunity to add our voice to the discussions” on gun control.
He used that word “we” quite a lot. So who exactly is the “we” and by what authority does Land speak for the “we”?
After all, this is a denomination that claims it cannot possibly create a commission to consider clergy sex abuse allegations – as numerous other denominations have done — because the Southern Baptist Convention has no authority to tell local churches about their ministers. Or so they say. They claim that Baptists’ professed belief in local church autonomy precludes such a thing.
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