Just weeks after the Southern Baptist Convention was rocked by a report documenting sweeping mishandling of sexual abuse, the nation's largest Protestant denomination gathered this week in Southern California for its annual meeting, where delegates known as "messengers" elected a new SBC president: Texas pastor Bart Barber, who defeated right-wing Florida pastor Tom Ascol in a runoff late Tuesday night. What happens in the SBC, with its deep connections to the Republican Party and the anti-aborion movement, inevitably affects U.S. politics more broadly. But this year, the reverse was true as well: The fight for the SBC presidency didn't just track the nation's wider political divides but seemed largely driven by them.
As Michelle Boorstein reports at the Washington Post, this year's meeting began Sunday with a pugilistic tone, at an opening event hosted by the Conservative Baptist Network, part of the denomination's most right-wing faction. At the event, neo-Calivinist megachurch pastor John MacArthur inveighed against progressive positions on race and women's roles in the church by declaring, "You don't advance the kingdom of God by lining up with the kingdom of Satan" — the latter apparently exemplified by the threat of "women preachers, social justice, then racism, then CRT, then victimization."
