<snip>
AMY GOODMAN: Explain the Baptist Church here. I mean, you're Baptist. Mohler is Baptist. What's the difference?
REV. JOSEPH PHELPS: Well, we both -- we share in common our desire to see God's will done on earth as in heaven. I'm a graduate of the Southern Seminary back in the late 1970s, where our mission at the time was we're out to change the world, which sounds sort of domination-like, but our agenda was to try to follow the way of Jesus, of love, of unity, of hope, casting a different vision, the day when the lion and the lamb lie down together, or the elephant and the donkey lie down together. We work together in love. In the late 1970s there was a takeover. Ostensibly the issue was the Bible, but the real issue was control: who gets to decide how the Bible's interpreted, whether women could be ministers, what the agenda of the Church will be. And slowly, but effectively, they took over the leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention. As a result, we're able to appoint trustees, who then appointed Dr. Mohler as president, who completely cleaned house at the seminary. Southern Seminary used to be one of the top ten theological institutions in the world. All of those professors have now been fired or forced out, and --
AMY GOODMAN: On what grounds? On what grounds?
REV. JOSEPH PHELPS: Just on theological grounds, on the grounds that they weren't conforming to the strict literal in their interpretation of the Bible, as is prescribed by Dr. Mohler and the new takeover group. The reason this is important, I think, to your larger audience, as I said earlier, is because this group's agenda now bleeds over, not only into beyond the issue of the Southern Baptist Convention, to our larger culture. That same kind of domination agenda -- which says we're right, you're wrong; we're going to save you from yourself by telling you not only what the Bible says, but now what the Constitution says -- has enormous implications for our democracy.
<snip>
AMY GOODMAN: But what is the feeling here about where Baptists fit in, and about the role of politics in religion?
REV. JOSEPH PHELPS: Well, Baptists, because of the domination of Southern Seminary on the national, and now Mohler, in particular, on the national landscape, it has fairly large footprint here in Louisville, Kentucky. But there's also a large presence of sort of the former ideology of Southern Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, which I think stands bravely and strongly over against this domination kind of mindset. It's ironic, because we both aspire to the same vision of God's will being done on earth as in heaven, proclaiming Jesus, talking about the Bible. We both do those things every Sunday. But how we play those out is enormously different. Here in Louisville, I would say the mood is greatly divided over whether the view espoused by Al Mohler, which was -- and “Justice Sunday,” which implied that that represented all people of faith -- was a legitimate one, and that's one of the reasons why we felt compelled to stand up and say, you don't represent people of faith, and besides that, what you're saying is inaccurate. And we don't know whether you are being inaccurate in your statement intentionally or accidentally, but this filibuster is not against these people because of their religious stand. Finally, I think that Baptists historically have been people who have espoused religious liberty. I'll make a prompt to the Baptist Joint Committee on Religious Liberty. one of the champions of religious liberty in Washington trying to hold a clear and, I believe, accurate understanding of what the First Amendment is about. The new Baptist regime, though, the takeover regime wants to fight that kind of mindset. They are anti-disestablishment people. They don't like the disestablishment of religion.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean disestablishment?
REV. JOSEPH PHELPS: Well, the Constitution, the First Amendment sought to disestablish religion, to not have an established religion. In junior high school, I learned this long word with 28 letters, antidisestablishmentarianism. I never knew what it meant. Now I do. It is Al Mohler and that group. They want to redesign, redefine our nation's history, no longer being disestablishment people, but going back and creating a strict religious theocracy.
<more>
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/05/1429230
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