Good

Overnight, pro-life Republican Mayra Flores won a special election in Texas, taking a reliably Democrat area, the 34th congressional district. It is the second most Hispanic congressional district in the nation with an 84.5% Hispanic population (for you Democrats, that’s “Latinx”). Flores is only the second Republican to flip a majority Democrat district in the Rio Grande Valley in over 100 years. The first time that happened was 2010. The Hispanic shift is real, even without Trump on the ballot. Flores will also be the first Mexican-born member of Congress. Look for that to get ignored by the cultural elite. The Democrats have only about a five seat majority now. Notably, Joe Biden won Cameron County, TX in the heart of the district with thirteen percent of the vote in 2020 and Clinton won it with thirty-three percent in 2016. Now, Flores and the GOP have won it.

In South Carolina, Republican Nancy Mace beat her Trump backed opponent and Republican Tom Rice, who voted for impeachment, lost to his Trump backed opponent in the primaries there. As of this writing, Nevada is outstanding and I’m going to get some sleep.

Out in California and in more meaningful news, Bart Barber is the new President of the Southern Baptist Convention. He got sixty percent of the final vote held in Anaheim, CA. He came close to an outright win on the first ballot.

Barber believes in the inerrancy of the scripture and believes it is the literal word of God. He believes in God’s sovereignty, the Biblical design of marriage, and Biblical sexual ethics. He is not woke.

You’d be hard pressed to know that from some of his critics who’ve made modern cultural warring an idol. So convinced are they that the church is adrift, they’ve found themselves being rejected by sound, Biblically orthodox Christians. Their interpretation is that they’re the godly ones and those not with them are drifting away.

I would encourage them to embrace humility and maybe realize that by making every hill a hill to die on, they’re the only ones routinely getting killed.

This issue is important because the Southern Baptist Convention is the largest Protestant denomination in the United States. The culture war is taking place there too and some in the SBC have pushed so hard on contemporary hot button issues, they provoked a backlash. But that backlash has been too partisan and too political.

For example, one of Barber’s opponents, a true stalwart of orthodoxy, spent time in the run up to the vote for President going on right-wing pro-Trump shows. In a denomination that embraces the separation of church and state, it struck even a lot of conservatives as too tied to partisan American politics when the church must transcend those things.

To understand just how far off the deep end the conservative culture warriors in the SBC went, consider the matter of Voddie Baucham. Baucham is a hero of the faith. The man is a legend, a warrior for Christ, and a statesman. He is not, however, a pastor within the Southern Baptist Convention.

Baucham was nominated to lead the SBC Pastor’s Conference and lost to another conservative named Daniel Dickard. Dickard is an orthodox, Bible believing pastor who no conservative would have an issue with, but his election let loose calls of liberalism in the church because Baucham had been barely rejected. But it simply is not true.

Therein lies the problem. The activist, political oriented Baptists recognize there is a problem, but they have lost the discernment and nuance to credibly identify it and are instead playing at perpetual grievance. When the SBC went wobbly over Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church allowing women to be pastors, these Baptists could have spoken up forcefully and with clarity on the issue.

Someone needs to tell the SBC that just because one of its churches has a celebrity pastor, that church does not have license to flout the guidelines against female pastors. The SBC refusing to deal decisively with that is, in fact, succumbing to post-modernism’s inability to accept the objective definitions. At a time the world no longer knows what a woman is, the SBC seems not to know what a pastor is.

But because this hyper-partisan group of conservatives scream about everything, they impacted nothing.

Had they been prudent in their culture warring, they could have been a clarion voice on the Saddleback issue. Instead, every issue for them has been a nail to their hammer except the one that affected the SBC most — the abuse scandal. They failed terribly on that front and have operated without any self awareness and a lot of a persecution complex and defiance.

Bart Barber is a the leader the Southern Baptists need at this moment. He’s a servant of Christ, not a warrior in culture. That means he’s willing to lay down his own life for Christ and love his neighbor. At this moment of sound and fury, Christians should not be throwing punches, but showing Christ’s love in a world that has turned its back on Him.

The Conservative Baptist Network could go a long way towards having an impact by distancing itself from partisan politics and instead of being a turd in the punch bowl, being the voice of humble conscience. The group is needed, just not as it chooses currently to present itself.

It can start by recognizing that not everything or everyone is woke. It can start with discernment and humility. And it undoubtedly has someone willing to advance Christ’s kingdom with them in Bart Barber, the man the moment needs.