Goodwill is an energetic, positive word. It’s a proactively muscular word. It contains enough self-definition that further commentary is unnecessary in casual conversation.
Let’s start describing ourselves as the goodwill Baptists.
Let’s drop the milquetoast modifier “moderate” to describe Southern Baptists who distance themselves from fundamentalism.
The phrase “moderate” was used during the last few decades of the 20th century to contrast one group of Baptists against another group of Baptists–those who were theological fundamentalists with their claim of an inerrant Bible, assertion of biblical literalness, declaration of theological purity and pronouncement of a truncated moral agenda.
If you disagreed with the veracity, method and secular political loyalty of the fundamentalists in their takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention and conquest of the public square, then you called yourself a moderate.
Of course, a moderate was not a liberal. Moderates stiff-armed zealots at both ends of the spectrum, clinging to the yellow stripe in the middle of the theological and political road.
The moderate, mainstream and centrist modifiers always required a lot more words that explained why we were not them (Southern Baptist fundamentalists). In other words, we defined ourselves negatively, because to describe the SBC was to use negative terms.
Now granted, some moderates have denied for a long time that they even care about the fundamentalists. They claim disinterest, while watching the SBC with eagle eyes and funding it through their churches and state conventions. Such is the situation of the Baptist deniers.
As non-fundamentalist Baptists go forward in the 21st century, we need a simple, positive, proactive, powerful, descriptive term.
Renaming is certainly not a unique issue for Baptists of the South. Some Southern Baptists have tried to drop the “southern” modifier, an effort that failed several years ago when the majority decided that keeping southern was a good thing, never mind that the term tied them to slavery, segregation and southern culture.
The Baptist Center for Ethics has used the modifier “goodwill” to describe the kind of Baptists we hope our readers are or should be.
When BCE released its global poverty DVD in the summer of 2006, we highlighted what goodwill Baptists were doing around the world to address hunger and poverty specifically through Baptist World Aid and its partners.
We think that the modifier “goodwill” works a lot more accurately and constructively than some of the old terms.
Let’s start describing ourselves as “goodwill Baptists.” Let’s see if that modifier works better in defining who we are to ourselves and to others.