How to defang the Christianist menace

Very, very interesting news out of Utah:

The most Republican state in the nation is drifting to the left. In the last few months, Gov. Jon Huntsman, a Republican and a practicing Mormon, has come out in favor of civil unions for gays and repeated his support for government action on global warming. Meanwhile, the Republican-controlled state legislature has liberalized Utah's notoriously arcane alcohol laws. The punishment for this apostasy has been record-high approval ratings—for both governor and legislature...For such changes, [the Mormon Church's] approval was a de facto requirement.

Amen to that. But somehow I'm not surprised. The Mormon Church has long been the most socially conservative religious organization in America, but I've always felt a near certainty that one day it would become one of the most liberal.

In doing so, it would be following in the footsteps of the "mainline Protestant" denominations in America and the Catholic Church in many parts of the world. Though these organizations aren't exactly liberal crusaders, they've seen the social writing on the wall, and recognized the need to bend without breaking. The reason, as I see it, is that these churches became local institutions to such a degree that they began to have a vested interest in society's overall modernization. Regular church-goers might still be much more conservative than average, but the churches' elites recognized that they faced a choice between opposing economic modernization - which would risk a catastrophic loss of membership - and accepting wider society's liberalizing trend.

Decentralized religions, on the other hand, are free to buck liberalism, since one fire-breathing pastor or imam can easily be more-conservative-than-thou, and draw churchgoers (or mosque-goers) from his rivals. Evangelical Christianity and Sunni Islam have thus stayed largely true to their puritan roots. That's almost certainly why Egypt has been trying to make Sunni Islam into a more centralized, national institution, with the use of muftis to corral the imams. Sure enough, the muftis take a more moderate tone.

Which brings me to the Southern Baptist Convention.

The SBC is America's largest Protestant denomination, with 16 million members. It is a monolithic, centralized organization. Yet the Convention has somehow managed to hide in the thicket of smaller Evangelical denominations, keeping a remarkably low public profile; few recognize it as the dominant Southern social institution that it is.

The SBC was formed in the decades before the Civil War, splitting with the northern Baptists over the issue of slavery (guess which one was in favor). Racial issues continued to define the Convention; though most Southern blacks are Baptist, a 1968 survey showed that only 7% of SBC churches would admit black members. It was only in 1995 that the Convention voted to apologize for its past support of slavery.

But apologize it did. And there, I think, lies the key to neutralizing the poisonous venom of modern America's Christianist menace. Tiny Evangelical splinter churches are not subject to public scrutiny and pressure, but the Southern Baptist Convention is big enough, centralized enough, and institutionalized enough to care about its image beyond its pews. The 1995 slavery apology demonstrates that focusing on the SBC as an organization can be an effective tactic.

And I suspect that the SBC is far more important to the modern conservative movement than the conventional wisdom yet realizes. The Convention makes up a huge chunk of the Evangelical movement (and, given he SBC's past, the enduring racism of Southern conservatism is not so surprising). If We the People can pressure the SBC into liberalizing, the entire Christianist movement might take a collective chill-pill on gays, evolution, bio research, and all the other issues where America's own Wahhabists have blocked the march of progress.