We now learn that both baptism and total membership in the Southern Baptists appear to be on the decline. It appears that not just Jimmy Carter is disenchanted with their increasingly strident stands of secular political issues.

While it is clear that the founding fathers demanded a separation of Church and State because they thought that organized religion was toxic to good governance^*, there is also the issue of blowback when an a religion spot welds itself to a political party that is in the descendance.

In a very real way, they have been done in by the same thing that crippled them after the Civil War, when their origin as a sect was driven by their support of slavery.

It could be argued that the negative consequences of the circumstances of their founding led to the sect, and its worshipers, being held in some distrust until the 1960s or 1970s, with the best guess as to the definitive end of this status being Carter’s election as president in 1976.

The lesson to be learned is the lesson that Molière so eloquently demonstrated in 1664, that religion can often be a convenient refuge for scoundrels.

^*Ask the brave anti-Mullah activists in Iran. They would agree too. Organized religionis completely toxic to good governance,