Running unopposed, Fred Luter, is the newly-elected president of the Southern Baptist Convention, the first African-American to hold the post. AP has a report.
You can follow the convention: see the Baptist Press is living blog or follow the convention’s live webcast.
As the AP reports,
Seventeen years earlier, Luter was one of the authors of an SBC resolution that apologized to African-Americans for its past support of racism and resolved to strive for racial reconciliation.
Since that gesture, the denomination has grown its non-white congregations from only 5 percent in 1990 to 20 percent in 2010. But its leadership has not diversified as rapidly as membership.
…
Lifeway Research President Ed Stetzer said [that] faced with declining membership … the 16-million strong Nashville-based denomination will have to be deliberate about its efforts to diversify. “I think they thought racial diversity would happen … now they realize they have to make it happen,” he said.
The Root paints a less rosy picture:
Even those in leadership roles with the Southern Baptist Convention agree that the association has a lot to answer for when it comes to race. “We were a segregated, virtually all-white denomination as late as the 1960s,” Richard Land, president of the convention’s policy arm, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, told the New York Times. (Yep, he’s the guy who recently accused President Obama of trying to capitalize politically on the Trayvon Martin killing in Florida, called the Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton “race hustlers” and suggested that racial profiling was justified.) Not to mention, it was created in 1845 in defense of slavery and provided a spiritual home to white supremacists for much of the 20th century.
Yet, Land received a reprimand from the church for some of his remarks.
In a NYT blog post, Molly Worthen wonders about the fit:
Conservative black Protestants and the Christian Right also have different memories of American history. While David Barton and other amateur evangelical historians have baptized the founding fathers as orthodox architects of a new Zion, African-Americans remember them as the authors of the Three-Fifths Compromise. “For far too long Anglo Christians have wrapped the Christian faith in the American flag, often creating a civil religion that is foreign to the way God intended His church to function,” Evans writes in his book, “Oneness Embraced.” For black Christians, American history is not a narrative of decline from an arcadia of Sunday family devotionals and McGuffey Readers to the godless fleshpots of modern America. It is a narrative of liberation that is not yet complete.
These divergent understandings of history have amplified disagreement over what it means to follow Jesus’ and the prophets’ command to “set at liberty those who are oppressed.” There is a cliché that white evangelicals are too busy straining toward heaven to care about social justice here and now. This is unfair. Even the most Apocalypse-obsessed preachers have had a heart for the underprivileged: Dwight Moody — a 19th-century evangelist and the spiritual grandfather of the “Left Behind” novels chronicling the end times — founded a school for orphans, the children of slaves and other needy students. William Jennings Bryan, the creationist anti-hero of the Scopes trial, was a progressive politician who opposed the laissez-faire policies of his day.
Low-income white evangelicals appear capable of voting against what an outsider might believe is their economic interest, but can this apply to African-Americans in the same numbers?
Not unrelated, the convention adopted a recommendation for an alternative descriptor, Great Commission Baptists. Advocates said in some parts of the country and among the black community the word “southern” was an obstacle to evangelism. A ballot vote was required. (Results will be available here Wednesday morning. Update: The recommendation was approved 53% to 46%.)
Turning the spotlight on The Episcopal Church, the picture is different, but is it better? Let us know what you think.