by Stephen Fox » Fri Oct 14, 2016 4:27 pm
[quote]Nelson Price is a piece of work. This former prayer partner of President Carter turned hardened apologist for the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention attempting to artfully endorse Donald Trump for President as a prayerful concern comes close to blasphemy.
Price outlines several concerns tipping his conscience to the Trump column. What he fails to mention is the leadership he followed in the Baptist world, Pressler, Jesse Helms, Eagle Forum's Phyliss Schlafly and other residues of the John Birch Society and White Citizens Councils most folks now find anathema to a more perfect Union. Long Story short the library shelf the BX 6400's has twenty or more books demonstrating Price to not only be on the wrong side of Baptist history but Christian history as well.
And now he would have us believe the discredited world of Fox News has the high ground over Hillary Clinton. Well there has been an avalanche of opinion pieces in the Christian world in the last few days saying Price is wrong. I would point him to one in particular, that of Molly Worthen in the New York Times about the Moral MOndays Revival in the pivotal state of North Carolina. Worthen should be of special interest to Price as her book The Apostles of Reason a few years ago laid bare the sophomoric ideology of the Inerrancy of Scripture on which all of Price's so called "Biblical World View" is based.
In June of 1986 I walked across the hill at Dykes Creek Baptist Church to the Kingston Hwy to catch a ride with the pastor of Garden Lakes Baptist Church to attend the Southern Baptist Convention meeting in Atlanta. There at the bottom of the escalator of the World Congress Center I met my Dad talking to Wieuca Rd Baptist pastor Bill Self and Tom Edsall of the Washington Post. Edsall was waiting on me as we'd had several phone conversations before the Atlanta meeting.
Two years ago my friend Randall Balmer of Dartmouth published a religious political pilgrimage biography of President Carter, one I doubt Price has read. Here is a Balmer quote from a piece Edsall wrote three weeks ago in the NY Times about Baptist fundamentalists and others of Nelson Price's stripe navigating this Trump moment in America:
Quoting Balmer in Edsall piece:
The religious right was never about the advancement of biblical values. The modern, politically conservative evangelical movement we know is a movement rooted in the perpetuation of racial segregation, and its affiliation with the hard-right fringes of the conservative movement in the late 1970s produced a mutant form of evangelicalism inconsistent with the best traditions of evangelicalism itself. Since then, evangelicals have embraced increasingly secular positions divorced from any biblical grounding, and supporting Donald Trump represents the logical conclusion of that tragic aberration.
A longer version of this letter will appear soon at my blog, foxofbama.blogspot.com
Sincerely,
Stephen M. Fox
"I'm the only sane {person} in here." Doyle Hargraves, Slingblade
"Midget, Broom; Helluva campaign". Political consultant, "Oh, Brother..."http://www.foxofbama.blogspot.com or google asfoxseesit