G. Frink's

"Batholics in Bohemia, ...or when your pastor enquires of you" is a Czeck cartoon which was inspired by Tony Cartledge's May 20, 2005, blog (no longer online) "Baptists or Batholics?" The caption translates, "Did you vote for Christian democratic party, Civic democratic party or social democrats? According to the new SBC instruction no. 214/09 we cannot accept liberal voters."

How soon will they all be Batholics in Baptist State Convention of North Carolina (BSCNC)?

Batholic was the word which sprang to mind when I read that the BSCNC had made a budgetary change intended to push moderate Baptists out. That change reflects the increasing doctrinal rigidity of a denomination which I am told once prided itself in having no formal creed.

I was blissfully unaware of the journey toward clerical domination by the nation's largest non-Catholic denomination until I read then-Biblical Recorder Editor Tony Cartledge's May 20, 2005, blog "Baptists or Batholics?" in which he wrote:

On more than one occasion, I have noted that the Southern Baptist shift toward the imposition of strict doctrinal guidelines on denominational employees has a distinct Batholic feel to it -- or Cathtist, as the case may be. Others have noticed the irony of freedom loving Baptists venturing toward a more authoritarian system.

Increasing rhetoric promoting a more authoritative role for the pastor, played out in the recent conflict at East Waynesville Baptist Church, highlight the practical aspects of the trend and bring it home to the local Baptist church.

Accounts by multiple church members indicate that pastor Chan Chandler, 33, a student at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, sought to impose his political views on the congregation and to remove from leadership those who disagreed.

Pastor Chandler resigned under pressure from the members whose ouster he had overseen, and was subsequently defended by comparison with, unsurprisingly, the pope in Rome. Waylan Owens, then vice president of planning and communcations at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, wrote:

When do you think the media will report that the core of Chan's message was the very message of the Catholic Church and its new pope who, before becoming pope, wrote a paper calling for communion to be withheld from those who actively support abortion, presumably identifying Kerry clearly enough for even the media to understand it.

Now, Chan did not have the sophistication and public relations skills of a man about to become pope ... but his message was the same. You cannot call yourself a member of a church that stands against abortion and then actively support abortion through your politics.

Southern Baptist praise for a Roman Catholic model of putting clergy in charge of determining who is fit for church membership is no longer astonishing, at least to me. And at the time Cartledge was not alone in finding it disturbing.

Rereading Cartledge's 2005 blog, it is difficult not to infer that the purging of moderates like him from the BSCNC was and remains a goal of the dominant fundamentalists. For example, Cartledge wrote:

In a recent sermon directed to North Carolina Baptists, SEBTS president Danny Akin called for stronger emphasis on both pastoral authority and the congregational exercise of church discipline in purging the church rolls of "unregenerate" members, which he said could number as high as 50 percent. There is danger in allowing unregenerate members to have positions of influence in the church, he said.

His gently worded blog was widely read. It was even translated into Czeck and inspired the cartoon you see on this page.

It seems to this non-Baptist observer, however, that his call for tolerance and cooperation not only didn't stop but may not even have slowed the process of deconstruction. In any event, the fundamentalist machine continued to tear apart the BSCNC he prized and today he and others are mourning something like a final departure.

I'm not sure what fate befell his Czeck peers, but I suspect it was effectively the same.

Update

Another blogger asked, who uses the words Batholic and Cathist?