June 16, 1999
Web posted at: 6:23 p.m. EDT (2223 GMT)

In this story: Latest votes continue shift to right Membership falls for first time in 73 years RELATED STORIES, SITES

ATLANTA (CNN) -- Delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention's annual meeting waded into the middle of another controversial issue Wednesday by formally rebuking President Bill Clinton for declaring June as National Gay and Lesbian Pride Month.

"Our love for our president compels us to rebuke him and publicly to deplore his most public endorsement of that which is contrary to the word of God," read a resolution approved at the end of the SBC's two-day meeting in Atlanta.

Members of the nation's largest Protestant denomination also voted 2,316 to 1,313 to ask Clinton, a Southern Baptist, to recall James Hormel, an openly gay man whom he appointed as U.S. ambassador to Luxembourg two weeks ago.

"We need to speak out and say we do not want an avowed homosexual to represent the U.S.," said the Rev. Wiley Drake of Buena Park, California, who sponsored the resolution.

But David Smith, a spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights group, decried what he said has become "an annual (SBC) convention event -- devote a day to gay bashing."

Another resolution calling on Clinton's home church, Immanuel Baptist in Little Rock, Arkansas, to discipline him for his support of gay rights was ruled out of order on the grounds that individual Southern Baptist churches are autonomous. It had been offered by SBC President Paige Patterson.

Patterson called it "a thorny situation," because members of Clinton's congregation "want, on the one hand, to be lovingly responsive to every member of the church."

"By the same token, I'm sure there must be many of them that are very troubled by (Clinton's stand)," he added.

Latest votes continue shift to right

Wednesday's votes are the latest in a series of controversial stands taken at recent SBC conventions, including last year, when delegates approved a resolution calling on women to "submit graciously" to the leadership authority of their husbands.

In 1997, the convention called on church members to boycott the Walt Disney Co. because of gay content in its movies and television shows and because the company offers benefits to the partners of gay and lesbian employees. A decision to target Jews for proselytizing also generated controversy.

The increasingly conservative tone emerging from the convention comes amid a two-decade struggle between conservatives and moderates for control of the denomination -- a battle that has increasingly gone the conservatives' way.

Previous conventions have featured tension between the two groups, but this year has been far from contentious because many moderates stayed home. Patterson, long identified with the conservative faction, was easily re-elected to a second one-year term as SBC president.

Membership falls for first time in 73 years

However, there have been indications in the past year that the rightward shift could be taking a toll on the denomination's membership rolls.

In the last year, almost 20 moderate churches have dropped out of the SBC. And for the first time since 1926, overall membership is down, by about 1 percent or 162,000 members, though membership is still the highest among Protestant denominations at about 16 million.

"The leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention want to tell the people in the church what to believe and what to do," said the Rev. Hardy Clemons of the First Baptist Church of Greenville, South Carolina, which voted last month to sever its SBC ties.

Critics say the denomination's conservative drift -- including purging seminaries and Baptist-affiliated institutions of professors thought to be too liberal -- infringes on the traditional Baptist position that individual churches and members should have freedom of conscience when it comes to religious matters.

But Patterson said that the moderates, by leaving, "are finally saying what they've known to be true all along, and that is, that they are not in substantial theological agreement" with the majority of SBC members.

Correspondent Brian Cabell, The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

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