SIDEBAR: Southern Baptists Urged to Vote on Resolutions Targeting Public Schools

c. 2005 Religion News Service (UNDATED) Southern Baptists are being urged to vote on resolutions at their annual meeting that would denounce public schools for their “toxic spiritual nature” and recommend parents remove children from schools with gay student clubs. The resolution targeting gay clubs has drawn support from dozens of state affiliates of conservative […]

c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Southern Baptists are being urged to vote on resolutions at their annual meeting that would denounce public schools for their “toxic spiritual nature” and recommend parents remove children from schools with gay student clubs.

The resolution targeting gay clubs has drawn support from dozens of state affiliates of conservative groups such as Focus on the Family, Concerned Women for America and the American Family Association. They are all urging action during Tuesday and Wednesday’s (June 14-15) convention in Nashville, Tenn.


Southern Baptist criticism of public schools arose prior to their meeting last year, but a resolutions committee declined to bring a proposed statement up for a vote. Two more resolutions have been proposed this year, and it will be up to a new committee to determine whether messengers, or delegates, to the meeting will vote on either of them.

The proposed resolution regarding homosexuality states that Baptist churches should investigate if their local schools have homosexual clubs and that parents should remove their children from those schools if they do.

“The evidence clearly points to the fact that homosexual activists are out to change the hearts and minds of the nation into accepting their lifestyle. What more effective way than to target our children who are a captive audience within the four walls of their school?” says the Tuesday (June 14) letter signed by conservative Christian groups.

It was sent to Gene Mims, chairman of the Southern Baptist Convention’s resolutions committee.

Bruce Shortt, a Houston attorney who co-authored last year’s resolution and this year’s proposal on homosexuality, said he hopes the newer resolution will gain support within the denomination.

“It should not be a controversial question as to whether or not our churches should find out what’s really going on within the schools,” he said in an interview.

The second proposal on Christian education encourages churches “to lovingly warn all of their members concerning the toxic spiritual nature of the government school system” and urges them to be proactive about starting Christian schools and homeschooling.

The Rev. Grady Arnold, co-author of that statement, is executive director of GetTheKidsOut.org, a project of the Alliance for the Separation of School and State.


“We believe there’s a biblical mandate for a thoroughly Christian education and the rejection of a thoroughly secular education, which is what they get in the public school,” he said in an interview.

The Rev. Bobby Welch, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, said in an interview that Southern Baptists were not ready to call for the removal of students from public schools at their last meeting and added, “I do not expect they will this time.”

David W. Key, director of Baptist studies at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology in Atlanta, said Welch may want the meeting to focus on evangelism but topics like homosexuality are “always red meat” for some in his denomination.

“It riles ’em up,” he said. “It brings an emotional kind of rallying point.”

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Editors: Also see RNS-BAPTISTS-ADVANCE, the main story.

Shortt is cq in 7th graph.

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