Help, I'm Drowning (in worthless analysis), or Why Those Water Words Matter

The latest reports are out about membership in the Southern Baptist Convention. The news isn't particularly great; membership is down .15%. Yeah, that's not a huge number. If the membership of the SBC is actually 16 million, and only Ed Stetzer and old-ass pastors believe that, then it represents a decrease of 22500 people. If the actual attendance in Sunday worship is closer to 5 million (a number that doesn't include children young enought to piss themselves and visitors), which all honest people know to be the case, then it means a decrease of 7500 people. Either way, not a ton of folks, yet it represents an ongoing downward trend in the SBC. (No, I don't think this is a tragedy. I count exactly two committed SBC types as good friends, and barely more than that as happy acquaintances.) However, for American religion, this is an important moment.

Much has been said and written about the growth of the "nones." Unfairly, the mainstream media have written as if all nones are people with no faith. That's just shitty journalism. The nones are in fact largely people of faith, but of no faith in particular. They are likely to call themselves spiritual but not religious, which means I never want to hang out with them. They are also equally likely to identify as generally Christian, but they eschew labels, especially denominational labels. Oh, I know, the SBC isn't a denomination...bullshit, bullshit, bullshit...it's as if these people are singularly incapable of telling the truth. (Sorry, I can't do Russell Brand without sound.) The SBC is up against this trend toward non-association, and they are largely to blame.

Part of this story is that amidst the trend that reveals the membership in the SBC has peaked and is now trending downward, there is a secondary story that is more grave (allegedly), but it's only grave if SBC theology knows what's at stake—but it doesn't. The SBC has reached a 60-year low in baptisms. For the unitiated, the SBC tracks numbers like dollars, members, and baptisms. Yeah, I know, it's goofy, but this is church, folks. (Non-denominational church...ha!) Who'd you bury, who'd you marry, and who'd you dunk in a bathtub behind the pulpit? 

The numbers are stark for Southern Baptists, at least those who actually believe there are 16 million members, and that baptisms were all first baptisms and not "recommitments" or denominational transfers. Yes, there are those pastors who re-baptize members as a way of "recommitting" or revisiting their baptism and then include those numbers in their (non)denominational reports. But what do the numbers really mean? The numbers mean that the downward trend in religious commitment in America is affecting the SBC. Welcome to the party. I suspect it's been there all along, but the tendency of the SBC to count dead people and emigrees to megachurches as members of their SBC congregations hid the numerical reality for a while. I suspect you can't find anyone under 30 who gives a shit about being "Southern Baptist." Okay, that's an exaggeration. There is at least one guy per seminary who thinks it's critically important, much like the theology prof I had as an undergrad who was (allegedly) willing to die for the Pentecostal Holiness handbook. There is no hope for these people. They will always be on the borderline of sanity; one might compare them with Lebron James fans. Somewhere in this story is a ghost, and not the Holy one.

For a (non)denomination that names themselves for a Christian sacrament to fail to understand the importance of the sacrament is hilarious in a Mel Brooks meets P.T. Anderson meets Sarah Palin sort of way. The SBC is concerned that the number of baptisms is down. Why wouldn't it be? They've spent generations devaluing the sacrament. The original purpose of baptism (Christian, not Jewish) was to move the believer (catechumen) from the political realm of "the world" to the political realm of "the kingdom of God." This followed a period of catechesis wherein the new believer learned what it was to be a Christian. Baptism was a privilege granted to catechumens who earned the right to enter the community of faith. It was a public declaration of faith, but it was, more than that, an introduction to the politic, ethics, and community of the kingdom of God. 

See, the water metaphor of baptism looked backward to the water metaphors of deliverance in the Flood and Exodus. It's a recapitulation of salvation in the sense of being carried through trial to redemption. (There is even an oblique metaphor to (re)birth here.) Once Finney and his ilk fucked everything up by making salvation a matter of right belief, it was a short step to making baptism a public declaration of right belief. Baptists, who were so quick to jettison all things "Catholic," quickly jettisoned the baby and the baptism water because they loathed the ideas of baptismal regeneration and infant baptism. In doing so, they lost the theological (soteriological) emphasis of baptism, and so were left to find a "meaning" in the symbolic act. What was left was a "public profession" of faith. Yeah, cause getting in front of a crowd and saying "I love Jesus, yes I do..." was insufficient. You had to have water to really make it stick...See how silly this gets when people forget theology? 

And so now we've arrived at the watershed moment (love that pun, eh?) in which Baptists realize that baptisms are decreasing...irony is the gift of the gods for the the liberals among us who grow weary of conservative literalism. What is to be done? Stetzer recommends focusing on the missio dei. That's a fancy Latin term for mission of God. It is, to borrow from Fitch, an utterly empty signifier. It could mean a million things or nothing, and it functions as a way to rally the troops, and it (happily) creates enemies: those who fail to understand the "missional mandate." I do love terms that are never defined or are defined such that they can mean "whatever the fuck the leader says God says is important."

Baptist friends, you have arrived at this moment because you have failed to understand what baptism means. It's really that simple. You have caved to evangelical banality in the way salvation is defined, and you have forgotten who you are. You have exchanged your glorious tradition for the language game of politics, and all the while tried to convince yourselves that a Christian vocabulary, or at least a moral (natural law) vocabulary, justified your abandonment of the realm of Spirit for the passing and profane rewards of the realm of worldly politics. Congratulations. You have arrived at the Monkey House (and we do need Vonnegut). Your politics do define you, but you fail to understand that it matters little what words you use; we see your politics through the vocabulary. 

Comments

[David Phillips]

Greg,

My dear friend Todd Littleton pointed me to your blog and I, as a (on the edge) SBC'er really appreciate much of what you have said. This is pretty good stuff and I just wanted to tell you so...

[Greg Horton]

David, thanks for stopping by and for the kind words.

[Leighton]

In the first figure citation, there's a missing 2 in front of 2500 (.15% of 16 million is 22,500 rather than 2500).

I didn't realize that Southern Baptists claimed not to be a denomination. I grew up with Church of Christ claiming the same thing, and while CofC clearly is a denomination according to the definitions used by sociologists, anthropologists and historians, this silliness is mitigated by their lack of a central political authority. SBCers apparently don't realize that if your church signs on to an organizational constitution that is managed at the national level, you not only belong to a denomination, you belong to a denomination that has a problem with pathological lying.

[Scott]

Southern Baptists most certainly identify themselves as a denomination. I think this author was confused with the Church of Christ, or that we (SBCs)decry any kind of a hierarchy--at least in theory, though often not in practice, and uphold (again, at least in theory) the autonomy of the local church. He was incorrect about many of his facts, and clearly has an axe to grind with someone, but nonetheless, spot on in terms of his main arguments.

[Greg Horton]

Scott, thanks for getting the main point, but the irony is that you continue to say the SBC is denomination and that all churches are autonomous. I supposed it's possible for people who believe 3=1 to believe that the concept of autonomous churches = denomination is a true statement when those "autonomous" churches can be kicked out of a "denomination." The minor point was that the SBC says both statements with a straight face, as if the very idea isn't self-defeating and contradictory. And I don't think I have any axes about, but thanks.