...southern baptists (insert eye-roll if you please)

For three weeks in January, I have submitted myself to a form of cruel and unusual punishment...or so I thought. Baptist History is a required course for my degree: something about showing my appreciation to all those little church women that paid for me to live overseas and also pay 3/4 of my tuition here.

Fortunately, I have a kick-ace professor named, drumrolllllll: Keith Harper. He pairs each lecture with a fair share of sarcasm and coercion to bring breakfast for the whole class to share. So I'm surviving. Actually (although it would be really embarrassing to be associated with this...), I really enjoy the class. Why? Thought you would never ask (eye-roll again if necessary).

Ever since I have been reading about all the politics happening at OBU, I've been brainstorming solutions. Surely there is another answer besides the blatant options:

1) I dislike all fundamentalist/conservatives who are stupid enough to believe in blah-blah-blah (which is normally something tied to biblical inerrancy, the creation account, homosexuality, abortion, etc. or perhaps more legitimatly, their orthopraxy of separatism from modern American culture--don't blame you on that one.) Let's totally disconnect OBU from its constituents and benefactors!

2) I dislike all the hell-burnin' heathens out there who want to read ideas and talk about issues that would make granny blush. Opposing ideas are dangerous, and I want my kids to know one thing: the Bible.

As great as those two parties sound, I'm interested in knowing how other Baptist institutions withdrew from the their local state conventions without committing financial suicide. And is that even a good option, considering that the trend in formerly-religiously-affiliated schools is to become unrecognizable to orthodox believers only a century later. Do I really want our beloved OBU to become antagonistic to orthodoxy? Not really.

My last reading assignment for the course is Barry Hankins' Uneasy in Babylon, and so far I'm intrigued by the academic laxity among moderates that facilitated a conservative resurgence. How sad that "academic" elitism on their part created a vacuum for cultural moralists to take over. Moderates were as isolated then as conservatives appear to be today.

Here's another surprise: the early conservatives among the SBC resurgence read more widely the works of Northern evangelical theologians. That's not the dim-witted conservative impression I expected to find. All this to say, the sides are not as clearly defined as we may want or feel led to believe.

So why do I care? I care about preserving an OBU that challenges students to truly think, grapple with foreign ideas, and formulate opinions that are informed, not formulated for them.