RfrancisR

That MAY be true. But it was far from universal. And there were many local congregations that were, for their day, progressive. Carter, as he tells in his Our Endangered Values, believed his more progressive worldview was in complete keeping with his Southern Baptists tradition. I may be mistaken, but I believe that Huey Long, a great progressive of his time, was a Southern Baptist. Clinton was also a Southern Baptist. Southern Baptists most certainly have had their fair share of progressives. Those progressives may have been an aberration, but they were made possible because, until the 80s and 90s takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention by fundamentalist like Falwell, free thinking was allowed in that denomination. That doesn't put them in league with the Quakers or the UCC, but it doesn't entirely segregate them from progressives either.

Well, one of the worst things about what's happened to the Southern Baptist Convention is that it used to be a body of free thinkers. The idea of enforcing orthodoxy on local churches would've appalled Southern Baptists of old. Remember Carter and Clinton both came from Southern Baptist traditions.

These are two issues in one: the media's discrimination against mainline churches and IRD's successful campaign to undermine them. UCC News Thoughts?

Hello, I'm R Francis R. I am a Christian, dislocated from New Orleans where I was a member of St. Paul's United Church of Christ. There is no UCC Church where I am at, so I am seeking a new mainline denomination to join. I don't know what this board is really about, but I see terms like "progressive Christians" and I presume it means that I will be in company of those people who value both progressive politics and progressive theology around here. I presume that by "progressive" you feel impelled to support social justice. I earned my education at a Jesuit university, Loyola University New Orleans, where social justice and social responsibility was emphasized. I hope to meet good and fun people to be around here. Oh, and I suppose you might be interested in what I look like, so here's a pic: