http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/06/17/op ... =0&referer
Whatever spin Sandy and Thornton make of this it emanated from a good place. I found the link this morning on the facebook wall of Bill JOnes, David Curries successor as head of Texas Baps Committed.
Brooks in good conscience attempts to school President Obama. He has a point that will be lost on the likes of Trey Gowdy, Rick and Bubba and a host of others that will not hear much of anything from Sandy's new exalted leadership of theSBC on the matter as the kerygma gets lost in the noise of Bobby Jeffress and J Falwell Jr, Franklin Graham and Russ Moore.
The new SBC had its roots in Lost Cause fundamentalism that not only was wrong headed on Scripture--see Molly Worthen--but was trapped in dominionist southern ideology. For that see an interminable list of references including Ellen Rosenberg, Moyers, and most recently Wuthnow and the easily googled beautiful piece in Oxford American by Marshall Frady's disciple Hal Crowther The New Mind of the South. Incisive paragraphs on the daughters of the Confederacy.
The point is Sandy and Thornton's SBC is entangled in something comparable to the Salafist wing of the Islamist tradition. Russ Moore's latest version in the brief history of the new SBC is just another stage, another attempt in the evolution of Atwater's N word memo to get the SBC back to something like it was in the early 1960s so they can justify a takeover they know in their gut stunk to high heaven.
Andrew Sullivan, to use another analogy reference when he upbraided 43 before he went to Iraq, one that I remember caught the attention of Bill Hull. How can 43 get righteous about radical Islam while "winking at milder versions in his own political constituency."