Three Protestant bodies spent one week at war over the body. The only church adding members is the one that refused to hold the argument.
The Southern Baptist Convention reached past the office and grabbed the act. For three years its messengers failed to write a ban on women pastors into the constitution. On June 10, by 6,028 to 2,026, they did it, and went further. A church can now lose its standing for letting a woman preach to the congregation at all. The title was already closed to her. Now the words in her mouth are too.
Why so far? One premise, the oldest in the conservative book. Concede the act and you lose the office. Lose the office and you lose the doctrine behind it. The slippery slope is the whole engine, and complementarians have never pretended otherwise. They point to the liberal mainline and say, look what loosening did. Albert Mohler, architect of the 2000 statement this amendment hardens, has preached that sermon for thirty years.
Fine. Test the premise. A slope is a claim about where a road leads, and roads can be walked. Two travelers turned up in the same week as Orlando. The SBC named neither. Both belong in evidence, because both show the descent in motion.
Exhibit one. The Presbyterian Church (USA), where the slope keeps a calendar. In 2011 it cut from its Book of Order the requirement that clergy keep fidelity in marriage or chastity in singleness. The fence fell, for the kindest reasons. Fifteen years on, its General Assembly weighs an overture, CON-10, to make ministers promise monogamy. Read that again. A church now debates whether to require what it once assumed. An affirming caucus runs a workshop called “Faithful Polyamory 101” and presses the Trinity into service as the model for loving three at once. Even Matthew Vines, who spent his career arguing Scripture can bless a same-sex couple, warns that polyamory will sink the whole enterprise. He is a witness for the prosecution who believes he came to testify for the defense.
Exhibit two. La Sierra University, and the drift that skips the vote entirely. On June 5 in Riverside its president stood under rainbow flags at a Lavender Graduation and told seven graduates the school “is big enough for all.” Adventist Fundamental Belief 23 calls marriage the union of a man and a woman. The La Sierra University Student handbook promises adherence to this very policy in two places, on pages 57 and 58. The platform said otherwise, the provost beside him. This is the quieter rot, the daylight between what an institution prints and what its leaders bless. The denomination that suspends conservative preachers for their sermons and lets a campus stage what its own statutes forbid. Two gospels, one letterhead, and nobody will say which one is real, and they can’t provide any assurance as to why church members shouldn’t be confused about what is going on not only in California but in the rest of North America.
So the slope is real. Both exhibits prove it. And here is the part the Baptists refuse to hear: being right about the slope has made them wrong about everything else. A wall built to stop polyamory by way of a silenced woman is a monstrous wall. The amendment treats a woman reading Scripture aloud as the first inch of the road that ends in “Faithful Polyamory 101.” The cure swallows the patient.
Now stand back and count the wrong. The Baptist saves the doctrine and loses half the church’s voice. The Presbyterian opens his arms so wide the embrace means nothing. The Adventist says two inconsistent things at once and christens the contradiction grace. Three communions, three roads to incoherence, each certain the other two are the cautionary tale. They are all correct about their rivals and blind in the glass.
And while they fight over who may speak and whom one may wed, the pews are filling somewhere else. Across the country the dioceses report a convert boom. The National Catholic Register surveyed 71 of them this spring and found 66 expecting more converts, many at record highs. The figures are preliminary and the statisticians counsel patience, but the direction is one way and it is up.
Ask the converts why and they answer with one word the Protestants can no longer say in unison. Consistency. They are walking toward a church that declines to put the body to a vote. Rome has its scandals and its civil wars, God knows, but it declines to poll the faithful on whether marriage means what it said last year. The thing the Baptists and Presbyterians and Adventists are tearing each other apart to define, the Catholic Church simply declares, and the declaration is the product in demand.
There is the irony, and it should disturb everyone in the story, the convert most of all. Rome is winning on certainty, and certainty is a different thing from truth. A church that sells fixity will gather the refugees of every church that put its convictions to a show of hands, whether or not the fixity is sound. The Protestants asked their members to vote on the truth. The members are answering with their feet, and the road leads to the one door that was never on the ballot.
