The largest Southern Baptist Convention gathering in decades opened Tuesday amid debates over race and sexual abuse, a concerted effort to push the conservative denomination even further to the right and a bellwether election to pick its next president.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — The largest Southern Baptist Convention gathering in decades opened Tuesday amid debates over race and sexual abuse, a concerted effort to push the conservative denomination even further to the right and a bellwether election to pick its next president. Nearly 15,000 church representatives were on hand as the meeting began with prayers for unity. Immediately after, debate began on the hot-button controversies that have roiled the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. Members heard an impassioned plea for survivors of sexual abuse and were asked to consider competing resolutions on critical race theory, an academic theory on structural racism that has been a target of religious and political conservatives. Tennessee pastor Grant Gaines, speaking with an abuse survivor at his side, proposed a task force that would oversee a sweeping review of the denomination’s response to sexual abuse — a broader investigation than the one announced last week by the SBC’s Executive Committee. „I stand with SBC church abuse survivors, and right now I’m standing beside one such SBC church abuse survivor,“ Gaines said. Other representatives proposed actions that would repudiate critical race theory, including one that would rescind a 2019 resolution that said the theory could be a useful tool. The SBC’s resolutions committee floated a resolution that didn’t specifically name critical race theory but rejected any view that sees racism as rooted in “anything other than sin.” The committee also reaffirmed a 1995 resolution apologizing for the history of racism in a denomination that was founded in 1845 in support of slavery, and it apologized for „condoning and/or perpetuating individual and systemic racism in our lifetime.“ Separately the committee proposed a resolution declaring that “any person who has committed sexual abuse is permanently disqualified from holding the office of pastor.
