So what’s up with the Southern Baptist Convention deciding to take a,
well, pro-regulatory
stance on the oil disaster in the Gulf? Just a week ago, Richard
Land, SBC public policy pooh-bah, was out there
defending BP and blaming “the environmental movement.” That was a far
cry from the SBC’s June 16 resolution calling on the government

to
act determinatively and with undeterred resolve to end this crisis;
to fortify our coastal defenses; to ensure full corporate accountability
for damages, clean-up and restoration; to ensure that government and
private industry are not again caught without planning for such
possibilities; and to promote future energy policies based on prudence,
conservation, accountability, and safety.

The SBC’s
resolutions committee chair is Southern Seminary dean Richard Moore, who
has also been the Convention’s point man for climate change. Heretofore
he’s been a vigorous opponent of things like the carbon tax, but he
happens to hail from Biloxi, where the effects of BP’s mess are, shall
we say, hard to ignore. Back on June 1, Moore wrote a blog
post that reads, in part:

For too long, we
evangelical Christians have maintained an uneasy
ecological conscience. I include myself in this indictment.

We’ve had an inadequate view of human sin.

Because we believe in free markets, we’ve acted as though
this means
we should trust corporations to protect the natural resources and
habitats. But a laissez-faire view of government regulation of
corporations is akin to the youth minister who lets the teenage girl and
boy sleep in the same sleeping bag at church camp because he “believes
in young people.”

But is it just that Moore has seen
the light of day in the black blobs of oil washing up on his native
shore? The SBC, desperate to attract young people to stem its ebbing
numbers, may have come to the realization that the Gospel of Richard is
not exactly advancing the Great Commission Resurgence. Hewing to
inerrancy and the other Baptist fundamentals doesn’t mean you have to
sign on to the entire GOP policy agenda. Could we be witnessing the
first cracks in the SBC’s Landian edifice? 

h/t Peter Smith