Religion: Let the Church Stand Up

They call themselves messengers, and they like to denounce the wicked world with the rhetoric of doom. "We are suffering from the corrosive breath of materialism, secularism, commercialism and godlessness," cries the Rev. Jaroy Weber of Lubbock, Texas, outgoing president of the Southern Baptist Convention, and this leads to "hunger, inflation, credibility gaps, loose morals, bad government, divorce, drunkenness." But as some 16,000 Southern Baptist messengers gather this week in Norfolk for the 119th convention of the largest Protestant group in the U.S., their spirits are as ebullient as their slogan: LET THE...

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