Ten Commandments Plaque Sullivan County Tennessee
Ten Commandments display
Sullivan County Courthouse
Blountville, Tennessee

Southern Baptist Tactics Targeted

The Associated Press

NEW YORK - A Southern Baptist Convention official says he knows that critics say it is arrogant to target Hindus, Jews and Muslims for conversion on their holiest of days.

'There is an arrogance in truth," says Don Kammerdiener of the International Mission Board. "The Gospel message is a stumbling block for those who choose not to believe it."

The denomination enraged. Hindu leaders in the United States this week when it released a booklet urging Southern Baptists to pray for Hindus on their major festival, Divali. Last month, it published a booklet aimed at Jews 'on the High Holy Days. An earlier book addressed Muslims on Ramadan.

'But some Christian critics say it's possible to share the Gospel's "good news" without pummeling the listener. The Southern Baptists, they charge, offend members of other faiths with campaigns designed to make headlines as much as win converts.

Evangelists have long confronted the ethical implications of proselytizing abroad, often in tense climates such as India, where Christians and Hindus compete for followers. As more immigrants bring their religious traditions to the United States, evangelicals are facing moral dilemmas at home.

What tactics are fair in the battle for souls? In a country with relatively unrestricted religious freedom, what limits should Christians place on their proselytizing?

Take away a Southern Baptist's right to evangelize and you've taken away his faith, says Kammerdiener, executive vice president of the mission board.

Still, he proposes rules of engagement. Offering inducements to win converts ~s unethical, he says. "And I think it is absolutely improper to falsely describe another religion in attempting to share your faith."

But Hindus object to the way their faith is characterized in the recent Southern Baptist prayer guide, which describes them as living under "the power of Satan."

Even a former head of the convention's International Mission Board, Keith Parks, calls the Southern Baptists' proselytizing campaign abrasive.

Emory University law professor John Witte Jr., who directed a three- year project on proselytizing, believes that groups like the Southern Baptists should more closely monitor their own missionary activities beginning with a decision not to target religious groups.

"Hustling for Jesus is fine," says Witte, who heads the school's program on law and religion. But an overly aggressive strategy violates the universal quality of the Gospel message and the example of Christ himself.

Besides, he says, "It will ultimately be self-defeating. It will stiffen the spines of religious groups being targeted and invite retaliation."

In Eastern Europe, he notes, anti- proselytizing sentiment has risen in response to some missionaries' use of high-tech media and high-pressure tactics. A similar public opinion backlash could follow in this country, he says.

The Rev. John Thomas, president of the United Church of Christ, finds missionaries who focus on converting Jews particularly disturbing.

"It's offensive ... when we have been part of a long history of abusive behavior ultimately leading to the Holocaust." Better, he says, to focus evangelizing the more numerous nonbelievers.

Thomas thinks it is arrogant to claim that Christianity offers the one path to truth. Parks, on the other hand, has no problem telling potential converts that Jesus Christ provides the only way to salvation. After all, Jesus told his followers to go "and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit." (Matthew 28:19)

Still, that does not justify aggressive or offensive proselytizing, says Parks, who left the Southern Baptist Convention to join the more moderate Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.

Christian missionaries' descriptions of other faiths should be respectful, he says. "We need to cultivate personal relations rather than launch a new crusade that's "confirmative,"

Ref. Coalition of Jews Protests Southern Baptist Conversion Tactics November 09, 1999 New York Times:

The Southern Baptist Convention, the nation's largest Protestant denomination, has always proclaimed it has a mission to reach out to people worldwide to urge them to a belief in Jesus Christ as the Messiah. But new efforts it has undertaken, aimed at converting Jews and Hindus, have generated a backlash from members of those faiths.

Yesterday, in an unusual display of unity between Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jewish leaders, the heads of the four major Jewish theological seminaries, together with officers of an umbrella organization representing more than 60 Jewish groups, sent a letter to the Southern Baptist president, the Rev. Paige Patterson, asking the denomination to stop supporting "deceptive" tactics to convert Jews.

The letter represents an increasing concern among Jewish organizations over an issue that has set Jews at odds with leaders of the nation's nearly 16 million Southern Baptists...

The letter coincidentally followed a demonstration on Sunday by about 100 Hindus outside a Southern Baptist church in Houston. The demonstrators were protesting a Southern Baptist booklet asking prayer for the conversion of Hindus, whom it described as ''lost in the hopeless darkness'' of their faith.

The prayer guide, published to coincide with Divali, the Hindu festival of lights, was the third such document produced by the Southern Baptists' International Missions Board in Richmond, Va. Two months ago, the board published a guide for use during the Jewish High Holy Days, asking Southern Baptists to pray for Jews' conversion. A guide asking Southern Baptists to pray for the conversion of Muslims was published earlier. In an article posted on its Internet site, the mission board said a fourth guide, on Buddhism, was planned...

Back to Sullivan County Religious Wars


God protect me from your followers

Quoting the Kingsport Times-News (1-18-2004)
Sullivan County Tennessee attorney Dan Street on the Ten Commandments,

"It seems clearer and clearer and clearer that we are promoting a particular religion, and that's a violation of the Constitution. The Constitution is the one document that protects minorities, and just because most people feel the Christian faith or the Jewish faith is the right faith, that doesn't mean they have a right to impose it on everyone else.

Plenty of Christians and Jews who may follow the Ten Commandments, but don't believe they should be displayed in public buildings. Most of the time, however, those people don't come forward with their opinion because they are afraid of being chastised. People think if you want the Ten Commandments down you're an atheist, and that's just not true.