Bush and Baptists

The President addressed the Southern Baptist Convention by video yesterday, and as Don at Article 19 points out, it didn't quite go as smoothly as it could have. Bush only singled out one local church in the entire speech--it was an example of mixing federal dollars with faith-based charity--but the church he chose is no longer a part of the SBC structure and instead supports the competing Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.

I am proud that we have now opened billions of dollars in grant money to competition that includes our faith-based charities. For example, my administration awarded College Park Baptist Church in Orlando, Florida $5.8 million to build 68 homes for low-income seniors.

Nevertheless, he reportedly received a number of standing ovations on the convention floor.

Interestingly, according EthicsDaily.com, College Park's new facility, built with money from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, will join a HUD-financed facility the church built 22 years ago, long before there was any talk of "faith-based charities." "This kind of thing has been done for a long, long time," College Park pastor Ron Crawford said. He continued, "We never thought of it being applied to faith-based initiatives."

For those who don’t keep up with the ins and outs of relations among Baptist groups, there’s no love lost between the SBC and the CBF. Both are groups of local churches joined together to spread the Baptist message. Once part of the SBC, CBF churches broke off from that organization several years ago when the SBC moved toward a more fundamentalist viewpoint on issues of faith such as the inerrancy of the Bible. (In some circles, it's referred to as the conservative or fundamentalist "take over" of the SBC.) There have been a number of skirmishes between the groups ever since, and the CBF even maintains a page on its Website to respond to SBC attacks.

In other SBC news, the convention voted to end its eight-year boycott of Disney, presumably because the corporation has learned its lesson. It’s also possible that the number of SBC families tired of hypocritically vacationing at Disney World anyway finally reached critical mass. The SBC also committed to baptizing a million new members this year and to keeping an eye on the "homosexual agenda" in public schools (although they stopped short of urging members to take their children out of public schools, a proposal that had its share of proponents).