G. Frink's

About half of North Carolina churchgoers are Baptists, and for years have been increasingly divided against one another by the 1979 fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention.

On Nov. 12, the fundamentalists at Baptist State Convention of North Carolina meeting in Greensboro ended almost two decades of budgetary cooperation with the moderate Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.

Although the action was technically an end in 2010 to the channeling of funds through the BSCNC to the CBF, without forbidding member churches to write a check directly to the CBF, it was clear that the intention was further imposition of theological conservatism on the BSCNC.

Not only was it clear when the action was taken that a number of the remaining moderate churches in the BSCNC would leave, some of the conservatives crowed about that prospect.

The CBF is an offspring of the culture wars and the split was in a fundamental sense inevitable. Although, according to the Biblical Recorder, a financial shift toward the CBF was already well under way.

The CBF was founded in 1991 in response to the fundamentalist takeover of the SBC. It is a fellowship of churches which call both men and women into the ministry, accepts homosexual members and are otherwise tolerant. Not a denomination, the CBF doesn't own or operate divinity schools or similar institutions but partners with like-minded institutions. Among those are 14 theology schools and seminaries and a variety of independent agencies, all of which operate autonomously.

The big Baptist tent is still up in North Carolina, most fundamentalists say with varying degrees of passion, and almost no one in sight really believes that. Certainly not Tony Cartledge, former editor of the Biblical Recorder, who wrote:

Barack Obama's victory in the presidential election might not have been the end of the culture wars, but it is certainly winding them down.

Frank Scheaffer, himself a former religious right advocate, points out that Obama's election reintroduces nuance to the American political and theological discourse.

He writes:

As our new president recognizes, self-awareness and mortality are already such a mutually exclusive (and terrifying) contradiction that accepting a few more contradictions is par for the course! And President elect Obama has a generous enough spirit and a large enough intellect so that he can do with his spiritual life, what the Religious Right and the New Atheists have not done: understand that there is no shame in embracing paradox.

President Obama is about to make reasoned faith fashionable again.

I think it's time for that. Don't you?