G. Frink's

Applying cult-like censorship, the Southern Baptist Convention's Lifeway Christian Bookstores shoved the September issue of Gospel Today under the counter "like pornography."

Why?

The cover features women pastors.

That's Southern Baptist heresy.

The SBC's Baptist Faith and Message statement of June 14, 2000, asserts that the Bible forbids women pastors.

The most detailed charge of cult-like behavior is made by prominent Oklahoma SBC Pastor Wade Burleson. He warns that the action has three cult-like characteristics:

1. "A cult has 'leaders' who determine what everybody else in the group can, and cannot read; what they can, and cannot do; what they can, and cannot think."
2. "A cult is a place of pecular standards of 'morality,' where leaders are afraid that members will be 'corrupted' by simply being 'exposed' to the 'immoral' through reading about them, or having unintentional contact with them, or heaven forbid, actually associating with them."
3. "A cult takes an 'us vs. them' mentality, and views everyone who is 'not one of us' as the enemy."

Some of the disagreeing comments appended to his blog argue in effect that it isn't that simple, and they have a point of sorts.

The fundamental issue can be understood far more simply, as Women In Ministry argued.

Hiding this particular issue of Gospel Today is an aspect of cult-like behavior that psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton called milieu control.

Milieu control means that, no matter who made the decision or how, the purpose is to hide information in order to direct people toward some decisions and away from others. In this case, Southern Baptists are being protected from the dangerous idea that it is theologically acceptable, not sinful, for women to serve as pastors.

As Chris Turner, a spokesman for Lifeway Resources, explained with regard to sequestering the magazine with its cover featuring and article about women serving as pastors:

It is contrary to what we believe.

The most detailed dissenting comments on Burleson's blog apparently assume that the ends -- a kind of censorship -- justify the means. Another influential Baptist blog argues that the Lifeway decision was based on correct theology, but overlooked a surfeit of equally bad or worse material.

I could find no defenders of the decision itself or its theology who offered concern for either the innate value of enlightening public debate or the right of individual Southern Baptists to confront that view and choose the official Southern Baptist path for themselves.

Defenders seemed instead to be preoccupied by a conflict between "worldliness," represented in this case by Gospel Today and its founder, and spirituality.

Thus the debate tends to be reduced to light versus darkness. Concerns about freedom of expression and freedom of thought are discarded and are replaced with concerns about control.

When the voice raised in this censorious way is that of the largest non-Catholic Christian denomination, I think abiding concern is in order.

My concern for both the denomination and for my native South, where Southern Baptists have considerable sway over everyday life.