When Ed Litton Beats the Far-Right
The 2021 Southern Baptist Convention, Ed Litton and what it means (and doesn't mean) for the state of American Evangelicalism.
Nashville, Tennessee, home to the Grand Ole’ Opry and the Country Music Hall of Fame, also serves as the headquarters and annual meeting place for the 14 million member Protestant denomination (and largest one in the country)—the Southern Baptist Convention. Yesterday, the denomination voted to install Ed Litton, whom some media outlets have described as the “moderate” candidate, as the SBC’s president.
Litton’s appeal to many within the denomination is his decades-long record for pushing the SBC towards ‘racial reconciliation.’ Fred Luter, the SBC’s first and only Black president from 2012-14, endorsed Litton’s candidacy, and are indeed close friends (Luter and Litton have both exchanged their pulpits as part of a “Racial Reconciliation Sunday”) While many are hailing Litton’s win as a resounding victory for the denomination’s “centrists” and loss for the far-right, there are some elements about Litton’s win that must be taken into consideration before folks start to feel comfortable with the SBC’s trajectory on issues regarding racism, sexual abuse and women leadership.
Ed Litton won the SBC’s presidency by an extremely thin margin (about 2%) of eligible voters within the convention. The far-right candidate, Mike Stone, campaigned heavily prior to this year’s convention, and with the backing of the conservative-wing of the denomination and its mobilizing arm—the Conservative Baptist Network—Stone was only behind Litton by a little less than 556 votes (out of over 15,000 attendees, the largest SBC gathering in decades). Since the CBN’s launch in February, 2020, the network has grown in numbers and in influence, with notables like former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and Family Research Council’s President Tony Perkins as members. Their control of the denomination via the presidency may have been averted, but their gained influence and power within the denomination itself, in a little over a year, suggests they will be a foreseeable force within the SBC for quite some time.
This contestation within the SBC is not so much between “left vs. right” or “liberal (or even moderate) vs. conservative” but “conservative vs. far-right conservative". Ed Litton, while seen by staunch SBC critics as a “woke leftist”, nevertheless holds theological views that one would certainly classify, theologically, as conservative. Litton holds complementarian views and believes that the SBC’s stance on women in ministry is substantial enough. Litton, like almost all SBC ministers, holds the inerrancy of the Bible, and, of course, belongs to an already Conservative denomination. Being a “moderate,” in this case, is quite relative.
Ultimately, both parties are fighting for a denomination raddled with sex-abuse scandals, an exodus of Black clergy, and the departures of famous members like Bible teacher Beth Moore, and former head of the SBC Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission Russell Moore (no relation), notwithstanding the SBC already bleeding 2 million members as of 2006. The diagnosis, according to the CBN, is the denomination supposed "drifting” toward wokeism, critical race theory, liberal culture and other slippery-slope similitudes. Voices like Ed Litton and outgoing SBC President J.D. Greear believe the church has gotten too immersed into politics, and needs to drift from its pharisaic legalism and overtly political alignments (presumably towards the right).
As CBN members worry about the church’s drifting and aim to #taketheship on a sinking boat, and Litton and Greear-type Baptists call for a return to the Gospel (which begs question regarding what they were preaching since the 1980s “conservative resurgence”) both parties are hiding behind liberal phobias and religious convictions to actually deal with the issue of race in America. Both Greear and CBN affirm the ‘unbiblical’ foundations of Critical Race Theory - a legal framework that examines the myriad of ways that the law intersects with race in society. CRT is still the Southern Baptists’ boogyman, it’s just the question on how to deal the imagined, ideological monster of the highest proportions not seen since “secular humanism” drifted on by.
Race is fundamentally still an issue for a denomination founded to support the institution of slavery, and the ultraconservative populists within the denomination, just like in American Evangelicalism and society et al, are the ones most keen downplay if not completely whitewash the history of slavery in the denomination and its affects within the church today. As one Mike Stone supporter highlighted in a tweet yesterday vis-á-vis the SBC presidential race, “We didn’t win. But this result shows we can.”