Review & Expositor

What happens when pastors attempt to lead their congregations to conduct civil discussions about potentially polarizing issues? How can congregations engage difficult, controversial, or otherwise challenging issues without splintering, and perhaps even leverage those conversations to achieve charitable clarity and greater unity? Based on interviews with respected pastors, this article examines seven local Baptist churches that engaged in processes that propelled them to examine, discuss, and sometimes make decisions regarding topics that could have fractured their fellowship. Topics range from race, to baptism, to LGBTQ inclusion, to church staff and budgets, to other challenging subjects. In the case studies, each pastor discusses: (a) the issue or issues the church confronted; (b) how the church went about examining, discussing, and deciding on the issue or issues; (c) the results of those processes, or what happened when they talked; (d) what went right; (e) what went wrong; and (f) what the pastor would do differently the next time the congregation enters a similar process. The insights presented by these case studies offer guidance for pastors and church leaders whose congregations face polarizing experiences. In addition, they provide useful material for student discussions of pastoral ministry and ethics.

In a time when public discourse is becoming coarser and more combative, believers have an opportunity to demonstrate Christian character by practicing civility. Civility is more demanding than manners. Manners are codes by which we move smoothly through the world and secure our place in society. Civility, on the other hand, has a moral component; it asks us to sacrifice for the wellbeing of the community. Civility is fueled by curious empathy and involves self-restraint. It falls into the domain Lord John Fletcher Mouton called the domain of “Obedience to the unenforceable.” The language we use and how we use language is a good barometer of how developed our civility skills are. Our task of building our capacity for civility is aided by an understanding of how we have become so politically divided as a nation. The Scriptures provide a sound rationale for building our capacity to practice civility. Biblical anthropology, instructions to the exiles in Babylon, along with texts about loving our neighbor and having regard for others in our congregations, all cast the qualities of civility as part of Christian character.

Polarization in Baptist life has a long history. Baptists have had polarized relations with other competing religious groups and with themselves. Baptist focus on freedom, dissent, conscience, local church independence, among other foundational principles, render Baptists prone to diversity and disagreement. Diversity, salted by the absolute certainties of religious belief, easily translates into polarization. Triumphalism, fundamentalism, and other types of ironic dogmatisms formed in the context of freedom have produced polarized beliefs. Those religious beliefs, however, cannot be separated from the interplay of sources of power: class, gender, and race.

In the context of the United States, a discussion of Baptists cannot be separated from these power components, especially matters of race. Significantly, if not surprisingly, Baptists exported their racial, triumphalist identity and commitments abroad in their missionary endeavors. Brazilian Baptists, for example, heard the gospel from Southern Baptists, but they heard that gospel in a racialized form that was captive to Southern US racist culture. Southern Baptists shared the gospel, but they also resisted efforts by native Brazilians in The Radical Movement to indigenize their faith.

For the first half of the twentieth century, two Baptist pastors “squared off” with one another from the First Baptist Church pulpits of two rival Texas towns. In Dallas, George W. Truett led what would arguably become the flagship church of Southern Baptists. Across the Trinity River in Fort Worth, J. Frank Norris, also known as the “Texas Tornado,” packed auditoriums preaching sensational sermons. Mentoring both men was B. H. Carroll, founder of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. And like James Dean and Richard Davalos in the movie adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novel, East of Eden, the two men feuded with one another, in part over the right to be Carroll’s heir. This article summarizes the rivalry as it played out in the lifelong conflict between J. Frank Norris and George W. Truett, and demonstrates how both the unifying statesman and the sectarian fundamentalist sides of B. H. Carroll are apparent in the struggle.

A key part of today’s polarized society is the polarized and polarizing world of social media. Although social media platforms bring the potential of more democratic involvement, greater public dialogue, and faster flow of news and information, the dark side of such Web 2.0 platforms also should concern church leaders and theologians. Already-existing polarization in society leads to a polarized use of social media as individuals seek like-minded online communities. Social media, however, also adds to that polarization by providing echo chambers, and features of social media encourage speed over accuracy and more aggressive communication. Three ways in which social media both represents and adds to polarization in politics, society, and churches are balkanization, as people separate into homogenous, polarized communities, the speeding nature of communication that allows inaccurate and overly emotional information to spread, and the flaming that occurs as anonymity and depersonalization of these communication platforms encourage aggressive and even violent rhetoric.

In his 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King Jr. criticizes “the white moderate,” identifying them as empathizing with the Civil Rights Movement, but not acting upon it. King’s “white moderate” compares to contemporary white Baptists who embody King’s definition. Putting “white moderate” in conversation with “moderate Baptists” demonstrates how moderate actions betray the Gospel. Exploring the identity of the clergy whom King addresses in his letter aids in drawing out a fuller definition of “moderate.” This article applies three aspects of King’s critique to contemporary Baptist concerns, such as women in ministry and inclusion of LGBTQIA persons in all areas of ministry: (1) an avoidance of tension through silence, what King calls “negative peace;” (2) a sympathetic view without sustained change in social structure or policy, identified by King as “lukewarm acceptance;” and (3) using generalized statements to avoid speaking of “hot-topic” issues, which King phrases as “sanctimonious trivialities.” White Baptists can fight against the trend of “moderateness” through being transformed by and participating in what King calls “direct action.” In doing so, Baptists may become, to use King’s term, “extremists for love.”

In contexts of harmful and increasing polarization, Richard Kearney’s anatheism constitutes a generative approach to hospitality across divisions. Kearney’s anatheism can foster critical hospitality in a deeply polarized social context. This article begins with an overview of Kearney’s anatheism and his anatheistic understanding of perichoresis, developed in dialogue with Anna Mercedes’s erotic feminist kenosis. The article then argues that anatheism proves generative for practical theology as a theological discipline attentive to the theory/practice binary and that an anatheistic practical theology can foster vital connections across polarities in US society through its “third way,” applying this argument specifically to the binary oppositions of fundamentalist/liberal and self/other. The concluding section notes opportunities for critical development in anatheology, namely through decentering the white male canon to prioritize marginal voices and attending to intersectional power dynamics.

Psalm 133 is the penultimate psalm of a collection within the Psalter entitled the “Songs of Ascents.” Its idyllic picture of community comes at the close of a collection of hymns and prayers in which the reader is invited to praise, lament, contemplate the past, and gather together for worship. In considering the issue of polarization in the church and in society, this psalm collection offers one model for dwelling together in a world in which fracturing is the easier path, arguing that in order to dwell together, we must first do the difficult work of journeying together.

In order to counteract racial polarization within and among US churches and society today, this article proposes remembering, confessing, and repenting of traditions of racialized biblical interpretation that have been complicit with traditional, hierarchical gender, race, and class divisions. Alternative interpretations of the Solomon and Sheba narrative in 1 Kings 10 offer ways to reconsider how race continues to haunt society and Christian churches in the United States. The author suggests that the moral imperative of whiteness is for white US Christians to embrace white racial particularity as a first step in dismantling the subtle racism of assumed white cultural normativity. As part of multiracial, multicultural, multifaith, global communities, white US Christians need more than ever to ponder the cultural consequences of our biblical interpretations.

Luke designed the narrative of Luke 7:36–50 in a way that heightens the tension for his first-century audience. The polarity emphasized in the narrative—a sinful woman at a Pharisee’s dinner table—corresponds well to the experience of first-century Christians who share meal fellowship with a diverse range of Christ-followers. This expository retelling highlights elements in the structure and rhetoric of Luke’s storytelling in order to help twenty-first-century readers of this passage understand how early hearers would have experienced the story.