Southern Baptist Conservatives Criticize BJC Director James Dunn Over Positions and PAW Board Ties

Disputes among Southern Baptists are not new, but the controversy surrounding James Dunn, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs (BJC), was described as unusually intense. The Washington, D.C.-based BJC conducts research, reports news, and serves as a government liaison on church-state issues. It is funded by nine Baptist denominations, but the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) provides more than 80 percent of its support.

Some SBC leaders objected to Dunn’s positions on issues that matter deeply to conservatives. At the denomination’s annual meeting the previous year, messengers voted to support President Reagan’s proposed constitutional amendment to restore oral prayer in public schools. Dunn testified against the measure in Congress, denouncing Reagan for “despicable demagoguery” and for “playing petty politics with prayer.” Those statements, the article reports, placed Dunn high on the list of Southern Baptist conservatives’ concerns.

Dunn told *Christianity Today* that he disagreed with the amendment’s approach. “I part company with them at the point of tampering with the Constitution by adding another amendment that would put upon the Constitution the inflexibility of the moment,” he said.

Conservative critics went further, opposing the BJC itself. Paige Patterson of the Criswell Center for Biblical Studies in Dallas said the SBC pays 85 percent of the BJC’s budget and questioned why Southern Baptists should not have their own representative in Washington. Patterson said a motion for separate SBC representation was likely to come before the convention’s June meeting in Kansas City. He also said conservative leaders were going around Dunn to reach government officials, arguing that Dunn had been antagonistic toward the president and would have no influence in representing Southern Baptists on the proposed Vatican envoy question.

Dunn responded that several liberal senators, including Mark Hatfield (R-Oreg.) and Lowell Weicker (R-Conn.), were leading congressional opposition to Reagan’s appointment of an ambassador to the Vatican. He described Patterson’s view as a “terrible misconception” and said the BJC’s work depended less on face-to-face contact than on relationships “that cut across political and ideological lines.”

Criticism also centered on Dunn’s service outside government. For three years he had been a board member of People for the American Way (PAW), an organization founded by television producer Norman Lear to oppose the Moral Majority and much of the so-called electronic church. Dunn declined renomination when his term ended in December, saying he had enough to do on religious liberty concerns “without wasting time with people who are bothered about my being part of it.” Critics also objected to PAW’s relationship with the Playboy Foundation, which had given PAW a $40,000 grant, and to PAW’s free advertising in Playboy magazine. Albert Lee Smith, a member of the Southern Baptist Public Affairs Committee, a BJC subsidiary, said it was inappropriate for Dunn to use the BJC’s name to support PAW while the group accepted Playboy funding. Patterson said Dunn’s decision did not resolve the matter, since Dunn remained identified with the organization.

Patterson said Southern Baptists were growing increasingly wary of the BJC, and calls for Dunn’s resignation had emerged in various parts of the country. The Alabama Baptist Convention had also asked the SBC the previous year to withdraw its funding of the BJC because of Dunn’s association with PAW.

Source: Read the original report