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News

Southern Baptist Convention suffers largest decline in church membership

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Protestant denominations are suffering declines in membership. Challenges like secularism, feminism and socialism are causing people to leave the church. And the response so far seems to be one of two things. From the conservatives, we hear that pastors need to teach the Bible more clearly. And from the progressives, we hear that churches need to adopt the political causes of non-Christians.

Here’s an article about the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, reported in Daily Wire. This is written by Ben Zeisloft.

He writes:

Membership in the Southern Baptist Convention witnessed the largest single-year decline in at least a century as the nation reels from the aftermath of lockdown mandates and pastors become concerned about the denomination’s theologically liberal drift.

The nation’s largest Protestant denomination saw a decline from 13.7 million members in 2021 to 13.2 million members in 2022, a decrease of more than 3% which continues the trajectory seen over the last three years, according to data released by Lifeway Research, a provider of church business services for the Southern Baptist Convention.

I’m what you would call a conservative, Bible-believing Christian. I don’t come out of a background of crazy sin and rebellion. But I did grow up in a non-Christian home, and my influences at that time were my two selfish parents, television, foolish students with no life experience, and public school teachers. So, I considered myself just as lost as any sinner. My brother actually continued down the path laid out by these influences, and our lives now are like night and day. My view of Christianity is that you put away your own selfish desires, and take up new Christian priorities. You stop worrying about what happened to you. You start looking for things you can do to build the relationship with the Boss.

My development as a Christian involved learning how to defend Christian truth claims and moral values to non-Christians, with reasons and evidence. But the perspective of people who grew up in the church is really different from mine. I tell them that church attendance is declining, because people have intellectual questions, and they have no reasons to think that our moral teachings are better. The church leaders disagree. They say that we just need to be nicer, and judge less, and have more fun activities to draw people in.

My friends who support the SBC know more about Disney and Star Wars than they do about how to defend basic Christian truth claims. They don’t want to learn how to make a case for God’s existence, Jesus’ resurrection, natural marriage or right to life. So, Christian churches just continue down the path of decline. The leaders think that Beth Moore is a better champion of Christianity than William Lane Craig. They promote Beth Moore, not William Lane Craig.

More:

Those who continued to profess Christianity became increasingly theologically liberal in their beliefs: a survey from Ligonier Ministries found that the share of self-identified evangelicals who believe “gender identity is a matter of choice” rose from 22% to 37% between 2020 and 2022, while the share who believe “the Bible’s condemnation of homosexual behavior doesn’t apply today” more than doubled from 11% to 28% over the same time horizon.

Record decline in Southern Baptist Convention membership occurs as hundreds of pastors throughout the country notice the liberal direction of the denomination. The trend is perhaps most palpable at the institutional level: Southern Baptist Convention President Bart Barber and other leaders have faced criticism for neglecting to rebuke the dozens of churches which have installed female pastors, a practice denounced in the Baptist Faith and Message.

Officials at the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the denomination’s public policy arm, meanwhile endorsed a red flag law in Tennessee months after they opposed a bill in Louisiana that would have criminalized abortion for all parties involved, even though Southern Baptists passed a resolution affirming that “the murder of preborn children is a crime against humanity that must be punished equally under the law” the previous summer. Former Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission President Russell Moore said three years ago that ministers should persuade church members to accept vaccination and wear face masks.

Here’s what the churches that leave the SBC are saying:

“You can take our church off your mailing list,” one pastor replied. “We do not support the socialist movement that has infiltrated the convention and are no longer a member.”

“Our congregation is no longer in the SBC because of their liberal stances on this and their support in fighting an abolition bill in Louisiana,” another minister said. “I pray along with you that the SBC leadership would be convicted by your efforts and the many churches like us who are stepping away,” added a third pastor.

“We truly appreciate your efforts to uphold the Bible. I’m just letting you know that our church voted to leave the SBC this past summer,” commented a fourth. “We felt that this issue was just one that should have been addressed in 2022. There were other issues, so we chose to become non-denominational and break from the SBC.”

I attended an SBC church recently for about 7 months. The pastor told me how conservative he was. How much he loved to read systematic theology. Then three things happened. First, he blocked my efforts to start an apologetics small group. Second, he invited a member of the far-left ERLC to push for open borders. Third, the pastor made the claim that “Jesus was a refugee” in a Bible study he was leading. There was no plan to counter secularism, feminism or socialism in this church. Instead, it was just the Democrat party line. I quit going, There just isn’t any interest in fighting any of the battles that are causing people to leave the church. The leaders are not excited to recommended Christianity to non-Christians as a set of correct answers to life’s biggest questions, along with meaningful work to do for the Boss. A new uniform every morning, no matter how badly you dirtied up the previous one the day before.

I think that’s a pretty good offer, and we should focus on making that offer to non-Christians, and learning how to answer their questions. Jesus didn’t try to entertain people into the Kingdom. He made claims, and authenticated those claims with evidence. I don’t know why Christian leaders think that their approach is better.

News

Leaked messages: leftists in government want parents who oppose their agenda to be fired

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Many leaders in the Christian church think that this whole “culture war” is just overblown. No one is out to get Christians, they say. Christianity isn’t under attack. We just need to win the secular left over by treating them nicely, and not believing “Republican party” ideas, like the Constitution, male-female marriage, secure borders, low taxes, and right to life. But what does the secular left think?

This article from ABC local news in Virginia (archived) is very interesting:

Some Loudoun County residents were threatened, and one even lost his job, after a social media group allegedly worked to dox them after the residents spoke out at school board meetings, according to documents a whistleblower sent 7News.

“I was taken back when I received a phone call from the sheriff’s department – a deputy – saying I was being threatened online,” Loudoun County resident Mark Winn told 7News.

The online threats happened in a Facebook group called the “Loudoun Love Warriors.”

The “Loudoun Love Warriors” group includes campaign volunteers, supporters, and staff for several Loudoun County elected officials, 7News learned after investigating the group members’ ties.

7News obtained hundreds of messages from a whistleblower in the group who thought the conversations were going too far.

Look how many people in the group are in government, law enforcement and school boards:

The “Loudoun Love Warriors” group includes people who appear to be associated with Loudoun County Commonwealth’s Attorney Buta Biberaj, County Supervisor Juli Briskman, School Board Chair Ian Serotkin, school board member Brenda Sheridan, school board member Atoosa Reaser, school board member Erika Ogedegbe, school board candidate Anne Donohue, sheriff candidate Craig Buckley, and Chair Phyllis Randall. None of these elected officials personally made any threats.

What’s interesting to me is how many WOMEN there are in the group. Here’s a New York Post article about “Buta Biberaj”.

It says:

A top Virginia prosecutor sought jail time for the dad who was arrested at a school board meeting while protesting his daughter’s rape — despite having run on a George Soros-funded campaign against mass incarcerations, according to reports.

Bronx-raised Loudoun County Commonwealth Attorney Buta Biberaj personally prosecuted dad Scott Smith, 48, after he was arrested at a raucous June 22 public meeting, Loudoun Now noted at the time.

The county’s top prosecutor pushed for jail time as well as a fine and anger management for Smith, even though he was only facing misdemeanor charges of disorderly conduct and resisting arrest — and his lawyer insisted he had been illegally detained, the court report said.

That’s what she did to a father whose daughter had been raped in a girl’s washroom by a student with male equipment. The father pays her salary with his taxes! But she didn’t feel any responsibility to treat him well.

Anyway, back to the original article. The threats made against the parents are very interesting. And keep in mind that the parents are paying the salaries of the government workers who are saying this:

  • “I’m gonna find his employer.”
  • “And holding that company accountable until he is fired.”
  • “Lets make him unemployable by love or by force.”
  • “I want to contact his employer to do just that. Ruin his livelihood.”
  • “Say goodbye to your job f***** [middle finger emoji].”
  • “I want every single person who clapped for that ousted en masse and their livelihoods ruined:).”

And these are even worse:

  • “Im telling you. SOMETHING has to happen to one of them.”
  • “Something public and permanent.”
  • “Lines drawn in the cement.”
  • “Lives needs to be ruined beyond repair.”
  • “Lets actually destroy them. Grind them.”
  • “If he had said that s*** about black kids or autistic kids I would shoot him.”
  • “We REALLY need to find this guy.”
  • “You guys need to stop protesting and start fighting back against these people Time to just do something different to shut them down.”
  • “F*** just getting him [fired].”
  • “Im soooo ready to show up with guns lol.”
  • “His life needs to be PERMANENTLY disassembled.”

And then they posted the addresses of the homes of the parents who they disagreed with. What bothered them the most was when one of the parents quoted verses from the Bible. That seems to be what really drove them crazy. But remember – the Biden administration said that it was concerned parents who were the real “domestic terrorists”.

I found another article about this story at Daily Wire, if you want to read more about the people involved.

And here is one of the women admitting that she e-mailed the employers of men who wanted to protect children from abuse and mutilation:

So, it’s very important for Christians and conservatives to understand where the secular leftists in government, law enforcement and the school boards stand. Christians think “oh, these are nice people, just like us”. But they’re not just like us. They’re just like Stalin, Mao, Hitler and the other socialist fascists who want to force their views on others. Parents who want their children to believe in God, morality, the Constitution, etc. are in their way. And they aren’t afraid to use threats, coercion, vandalism, and even violence in order to force parents to bow to them.

News

The importance of having a narrative when confronting the assumption of naturalism

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How do you present theism as a rational belief to a person who thinks that the progress of science has removed the need for God?

Canadian science writer Denyse O’Leary writes about the history of cosmology at Evolution News.

Excerpt:

What help has materialism been in understanding the universe’s beginnings?

Many in cosmology have never made any secret of their dislike of the Big Bang, the generally accepted start to our universe first suggested by Belgian priest Georges Lemaître (1894-1966).

On the face of it, that is odd. The theory accounts well enough for the evidence. Nothing ever completely accounts for all the evidence, of course, because evidence is always changing a bit. But the Big Bang has enabled accurate prediction.

In which case, its hostile reception might surprise you. British astronomer Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) gave the theory its name in one of his papers — as a joke. Another noted astronomer, Arthur Eddington (1882-1944), exclaimed in 1933, “I feel almost an indignation that anyone should believe in it — except myself.” Why? Because “The beginning seems to present insuperable difficulties unless we agree to look on it as frankly supernatural.”

One team of astrophysicists (1973) opined that it “involves a certain metaphysical aspect which may be either appealing or revolting.” Robert Jastrow (1925-2008), head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, initially remarked, “On both scientific and philosophical grounds, the concept of an eternal Universe seems more acceptable than the concept of a transient Universe that springs into being suddenly, and then fades slowly into darkness.” And Templeton Prize winner (2011) Martin Rees recalls his mentor Dennis Sciama’s dogged commitment to an eternal universe, no-Big Bang model:

For him, as for its inventors, it had a deep philosophical appeal — the universe existed, from everlasting to everlasting, in a uniquely self-consistent state. When conflicting evidence emerged, Sciama therefore sought a loophole (even an unlikely seeming one) rather as a defense lawyer clutches at any argument to rebut the prosecution case.

Evidence forced theorists to abandon their preferred eternal-universe model. From the mid 1940s, Hoyle attempted to disprove the theory he named. Until 1964, when his preferred theory, the Steady State, lost an evidence test.

Here is a quick summary of some of the experimental evidence that emerged in the last few decades that caused naturalists to abandon the eternal universe that they loved so much when they were younger.

