(MintPress) – “I grew up in the hood, and my mom worked two or three jobs. I hung out with a lot of bad guys. I did a lot of crazy things I should not have done,” said Rev. Fred Luter Jr., a former street preacher who is poised to become the first black president of the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant body on Tuesday.
Luter’s rise to the head of the SBC
Luter, who is running unopposed, told National Public Radio he got his start preaching in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward. He is expected to be elected as the first black president of the conservative Christian congregations this week. But his road from the hood to the pulpit wasn’t a straight path, perhaps mirroring the Southern Baptist Conventions road from supporting slavery in America and opposing civil rights in the 1960’s to its historic step in electing an African-American leader to head the church.
Luter, 55, a former street preacher turned church leader, is credited with reviving and sustaining membership at the Franklin Avenue Church, a New Orleans congregation faltering in the 1980’s and devastated in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
Despite not having a formal seminary degree, he grew his congregation at Franklin Avenue to the largest Southern Baptist Church in Louisiana, with 7,000 members.
The Southern Baptist Congregation, at about 166 years old, and the largest Protestant sect in America contains 51,000 congregations with 16 million members. Of those, about a million of its congregants are black.
It is also the second largest Christian body in the United States, after the Catholic Church.
Racial turmoil within the SBC: Then and now
A strong argument for man’s equality before God was a hallmark of the theologies of the Baptist and Methodist evangelicals in pre-Revolution America. Both traditions embraced African Americans. They challenged the hierarchies of class and race and urged planters to abolish slavery, welcoming slaves as Baptists and accepting them as preachers.
But historically, slavery became a divisive issue for Baptists in America leading up to the Civil War, eventually splintering the denomination. In the 19th century it became the most critical moral issue dividing Baptists in the United States, according to the Dictionary of Afro-American Slavery.
Richard Land, head of the church’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) told NPR that Luter’s election demonstrates how far the denomination has come since it came into being after splitting off with northern Baptists over the issue of slavery in 1845.
“It’s as historic a moment as Southern Baptists have had,” Land says, “because the president of SBC is not just an honorific — it is a position of real power.”
Luter and Land worked together to help to draft a 1995 document in which the SBC apologized for “historic acts of evil such as slavery” and for condoning “racism in our lifetime” and asking for forgiveness “from our African-American brothers and sisters.”
However, earlier this month, the Southern Baptist Convention reprimanded Land, also the chief of its policy branch, for making racially insensitive remarks about the Trayvon Martin killing. “Richard Land Live!,” Land’s weekly call-in radio program on public affairs was also terminated after church leaders condemned the remarks he made on his March 31 broadcast.
Land said that President Obama and other black leaders were exploiting the Trayvon Martin shooting “to gin up the black vote,” and accused the Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Rev. Al Sharpton of fomenting a “mob mentality,” and he also suggested that racial profiling was justified. A blogger later alleged that his remarks were taken from an editorial in the Washington Times. Land apologized on May 9 for his comments as well as his failure to cite the Washington Times.
The church’s trustee executive committee issued a statement saying that Land’s comments “were very hurtful and offensive to the Trayvon Martin family and to many in the African-American community, including hundreds of thousands of African-American Southern Baptists. Damage was done to the state of race relations in the Southern Baptist Convention,” according to the Baptist Press.
Luter, a member of the executive committee of the ERLC for the Southern Baptist Convention, was present at the proceedings which handled the Land incident.
More African-Americans embrace SBC
The SBC has seen a rising trend in more African Americans joining the denomination, which has grown its non-white congregations from only 5 percent in 1990 to 20 percent in 2010.
Despite that, a recent survey of SBC pastors from the denominations’ LifeWay Research uncovered that 10 percent of respondents disagreed with the statement, “Without regard to any individual, I think it would be a good thing to have an African-American as president of the Southern Baptist Convention.”
LifeWay Research president Ed Stetzer, commenting on the findings said, “Southern Baptists have come a long way. In the last 20 years, the percentage of non-Anglo SBC churches has grown from five percent to twenty percent, and now seven percent of Southern Baptist churches are identified as primarily African-American. But, we are still a predominantly Anglo denomination, so it is particularly encouraging to see the openness and enthusiasm for an African-American SBC president.”
Michael O. Emerson, an expert on race and religion at Rice University said on Luter’s election, “Given the history of the convention, this is absolutely stunning,” in an interview with the New York Times.