On the eve of the Southern Baptist Convention, the waning power of conservative Evangelicals shows itself.

[lees1975]

7. They elected a more conservative President who has downplayed and ignored the sexual abuse crisis.

Willy Rice, pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Clearwater, Florida, was elected President of the SBC. Rice has claimed that the denomination's sexual abuse crisis is more hoax than reality, and claimed that the denomination has followed culture more than the Bible in recent years.

Documentation of the sexual abuse crisis has revealed that the expose done by the Houston Chronicle about six years ago merely scratched the surface of a real crisis by exposing a few hundred cases. But it is easy, in a Baptist denomination where churches are independent and autonomous, and don't have to follow the recommendations of denominational leaders if they're not going to be enforced, as these aren't, to hide, and to continue to perpetuate abuse, moving from church to church.

Claiming that the denomination's leaders have followed culture more than the Bible is an old fundamentalist cliche. What that means is that there's been a trend away from hard line, right wing extremism and they think the way to make things work again is to become more hard line, and less Christian. They've lost 25% of their membership in a decade, and the average annual membership loss is more than 300,000. A hard line fundamentalist approach isn't going to work.