One of the things that bothers me about many Southern Baptists is how exclusionary they are. Southern Baptists seem to be known more for what and who they are against than for what they are for.
One good example of that is the recent letter writer who complained about The Alabama Baptist’s Jan. 18 article about the meeting of Baptists announced by Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. The purpose of the meeting is to try to get Baptists from different conventions to set aside their differences enough to come together to find some things they can work on together. But the writer felt that this article shouldn’t have been written because of negative feelings he has about Carter and Clinton.
One the one hand, I think it is admirable to try to get people who disagree on some things to come together to work on things they can agree on. One might even call that Christ-like.
But on the other hand, it is pretty ridiculous to say that an article shouldn’t be written just because you don’t like people mentioned in the article. There are many people I don’t care for, including many Baptists whose sins I think are probably worse than Bill Clinton’s and whose depictions of “truth” are probably much more inaccurate than Jimmy Carter’s. But many of them make it into the news, and I don’t complain about it. A newspaper’s business is to report news, whether you like the people in the news or not and whether you agree with their purpose or not. This was news, and it should be reported.
If someone is committed to having nothing to do with people they don’t like (not a very Christ-like attitude) and don’t want to even read about them, they shouldn’t read newspapers.
They should stick to the marketing and “propaganda” pieces of their preferred groups.
John Duke
Birmingham, Ala.
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