This year was always going to be a controversial one for the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting, which takes place Tuesday and Wednesday in Dallas. From the public outcry surrounding former president Paige Patterson, who was fired from his post as head of the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary after making a series of remarks that appeared to justify spousal abuse, to the numerous clashes within the evangelical community centered on the Trump presidency, the 2018 meeting of America’s largest evangelical denomination was already set to be fraught.
Now, Vice President Mike Pence is planning to speak at the event.
Pence will speak on Wednesday, the second day of the conference, the SBC announced on Monday.
“We are excited to announce Vice President Mike Pence will be attending this year’s SBC annual meeting to express appreciation to Southern Baptists for the contributions we make to the moral fabric of our nation,” said current SBC president Steve Gaines.
Pence is the highest-ranking government official to attend an SBC convention in person. (George W. Bush gave a speech via video link in 2005.) Attending and endorsing explicitly religious organizations is, however, something Pence has a history of doing. He spoke at last year’s Focus on the Family anniversary and attended the anti-abortion March for Life.
His presence at the annual meeting, furthermore, strengthens the existing bonds between the evangelical community and the White House, which has increasingly focused on white evangelicals as its support base. (Eighty-one percent of white evangelicals voted for Trump in 2016, and 75 percent continue to support him as of spring 2018.) Symbolic Trump administration moves like transferring the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and working to repeal the Johnson Amendment have served to bolster and support that evangelical base.
In return, members of the evangelical “old guard” — from Jerry Falwell Jr. to Tony Perkins — have continued to vociferously support Trump, even going so far as to suggest his presidency was preordained by God, despite the protestations of an increasingly vocal evangelical minority.
(Meanwhile, some younger evangelical leaders, like Russell Moore, president of the SBC’s public policy outreach arm, have been longstanding and vocal Trump opponents.)
Within that context, Pence’s decision to speak at the SBC convention seems like yet another conflation of Christianity and Trumpism: a political alliance between the GOP apparatus and the evangelical old guard that may overshadow the wider story of the SBC. When an entire religious community is dealing with the fallout of #MeToo, what does it mean to give a platform to the second-in-command of one of the most unrepentant “pussy grabbers” of all?
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