Southern Baptists quit global alliance
Cite liberal shift of world federation
INDIANAPOLIS -- The Southern Baptist Convention quit a global federation of Baptist denominations yesterday as convention leaders denounced the Baptist World Alliance and other groups for accepting liberal theology.
At a meeting that has affirmed the convention's conservative values 25 years after its rightward shift began, more than 8,000 Southern Baptists also cheered as President Bush -- speaking through a live video link -- stressed his support for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. Bush also defended his policy of strictly limiting stem cell research, despite pressure to reconsider after President Ronald Reagan died of complications from Alzheimer's disease.
Outgoing convention president Jack Graham introduced Bush as ''a man of personal faith whose leadership is great for America."
The Southern Baptist Convention is the world's largest Baptist denomination and America's largest Protestant body, with 16.3 million members. It helped launch the alliance 99 years ago and was a strong supporter before its move toward conservatism with the election of a right-leaning president a quarter-century ago.
Yesterday, it took just a show-of-hands vote to approve the withdrawal from the alliance, a federation of 46 million Baptists in 211 denominations.
The convention's pullout means the alliance will lose $300,000 next year, but ''our concern is not financial," said the Rev. Denton Lotz, general secretary of the alliance. ''Our concern is schism and division. Christians need to be a united voice."
The Rev. Paige Patterson, president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, told the meeting the problem was a liberal drift within the alliance. Patterson said some in the group question the inerrancy of the Bible and that one US member denomination, American Baptist Churches, includes a group of ''gay-friendly congregations."
Graham's address as outgoing president said the 2004 ''election matters because there are two different viewpoints on where this culture needs to be on the moral issues of our time." He urged Southern Baptists to lobby Congress in favor of an antigay marriage amendment.
Bush, who has spoken to the annual Baptist meeting three years running, was greeted warmly, and got the biggest applause when he said that ''I support a constitutional amendment to protect marriage as the union of a man and a woman."
Bush also underscored his opposition to most embryonic stem cell research. ''Life is a creation of God, not a commodity to be exploited by man," Bush told the convention. Although Bush did not specifically mention stem cells in the speech, a spokesman later confirmed that the rejection of the use of life as a ''commodity" was a reference to his stance on stem cells.
''It goes to the principle on which his policy was based," said Trent Duffy, a White House spokesman.
The convention also elected the Rev. Bobby Welch of Daytona Beach, Fla., as Graham's successor.
Information from Reuters was used in this report 