monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

It's amazing how much you can learn from a cartoon, eh?

Indeed, disentangling the SBC from the GOP is central to the denomination’s makeover. For example, a motion to defund the ERLC in response to the agency’s full-throated opposition to Donald Trump failed miserably.

In years past, Republican politicians have spoken to messengers at the annual meeting. In 1991, President George H.W. Bush addressed the group, Vice President Dan Quayle spoke in 1992, and President George W. Bush did so in 2001 and 2002 (when my father, James Merritt, was SBC president). Neither President Bill Clinton nor President Barack Obama were invited to speak to Southern Baptists during their terms. Though Southern Baptists claim not to be affiliated with either major party, it’s not difficult to discern the pattern at play.

Vice President Mike Pence addressed the convention this year, which may seem like the same old song to outsiders. But there was widespread resistance to Pence’s participation. A motion to disinvite the vice president was proposed and debated, but was ultimately voted down. During his address, which hit some notes more typical of a campaign speech, a few Southern Baptists left the room out of protest. Others criticized the move to reporters or spoke out on Twitter. The newly elected Greear tweeted that the invitation “sent a terribly mixed signal” and reminded his fellow Baptists that “commissioned missionaries, not political platforms, are what we do.”



Though most Southern Baptists remain politically conservative, it seems that some are now less willing to have their denomination serve as a handmaiden to the GOP, especially in the current political moment. They appear to recognize that tethering themselves to Donald Trump—a thrice-married man who has bragged about committing adultery, lies with impunity, allegedly paid hush money to a porn star with whom he had an affair, and says he has never asked God for forgiveness—places the moral credibility of the Southern Baptist Convention at risk.

By elevating women and distancing themselves from partisan engagement, the members of the SBC appear to be signaling their determination to head in a different direction, out of a mix of pragmatism and principle.

For more than a decade, the denomination has been experiencing precipitous decline by almost every metric. Baptisms are at a 70-year low, and Sunday attendance is at a 20-year low. Southern Baptist churches lost almost 80,000 members from 2016 to 2017 and they have hemorrhaged a whopping one million members since 2003. For years, Southern Baptists have criticized more liberal denominations for their declines, but their own trends are now running parallel. The next crop of leaders knows something must be done.

“Southern Baptists thought that if they became more conservative, their growth would continue unabated. But they couldn’t outrun the demographics and hold the decline at bay,” said Leonard. “Classic fundamentalist old-guard churches are either dead or dying, and the younger generation is realizing that the old way of articulating the gospel is turning away more people than it is attracting. “

Regardless of their motivations, this shift away from a more culturally strident and politically partisan stance is significant.

As the late pastor Adrian Rogers said at the 2002 SBC annual meeting in St. Louis, “As the West goes, so goes the world. As America goes, so goes the West. As Christianity goes, so goes America. As evangelicals go, so goes Christianity. As Southern Baptists go, so go evangelicals.”

Rogers may have had an inflated sense of the denomination’s importance, but the fact remains that what happens in the SBC often ripples across culture. In Trump’s America, where the religious right wields outsized influence, the shifts among Southern Baptists could be a harbinger of broader change among evangelicals.

Just when Missouri Republicans were beginning to recover from the long, divisive nightmare that finally ended when GOP governor Eric Greitens resigned on May 29, the worst of all possible scenarios has emerged from the smoking crater of the one-time wonder boy’s career.

The Republican is entertaining the idea of running for one of Missouri’s two U.S Senate seats, but not on the Republican ticket, but as an Independent.

On the first point, it’s very likely that Greitens hates his own party with the heat of a thousand suns, because virtually all of its leaders abandoned him in the multiple sex and ethics scandals that consumed his once-bright political career. And among the first and foremost to throw him under the bus was Attorney General Josh Hawley, the GOP’s putative nominee for the U.S. Senate. If a second Republican, however tarnished, is in the race, it can’t help but hurt Hawley, and that’s probably fine with Eric Greitens, who got elected governor to begin with on an “outsider” message condemning pols in both parties as evil scum.

And that leads to the solution to Greitens’s second problem: I’m sure Missouri Democrats would be happy to rustle up 10,000 signatures for his ballot petition.

Indeed, if this all actually happens and Greitens makes the November ballot, it will be a sign of divine favor for incumbent senator Claire McCaskill. Six years ago, she won reelection after Republican nominee Todd Akin imploded via really stupid and obnoxious comments about rape. Could she be that fortunate again? We may know by July 30.

Great News: The Fewest Americans In 8 Years Are Dependent On Government For Food

Who has caused that war they are fleeing?

The cartoon also misses the fact refugees are shipped here and treated differently, their children are not taken anywhere.

But asylum-seekers are having their children separated from them.

Separated by gender!? How inhumane can ya get?