When it comes to fights, the Southern Baptists don’t mess around. Whereas other denominations and religious bodies (Methodists, Episcopalians) at least try to keep things looking civil on the surface, not so America’s largest non-Catholic flock.

When these Baptists want a street brawl, the rest of us need to clear the decks. And what’s interesting in this newest set of battle lines is how women are getting involved and helping redefine this battle as something bigger than theological jousting. It’s even more than sexual abuse and #ChurchToo.

It’s about whether women will ever be taken seriously in the SBC when problems first arise, not when things have gotten so bad, the police are being called in.

The more recent unrest bubbled to the surface about a week ago. Outside of the denominational press, Religion News Service has been the main outlet covering the fracas. This story gives some background.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (RNS) — The Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee will launch a task force to examine the activities of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the convention’s public policy organization headed by the theologian and author Russell Moore. Southern Baptist leaders fear controversy over Moore could lead to a drop in donations. Moore, 48, who has been president of the ERLC since 2013, has been an outspoken critic of Donald Trump since the president began campaigning for the White House. In 2016, Moore called Trump “an arrogant huckster” and wrote an essay for the National Review citing “Trump’s vitriolic — and often racist and sexist — language about immigrants, women, the disabled and others.”

If you remember, Moore was forced to apologize for those remarks and meet with Frank Page, a former Executive Committee president, to reconcile. Tmatt covered the process here and here back in March 2017.

Apparently that wasn’t enough.

Mike Stone, chair of the Executive Committee, said in a news conference Tuesday (Feb. 18) that committee members have heard anecdotal accounts of churches withholding money or reducing giving because of concerns about the ERLC. He said that local church leaders and state Baptist leaders have expressed concerns in private but not on the record. The task force will give them a place to officially lodge their concerns.

Moore’s own commission hotly protested in this memo how the Executive Committee was trespassing on the ERLC’s turf, as established in SBC bylaws.

RNS followed up with another story naming the some of the folks who are withholding money because of Moore, namely Jack Graham, pastor of Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Texas, one of the nation’s largest churches at 45,000 members.

Graham, one of the president’s evangelical advisers, felt that Moore’s criticisms of Trump and his evangelical supporters was out of bounds. He didn’t want his church’s dollars to support Moore’s work at the denomination’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. Prestonwood eventually starting sending money to the SBC again. But it has opted out of funding the ERLC, which Graham thinks has outlived its usefulness. “The focus of the ERLC is not the focus of the mainstream of the SBC in terms of its approach to politics, to conservative thought and theology,” Graham told RNS in a phone interview this week. Graham is not alone. About 100 of the denomination’s 46,000 churches said they would withhold funds from the Cooperative Program because of the ERLC back in 2017, according to published reports. Since that time, more churches have threatened to do the same, according to leaders of the SBC’s Executive Committee.

The article goes on to explain some of the hot water that former ELRC leaders have landed in during past years, meaning that whoever leads the group will always been in some kind of trouble. Life is complex in the age of Donald Trump.

What’s fascinating to me is how some of the SBC women are coming out in favor of Moore. Chief among them is author/teacher Beth Moore (no relation) who posted the below tweets on Feb. 19. She didn’t need to name names. Everyone knew what she was referring to.