Church News

Would be a war, people said. The Southern Baptist Convention met last week, 16.000 strong, in fact, the nation's largest Protestant denomination, split at the seams between two conservative views--basically Trumpismist and those not so, although neither side would have advertised itself as such.

On one side stood the conservative conservatives gunning for continuing a pattern of racial reconciliation, as well as a commitment to deal up front with the denomination's nagging problems with sexual abuse--in other words, strong church-like concerns with the problems of racial and gender injustice. Absolutely nothing about those concerns are "progressive" or "liberal," but we're now in the Era Of The Big Lie.

Opposing the conservative conservatives were the ultra-conservative conservatives, who generally eschewed social concerns, SBC people who hammer the horrific extremes of the latest Fox News bugaboo, "critical race theory," which threatens to make our children (gasp!) feel guilty about being white. Not reading racial animosity into the battle lines is well-nigh impossible.

The question the SBC faced?--who will lead? Guess who won? The conservative conservative, who we'll call (to throw salt in the wound) "the progressive conservative." There, I said it. I don't know if the ultra-conservative conservatives are awaiting Donald J. Trump to carp about the election was rigged, but who knows? Stranger things have happened and are happening. And will.

In other church news, last week the U. S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, 400-strong, voted to create guidelines to determine who will or should take communion and who wouldn't or shouldn't, a move generally assumed to be aimed at Joe Biden, who happens to be President of these United States and who attends mass religiously (last Sunday, an English congregation was shocked when the Bidens, unannounced, happened to stop by--a lovely story). But Biden is a Democrat, a life-long member of a party that is pro-life but not rabidly anti-abortion. Expect some kind of ecclesiastical edict sometime soon to see if the Bidens will be barred from the mass.

As Karen Tumulty said in the Washington Post on Saturday, "Catholics — and I am one — should be leery of those in the clergy who treat the Communion wafer as some kind of merit badge, rather than the spiritual sustenance that we were taught to believe it is." But then, she's a liberal, I guess.

Roman Catholics have come along way since JFK. In 1960, I was in sixth grade. I didn't know what to think about my uncle, who, like an Old Testament prophet, spoke at lots of area Dutch Reformed churches, including ours. It was a Sunday night, after worship. Only the truly faithful were there. 

I was a kid. I didn't know what to think. The whole presentation was bitter and angry. Should Kennedy triumph over Nixon that year, my uncle was convinced that the Pope--way over their in Rome!--would be at the controls of the entire American system of government because JFK, as a Catholic, had to listen to, adhere, follow, whatever! the Pope's rulings. America would be governed by the pope, my uncle told the crowd of faithful. Not that many years before, Protestants like us had called the pontiff "the anti-Christ."

Didn't happen. JFK was assassinated three years later in Dallas. But I can remember exactly where we sat in the church that night, and I can't help thinking it was the beginning of my lifelong separation from my parents' politics. I couldn't buy his total conviction that America was moving inexorably down the road to perdition because Kennedy was a Roman Catholic.

Sixty years later, turns out my Uncle wasn't all wrong--the Roman Catholic Church appears to be trying to influence an American President's politics, but in a very limited way: to keep him from the sacraments. Pope Francis hasn't done much dictation of public policy as of yet, but it's early, Uncle Jay, so we'll see what kind of perdition is yet to come our way. 

Thank goodness, that old bugaboo belongs in a museum.

American culture, these days especially, is a ripe melon, split and juicy. If just one man would say, "I've been wrong. Biden won. It wasn't rigged. Joe Biden got more votes than I did. Joe Biden is President. I'm sorry. Please, go home and build a better world." If just one man would say that, maybe we could heal.

That one man, of course, is the ex-President. 

I'm not expecting that speech any time soon. 

The temperature in Alton right now is 51 degrees! Finally, we're cooling off after two weeks' worth of 90+. 

Don't I wish that were true in every way.