At their annual meeting in New Orleans last week, Southern Baptists doubled down on their crusade against female clergy. “Messengers” (delegates) of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination ratified the expulsion of two congregations — one of them Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California — for condoning the ordination of women.
The venue was significant. In New Orleans in March 1967, Paul Pressler, a Texas judge, and a seminary student named Paige Patterson met at Café du Monde and, according to durable legend, strategized the conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention. Fundamentalists within the denomination insisted its membership was on a slippery slope to theological liberalism by allowing women pastors and by refusing to affirm biblical inerrancy.
Although I contend that the term “liberal Southern Baptist” is an oxymoron, the conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention in the ‘70s set in motion a purge of all vestiges of “liberalism” from the denomination. The fundamentalists, exploiting the powers of the denomination’s president, systematically began to populate church agencies and especially seminary boards with like-minded conservatives.
