By Jeffrey Walton, Juicy Ecumenism. (Image credit: Juicy Ecumenism)
The advent of Christian Nationalism and the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2015 Obergefell v Hodges ruling mandating recognition of same-sex marriage are opposite ends of a society upending a liberal conventional wisdom that prevailed at the conclusion of the Cold War, according to a Baptist historian.
Author Hunter Baker joined American Reformer Editor Timon Cline and Executive Director Josh Abbotoy for the conservative publication’s August 13 podcast discussion centered around Baker’s new book, Postliberal Protestants: Baptists Between Obergefell and Christian Nationalism. All three self-identify as liberals in a classical sense, but Abbotoy and Cline customarily advocate for confessional state coercion. The former provocatively declared in 2023 the need for “a Protestant Franco,” a reference to Spain’s Generalissimo Francisco Franco who ruled Spain as a dictator from the Spanish civil war until his death in 1975, a period characterized by government-enforced Roman Catholic ideology. Baker, who also authored The End of Secularism, is a fellow of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, which historically advocates religious freedom for all.
Abbotoy and Baker are both Baptists, Cline was raised by Southern Baptist missionaries and Baker serves as provost and dean of the faculty at South Carolina’s North Greenville University, a conservative Christian liberal arts college affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention.