The Rev. Adrian Rogers, a Memphis televangelist who helped engineer a conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention when he was elected president of the nation's largest Protestant denomination in 1979, has died. He was 74.
Rogers, who was hospitalized earlier this month with double pneumonia and cancer, died Tuesday in Memphis, his ministry said.
The election of Rogers turned out to be a watershed moment for the 16-million member congregation, which shifted dramatically to the right politically and theologically — and stayed there — as he appointed fellow conservatives to key positions.
Since then, conservative leaders have pushed hard against abortion rights, homosexuality and female pastors.
Earlier this year, Southern Baptists ended an eight-year boycott of Walt Disney Co. that had been prompted mainly by the company's decision to give benefits to companions of gay employees.
Reading this obituary reminds me of a friend who years ago taught me some interesting things about newspapers. One of the things she always did was to read obituaries carefully. Sort of like the Pete Seeger song about getting old:
I get up each morning and dust off my wits
Open the paper and read the obits
If I'm not in there I know I'm not dead
So I eat a good breakfast and go back to bed
Actually, her thinking was more that obits give a lot of details about the lives of people who don't normally make the newspaper while they are alive. And some of the stories can be very interesting.
Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, Nelson's obituary notes, both invited Rogers to preach at the White House.
It's questionable whether Rogers was as pleased at the invitation from devout Southern Baptist Carter as he was by that from Reagan, a man whose religious convictions were always vaguely defined. In his new book Our Endangered Values, Carter talks about Rogers, identifying him by date rather than by name in this case:
A few weeks before our hostages were seized in Iran, the newly elected president of the Southern Baptist Convention [Rogers] came to the Oval Office to visit me. This had been a routine ceremony for many years, especially when the president of the United States happened to be a Baptist. I congratulated him on his new position, and we spent a few minute exchanging courtesies. As he and his wife were leaving, he said, "We are praying, Mr. President, that you will abandon secular humanism as your religion." This was a shock to me. I considered myself to be a loyal and traditional Baptist, and had no idea what he meant.
Carter then describes in a way both sad and amusing, how he and his pastor tried to figure out what the heck the head of their denomination had been talking about. The pastor knew that Rogers had been elected as the candidate of a hardline conservative faction in the SBC.
But he evidently did not know about the crackpot Christian Right notion of "secular humanism" as a religion. In the convoluted logic often found among genuine extremists, the argument went that anyone who opposed government sponsorship of the Christian religion, such as Christian prayers in public school ceremonies, was practicing the religion of "secular humanism". And since "secular humanism" is a religion, banning government-sponsored promotion of the Christian religion was imposing the religion of "secular humanism" and thereby violating the freedom of religion of Christians. (Yes, "paranoid" would be an appropriate description to apply to this reasoning.)
Carter was correct: he was a traditional Baptist, and therefore had not been initiated into such arcane mysteries of the Christian Right.
Carter's pastor did speculate that Rev. Rogers was writing him out of the Christian faith because Carter "had made some presidential decisions that might be at odds with political positions espoused by leaders of the newly formed Moral Majority and other groups of conservative Christians".
Both my pastor and I were still in a quandary, but I had no alternative except to ignore the condemnation and continue doing what I thought was best for our country (and also compatible with my traditional Baptist beliefs). At the same time, I began to learn what I could about both Islam and the generic aspects of fundamentalism.
One of the paradoxes of the Christian Right is that their theology centers on the individual's "personal relationship with Christ" and expects believers to proselytize others to "accept Jesus and Lord and Savior". And yet in their political preferences, the Christian Right groups place a much higher value on a candidate's policy positions than on their personal faith. Carter was clearly much closer to the Christian fundamentalists in terms of personal religious faith than Reagan. The same was also true of Bill Clinton when he ran against Old Man Bush and against Bob Dole.
No doubt, it's good, pragmatic political sense so far as it goes. But I assume that the religious element is more than cynical manipulation for at least some of these Christian Right leaders, however fanatical a turn they may give it. So it is something of a paradox.
And speaking of fanaticism, Carter in that last paragraph makes a thematic as well as temporal connection between his newfound priority of getting acquainted with both Islamic and Christian fundamentalism ("the generic aspects of fundamentalism"). That's not just a polemical shot; in fact, he seems to have worded it to softpedal the polemical side of it.
There are some common characteristics of fundamentalism that can be identified that are ecumenicalal, and not just in the sense that they occur in more than one religion. The Bush administration has generally voted in the United Nations with conservative Islamic countries on questions related to birth control and women's rights.
But religions also do have their particular characteristics. It's easy to assume that "fundamentalism is fundamentalism", or "mysticism is mysticism", and brush aside the differences between religions. That inevitably leads to a superficial understanding of the commonalities. Salafism is a brand of Islamic fundamentalism, Kabbalah is Jewish mysticism, Pentecostalism is a Christian strain of belief, and so on. To really understand the common elements of such phenomena in different religions, understanding them in their particular religious context is also required.
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