Will Southern Baptists support call to remove Confederate flag?

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (RNS)—Does a Southern Baptist leader’s call for the Confederate battle flag to come down mark a sea change in the views of evangelicals about a symbol long wrapped in both support for slavery and regional pride?

Russell MooreOr will conservative white Christians in the South resist change even as a growing number of Republican leaders from the region—including South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley—call for the flag to go?

“The cross and the Confederate flag cannot co-exist without one setting the other on fire,” Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, wrote in a widely noted blog post June 19.

The column touched a chord because it landed in the midst of the national anguish, and debate, over racism in the United States following the massacre of a pastor and eight worshippers by a white gunman inside Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C.

The suspect, 21-year-old Dylann Roof, espoused white supremacist views and proudly displayed the Confederate flag, which continues to be flown full-mast on the South Carolina State House grounds.

“Let’s take down that flag,” Moore concluded.

A changing ethos

Some say Moore’s call is a marker of a changing ethos within the SBC as conservative Christians join in mourning the “Emanuel Nine.” Others wonder if the divide over the flag remains.

“Russell Moore articulated publicly and brilliantly what many of us have been saying for many years,” said Alan Cross, a white Montgomery, Ala., Southern Baptist pastor, who successfully requested the SBC Executive Committee report on its progress on racial reconciliation.

“That sentiment is just becoming more vocal and accepted now. Eyes are opening.”

Church historian Bill Leonard of Wake Forest University Divinity School agreed Moore’s sentiments could “prevail given the pain of the current situation.”

But he said it’s doubtful all Southern Baptists will back him, despite the June 17 killings.

Sheila DiCiorrio holds a sign asking for the Confederate battle flag that flies at the South Carolina State House to be removed in Columbia, S.C., on June 20, 2015. (RNS Photo courtesy of REUTERS/Jason Miczek)“I think that his constituency in the SBC will be divided, particularly in South Carolina and Georgia, where those flag issues still create energy,” Leonard said.

On June 22, Moore said he had received an overwhelmingly positive response to his blog post.

“I’m surprised by how positive the reaction has been, probably 98 or 99 percent” in favor generally, he said.

“Southern Baptists have been overwhelmingly positive in their responses,” Moore said. “The Lord is doing amazing things in bringing Southern Baptists together across ethnic and racial divisions.”

Leaders from African-American clergy to Sikh officials have called for South Carolina legislators to halt the flying of the controversial flag, especially at South Carolina’s State House. Some SBC executives affirmed Moore’s call for taking down the Confederate flag.

SBC executives respond

“Gospel-minded Christians should support taking down the flag,” Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President Al Mohler said. “Love of neighbor outweighs even love of region, and it certainly requires that we disassociate ourselves from any hint of racism, now or in the past.”

Danny Akin, president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C., tweeted his thanks to Moore for his “very fine article.”

But Moore’s comments have received some criticism.

Blogger Douglas Wilson wrote he declined to join Moore’s call and instead thinks the response to the shootings at Emanuel AME should be on “issues that stand a chance of being far more relevant to the shooting than a flag at the state capitol.”

“Is the point to help solve the problem, or is the point to make a grand gesture?” Wilson wrote.

In a National Review column, evangelical writer David French differentiated between appropriate and inappropriate uses of the Confederate flag.

“Flying it as a symbol of white racial supremacy is undeniably vile, and any official use of the flag for that purpose should end, immediately,” he wrote. “Flying it over monuments to Confederate war dead is simply history.”

Southern Baptists’ sentiments about the flag and other racially charged issues could be shaped by what many described as a moving prayer session June 16 during their annual meeting, when white Southern Baptists joined African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians and Native Americans onstage to pray for reconciliation and repentance for racism.

“Southern Baptists are finding their identity more in Christ than in Southern culture or racial identity,” said Cross, author of When Heaven and Earth Collide: Racism, Southern Evangelicals, and the Better Way of Jesus.

“We still have a long way to go, but change is happening. Moore reflects that rather than being an outlier,” he said.

Southern Baptist history

In the early days of the denomination, which has since repented for the role slavery played in its formation, such a statement about the Confederate flag probably would have been unthinkable.

An 1863 resolution by delegates of the Southern Baptist Convention said they “will render a hearty support to the Confederate government in all constitutional measures to secure our independence.”

A century and a half later, Cross said, he has seen change beyond prayers from a convention stage and blog posts from a prominent denominational official.

“I do not know of very many Southern Baptists, if any, who fly the Confederate flag,” he said. “And I live in Montgomery, Ala., the first capital of the Confederacy. We have some memorials around with the flag on it, but they are relics of the past and are not related to the active ministry of churches.”