Southern Baptists are finally getting it! Hallelujah! Southern Baptists are finally getting it! Well, some of them are, anyway. And that’s a start.
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(NOTE: This weblog creates, for us all, a chance to meet at the intersection of Life and the New Spirituality. It is written by the author of Conversations with God, the worldwide best-selling series of books. The “New Spirituality” is defined by the author as “a new way to experience and express our natural impulse toward the Divine without making others wrong for the way in which they are doing it.” The author’s latest book is Happier Than God, published in February by Emnin Books and distributed by Hampton Roads.)

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It took forever—and for a while there I never thought it would happen—but even Southern Baptists are, at last, “getting” that we have an environment that we have to protect.
In what The New York Times yesterday called “a significant departure” from the Southern Baptist Convention’s “official stance” on global warming, 44 Southern Baptist leaders have broken from the pack to issue a statement that, for them, had to have taken enormous courage…even though, for the rest of the world, it may seem like a simple noticing of the obvious.
Times journalist Neela Banerjee reports that those leaders “have decided to back a declaration on climate change.”
Now that is news. No kidding around. That is news.
Southern Baptists are, of course, among the most politically and socially conservative people around. And most conservatives, if you don’t know it, do not believe there even is a Climate Change Problem. They regularly poo-poo the views of environmentalists on this (and most every other) subject, have roundly denounced Al Gore’s movie/book An Inconvenient Truth as a pack of, well, wild exaggerations, if not outright lies, and have even, in some instances, called the whole climate change claim a gigantic hoax.

Now come over 40 members of the leadership of this movement to tell us that, on this subject, their denomination has had it…er…wrong. The group that signed what was called “A Southern Baptist Declaration on the Environment and Climate Change” included Rev. Frank Page, the current president of the Southern Baptist Convention, as well as Rev. Jack Graham and Rev. James Merritt—two Convention past presidents. In other words, some movers and shakers within the movement, which, with 16 million members, is the second largest religious denomination in the United States (Roman Catholics are first).
In their Declaration these 44 leaders said, in part, “We believe our current denominational engagement with these issues has often been too timid, failing to produce a unified moral voice.”
You have to understand what a departure this is. The Times reports that just last year the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution that took “a more skeptical view of global warming.”
Yet this new Declaration pulled no punches. Other wording from the present document includes this paragraph:
“Our cautious response to these issues in the face of mounting evidence may be seen by the world as uncaring, reckless and ill-informed.”
So let’s give credit where credit is due. That statement, from the current president. two past presidents, and 41 other denominational leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention will surely draw some disagreement (if not antagonism) from other members of their group.
It is true, of course, that evidence of global warming—and of mankind’s role in creating it–is mounting (to the point of making the matter embarrassingly clear), and so this Declaration may, indeed, seem to be a simple statement of the obvious—yet sometimes (in fact, usually) even stating the obvious can get you in trouble.
Kudos, then, to the Southern Baptist leadership for signing on to a document that, according to the New York Times report, “also urges ministers to preach more about the environment and for all Baptists to keep an open mind about considering environmental policy.”
But don’t get too excited just yet. As the same Times story noted, while the new Declaration on climate change was certainly noteworthy, “Still, many powerful Southern Baptist leaders and agencies did not sign the declaration, including the convention’s influential political arm, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.”
It would seem that George Bernard Shaw had it right. “All great truth,” he famously said, “begins as blasphemy.”