The read

From my Sunday column in the Athens Banner-Herald ...

Furthermore, in his sophomoric diatribe against Carter, Erickson falls prey to what is a common misconception about the divide between the more conservative SBC and the moderate Baptist organizations - which is it's all about politics.

The problem with these arguments, though, is they're concocted by those putting them forward. To suggest Carter left the SBC - or that the SBC saw several of its churches leave its ranks and form the more moderate Cooperative Baptist Fellowship - for merely political reasons is to misunderstand the hundreds of years of Baptist history.

The split in the SBC occurred not so much because of a shift toward fundamentalism in the late 1970s, but rather because many felt that shift was altering the basic definition of what it meant to be a Baptist. The denomination's tradition is rooted in the belief that each church is independent and each individual is free to prayerfully study the Bible in an attempt to derive his or her own meaning and interpretations from it.

The SBC, however, began to exhibit many tendencies of more hierarchical denominations where decrees and mandates are passed down from a centralized governing body to the local churches. It called on its membership to boycott certain businesses. It encouraged them to pull their children out of public schools. It issued definitive statements that minimized the role of women in worship.

It was a slow trickle of those top-heavy moves that wore down traditional Baptists who had shunned that centralized authority and formalized creeds. Or, as the Rev. Bill Ross, my former pastor at First Baptist Church of Athens, a former SBC church, once explained to me, "If I had a church member who wanted to go to Disney World on vacation, I didn't have the heart to tell them they couldn't."