re: Poll: Protestants decline, more have no religion in a sharply shifting religious landscape

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I love the SBC. Preaching the word of God, not the word of man.

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The SBC is remarkably shallow in its theology and philosophical musings. It's the t-shirt bammer of Christian denominations.

The Catholic Church, for all its faults, has more depth within their belief system. They also have developed relevant philosophical and scientific ideas that extend far beyond religion.

I say this as someone who thinks both groups believe a fairy tale. It is not debateable which group has contributed more to society however.

Foo. Let me guess. You are PCA.

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Lots of churches turned their services into a pop/rock concert followed by a pep rally.

If religion doesn’t provide some moral direction it’s useless. And sometimes that means delivering sermons that don’t leave people feeling good about themselves.

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pretty much why i stopped going to church. if i wanna buy a used car i can go to a car lot.

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It teaches the hard truths found in the Bible and don’t skew their own leanings on it.

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So then, what explains the SBC’s evolution on contraception and divorce?

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Otherwise, people are just finding more distractions to occupy them. The matters of purpose and truth just don’t spark interest.

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For most of human history religion was used to explain everything from lightening to earthquakes to seizures. The fact is we no longer need religion to explain most of what humans experience in life. Where once religion was used as a barometer of objective truth it is now merely a matter of subjective meaning.

To say it another way, god(s) have become increasingly more impotent as time has gone on. Once upon a time Yahweh flooded the entire earth and killed nearly everything on it and told them he was doing it. Now he helps people get off heroin, find close parking spaces and cure depression. He has receded to a point where none of his supposed activities can be objectively measured or experienced.

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it preaches the word of God as the sole doctrine

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Except for the original books they refuse to acknowledge and the original, millennia old doctrines they don't care for.

But beyond that, the theology is bereft of depth. It's a literalist, shallow belief system that appeals to the intellectual grunts of Christianity. The SBC has provided the greatest contribution to the modern evangelical movement of any denomination, contributions which include biblical literalism, the nonsensical young earth doctrine, a denial of evolution and the demonstrably unbiblical "once saved always saved" doctrine. It's a theology that requires one to think very little about what they believe and accept Christianity on the most superficial basis it has ever been presented under.

They do have great picnics, though

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So then, what explains the SBC’s evolution on contraception and divorce?

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I don’t know, I do know that this is the resolution on the SBC’s stance on birth control dating all the way back to 1934:

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The Southern Baptist Convention hereby expresses its disapproval of the Hastings Bill, now pending in the Congress of the United States, the purpose of which is to make possible and provide for the dissemination of information concerning contraceptives and birth control; whatever the intent and motive of such proposal we cannot but believe that such legislation would be vicious in character and would prove seriously detrimental to the morals of our nation.

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And here’s an article from 2014 in the Baptist Standard about the topic:

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In 2008, Thomas White, then a professor at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and now president of Cedarville University, made headlines in a seminary chapel sermon denouncing birth-control pills as “wrong,” “not correct according to Scripture” and—in cases where the pill functions to prevent a fertilized ovum from implanting in the uterus—“murder of a life.” White later clarified he didn’t mean to imply that all forms of birth control are murder but only the kind that “ends life after conception.”

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Southwestern Seminary First Lady Dorothy Patterson once warned in an article that many women who believe life begins at conception are unaware oral contraceptives sometimes are effective by preventing a fertilized ovum from implanting, “resulting in what is actually an early abortion.”

“While taking an oral contraceptive is certainly not equal to purposely getting an abortion, the ethical considerations are similar,” she writes. “One function of oral contraceptives is to help prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg. If life begins at conception, this function of the pill is not contraceptive but abortive.”

Patterson urged Christian women to consider if “the use of oral contraceptives truly is compatible with a pro-life stance.” For many women, she said, the issue of whether to use the pill revolves around the issue of convenience. “Is mere convenience a good enough reason to take a drug that may terminate human life, no matter how low the risk is?” she asked.

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Some theologians, like SBC Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission head Russell Moore, don’t believe every act of intercourse must be left open to the possibility of conception. But they reject a “contraceptive culture” that views children not as a blessing but rather an inconvenience to be avoided or postponed.

“I wonder how many Southern Baptist parents tell their newly married children to ‘wait till you get settled’ before having children so ‘you can enjoy each other,’ as though children will mean the end of romance,” Moore wrote in 2006. “I wonder how many Southern Baptist churches greet a family with four or more children with a snide comment from a Baby Boomer about whether ‘you know what’s causing that.’”

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On the topic of divorce, this again comes from the SBC site, it is long so I’m not going to type it all out:

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RESOLVED, That we call on our churches to proclaim the Word of God on the permanence of marriage, and to provide ongoing marriage enrichment opportunities, in light of the gospel of Jesus Christ and God’s abhorrence of divorce

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Except for the original books they refuse to acknowledge and the original, millennia old doctrines they don't care for.

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Please, point me in the direction of this.

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It's a literalist, shallow belief system that appeals to the intellectual grunts of Christianity.

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Are we not supposed to take the Bible at it’s word?

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demonstrably unbiblical "once saved always saved" doctrine

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If you don’t believe in that then you are saying that one, you could do something to lose your salvation. And two, you could ever work to gain your salvation. Which would be impossible because we are born sinners. And no matter how many good deeds we do on earth, we would never be able to gain entry into heaven based on those alone.

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In John 10:28-30, Jesus says: “I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one can snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all; no one can snatch them out of my Father's hand. I and the Father are one."

John 3:15-18 says about Christ: “The Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life. For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God's one and only Son.”

For whoever shall keep the whole law, and yet k stumble in one point, l he is guilty of all.

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Except for the original books they refuse to acknowledge and the original, millennia old doctrines they don't care for.


Please, point me in the direction of this.

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I believe he is referring to what Protestants refer to as "The Apocrypha", what the Catholic Church refers to as "deuterocanonical books", that is the Books of Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Tobias, Judith, Baruch, First and Second Machabees and portions of Esther and Daniel.

OMG!
You solved it. Question wrestled with for decades, and you definitively solved it in a few paragraphs.