The importance of having a narrative

Now I want to make a very, very important point about Christianity and the progress of science. And that point is that it is very important that Christians present the evidence in exactly the way that Denyse presented it in that article – in its historical context, featuring the conflict between naturalists and the experimental evidence.

All Christians should be familiar with the following basic pieces of evidence which fit the war between science and naturalism narrative:

  1. The origin of the universe
  2. The cosmic fine-tuning
  3. The origin of life (biological information)
  4. The sudden origin of the Cambrian phyla
  5. The habitability/observability correlation

When you talk about these evidences as a Christian theist to non-Christians, you have to have cultivated a genuine interest in reconciling your beliefs with science. You have to accept that there are two books that reveal God’s character and attributes. The book of nature, and the book of Scripture. And you need to be flexible about getting these two books to fit together. The book of nature gives us natural theology (see Romans 1). It tells us that God is Creator and Designer. The book of Scripture tells us that God stepped into history as a man to save us by taking the punishment for our headlong rush away from God, which the Bible calls sin. Science is one way that humans can recover some of basic knowledge about God. Knowledge that is only possible because God created and designed the universe (and us) in such a way that we are capable of making discoveries, and that the universe is capable of being explored and understood.

It’s very important to present these five basic evidences to non-Christians in the historical context. And here is the story you must tell: “In the beginning, there was the naturalism, and the naturalism tried to argue from ignorance that God was not Creator and God was not Designer. And then came the science, and now people have to give up their naturalism in order to account for the science”. That’s the narrative you use when talking to non-Christians about science.

In the beginning was the naturalism:

  1. In pre-scientific times, atheists maintained that the universe was eternal
  2. In pre-scientific times, atheists maintained that a life-permitting universe was as likely as a life-prohibiting universe
  3. In pre-scientific times, atheists maintained that the cell was a simple blob of Jello that could spontaneously emerge in some warm pond
  4. In pre-scientific times, atheists maintained that the sudden origin of the Cambrian phyla would be explained by subsequent fossil discoveries
  5. In pre-scientific times, atheists maintained that there was nothing special about our galaxy, solar system, planet or moon

But then science progressed by doing experiments and making observations:

  1. Scientists discovered redshift and the cosmic microwave background radiation (evidence for a cosmic beginning) and more!
  2. Scientists discovered the fine-tuning of gravity and of the cosmological constant and more!
  3. Scientists discovered protein sequencing and exposed the myth of “junk DNA” and more!
  4. Scientists discovered an even shorter Cambrian explosion period and the absence of precursor fossils and more!
  5. Scientists discovered galactic habitable zones and circumstellar habitable zones and more!

And now rational people – people who want to have true beliefs about reality – need to abandon a false religion (naturalism).

Now naturally, science is in a state of flux and things change. But you have to look at the trend of discoveries, and those trends are clearly going against naturalism, and in favor of Christian theism. No one is arguing for a deductive proof here, we are simply looking at the evidence we have today and proportioning our belief to the concrete evidence we have today. People who are guided by reason should not seek to construct a worldview by leveraging speculations about future discoveries and mere possibilities. We should instead believe what is more probable than not. That’s what a rational seeker of truth ought to do. Proportion belief to probabilities based on current, concrete knowledge.

Atheism, as a worldview, is not rooted in an honest assessment about what science tells us about reality. Atheism is rooted in a religion: naturalism. And the troubling thing we learn from looking at the history of science is that this religion of naturalism is insulated from correction from the progress of science. Nothing that science reveals about nature seems to be able to put a dent in the religion of naturalism, at least for most atheists.

It falls to us Christian theists, then, to hold them accountable for their abuse and misrepresentation of science. And that means telling the story of the progress of science accurately, and accurately calling out the religion of naturalism for what it is – a religion rooted in blind faith and ignorance that has been repeatedly and convincingly falsified by the progress of science in the modern era.

Positive arguments for Christian theism