The “Nashville Statement”: Clarity and Controversy from the Baptist Vatican

The “Nashville Statement”: Clarity and Controversy from the Baptist Vatican

            Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal on 9/1017

            For decades many Southerners have jokingly referred to Nashville, Tennessee as the Baptist Vatican.  That’s because Nashville is the location of the publishing house and other operations of the Southern Baptist Convention.

            Of the numbering of different Baptist groups, there is no end.  The largest Baptist group and the largest protestant denomination in America is Southern Baptists with 47,000 churches across the country.  

            It wasn’t Baptists alone, however, who produced the clarifying and controversial “Nashville Statement” on August 29 in Nashville.  In fact, the document’s 150 signers are evangelical leaders of many denominations.  One signer, James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, is a Nazarene.  Francis Chan, the popular San Francisco pastor, is a Charismatic.  Methodists, Presbyterians, and Anglicans, among others, also signed the document.  The document is clarifying because it reminds evangelicals of orthodox Christianity’s historical stand on sexuality.  It is controversial because some Americans don’t like Christianity’s historical stand on sexuality, particularly the LGBT lobby.

            The statement’s signers were convened by the Council of Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, an organization founded in 1987 by evangelical leaders of different denominations.  These leaders were concerned about the spread of ideas regarding human sexuality which they believed were scientifically wrong (transgenderism) and socially harmful (homosexual marriage).  Its board members come from states stretching from Florida to Washington state, and from California to Ohio.

            The “Nashville Statement” is a list of 14 articles or statements of belief.  It is nothing new.  Actually it is a re-statement, a listing of 14 theological positions held by Christians for, let us say, 2000 years.  One statement is given below, but first some background.

            Who could deny that there has been an upheaval of Western sexual mores during the last five decades?  The “free love” of the ‘60s has turned out to be costly, radical feminism has rendered women less feminine and men less masculine, and homosexual marriage (an oxymoron) has turned the definition of marriage on its head.  Porn is rampant, nudity and near-nudity are ho-hum, and sex is, well, nothing especially beautiful and sacred, just a pleasurable activity between two people of any sex.

            This is where we have arrived since “free love,” “sexual freedom,” and the “pleasure principle” started us on the journey.  Children and teens are swamped by it, presuming it is the acceptable norm.

            Concern about this upheaval is held by far more people than the 150 initial signers of the “Nashville Statement.”  Regarding the trendy endeavor of transgenderism, Dr. Paul McHugh, retired chief psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins Hospital, recently wrote, “Sex change is biologically impossible.  People who undergo sex-reassignment do not change from men to women or vice versa.  Rather, they become feminized men or masculized women.” (And our military sanctions it?)  It was McHugh who put a stop to transgender surgery at Johns Hopkins.  McHugh still believes in chromosomes even though Scientific American magazine doesn’t.  It now allows for human “hybrids.”

             Each of the statement’s 14 articles contains an affirmation of belief and a denial.  For instance, Article 1 reads (in part), “We affirm that God has designed marriage to be a covenantal, sexual, procreative, lifelong union of one man and one woman as husband and wife … We deny that God has designed marriage to be a homosexual, polygamous, or polyamorous relationship.  We also deny that marriage is a mere human contract …”   

            The document goes on to address, in the above format, today’s sexual chaos and its resulting moral standards or lack thereof.  It is a call to hold steady and hold forth against the spirit of the age.  Culturally and politically it indicates that, for evangelicals, the matter is a hill on which to die.  

            Predictably, critics’ claws have already come out.  It is a document of hate, claims the LGBT lobby.  I challenge anyone to talk for just 5 minutes with Woodstock, Georgia pastor Johnny Hunt, one of the signers, and then tell me he’s a hater.

            America’s teens are being sexualized like never before.  They are being drawn away from what many of them have been taught at home and at church about sexuality.  Teach school for a month or so if you doubt this.

            Signers of the document have just as much right to express their views as do the LGBT lobby and its big corporation sympathizers.  The Nashville Statement indicates that evangelical leaders are back and are willing to assert what they believe.  Theirs is an issue that particularly affects our children who are being fed fake sexual science and are being bombarded with dangerous sexual messages.

            I say hoo-ray for the document’s signers.

Roger Hines

9/1-17