One sign of division on the right is the civil war breaking out between the business-backed conservatives and religious right leaders. An example was former GOP Majority Leader Dick Armey, saying last week that "James Dobson and his gang of thugs are real nasty bullies," labeling the Focus on the Family leader as engaging in "high demagoguery." Since Armey is now President of FreedomWorks, one of the key corporate-backed lobbying groups in DC and in statehouses around the country, this is a serious declaration of war between previous political allies.The Evangelical Conflict over Climate Change:
But the most serious conflicts are now happening within the religiously conservative movement itself. A clear example was when evangelical leaders this year created the Evangelical Climate Initiative to address climate change and clean up our environment, based around a statement signed by 86 initial evangelical leaders, including Rev. Dr. Leith Anderson, Former President, National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), Rev. Ron Sider, President, Evangelicals for Social Action and Rick Warren, pastor of Saddleback Church and author of mega-seller The Purpose Driven Life.
This was organized by the even older Evangelical Environmental Network, which includes a range of groups including the Texas Baptist Convention.Denouncing this effort in an open letter were other rightwing evangelicals tied to the more traditional political rightwing, including James Dobson, Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention, former Watergate criminal, now religious leader Charles Colson, Lou Sheldo of the Traditional Values Coalition, and Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association.Other Divisions Among the Religious Right: This conflict forced the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), which represents 51 denominations and 10 million people, to abstain from taking a stand on global warming. In a sign of other divisions, the NAE took no position when the war in Iraq started due to the stalemate between anti-war and pro-war factions.Similarly, when Dobson and others on the far right objected to US funding for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, because a small portion of its funds go to distributing condoms and providing clean needles to drug addicts, evangelical leaders like Rick Warren and even Pat Robertson stood up to Dobson in defense of the Global Fund as critical for saving lives around the world.The "Other" Baptists: As the Southern Baptist Convention moved sharply to the theological and political right in the last few decades, dissent has broken out throughout its institutions. Baptist colleges have cut ties to the Southern Baptist Convention to protect free thought on their campuses. In 1991, a large number of Southern Baptists formed the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, including 1800 partner churches and 13 theology schools and seminaries, as an alternative to the rigid fundamentalism of the SBC.
An even more progressive group of Southern Baptists have broken off to form Mainstream Baptists.Most significantly, leaders of these dissident Southern Baptist groups have begun a dialogue with the northern American Baptists (from which the Southern Baptists split in the 19th century over the issue of slavery) and with the African-American Baptist denominations. This year, former President Jimmy Carter (a former Southern Baptist himself) convened a meeting where various Baptist leaders committed to exploring building a North American Baptist Covenant dedicated to "promote peace with justice, to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, care for the sick and the marginalized, welcome the strangers among us, and promote religious liberty and respect for religious diversity." Significantly, all of these Baptist groups together include 20 million members, more than the 16 million members remaining in the Southern Baptists.
