According to The Press Association:

Ultra-conservative Southern Baptist leaders have performed a shock U-turn, saying their denomination had been 'too timid' on environmental issues and had a biblical duty to stop global warming. The statement, signed by the president of the Southern Baptist Convention among others, shows a growing urgency about climate change even within groups that once dismissed claims of an overheating planet as a liberal ruse. The conservative denomination has 16.3 million members and is the largest Protestant group in the US. The signatories of A Southern Baptist Declaration on the Environment and Climate Change acknowledged that not all Christians accepted the science behind global warming. ... But the leaders said that current evidence of global warming was 'substantial' and that the threat was too grave to wait for perfect knowledge about whether, or how much, people contributed to the trend.

Here's your chance to play "Are You Smarter Than a SBC Leader?"

Go to the Heartland Institute and take The Global Warming Test.

Doug Newman's essay today, "Jerks for Jesus" reveals this problem more:

However, [Fred] Phelps and his crew are hardly the most obnoxious Christians in America. This dubious honor belongs to a group numbering in the millions, 99.44% of whom are far more polite and civil.

I speak of the big government groupies in the Religious Right. They are absolutely everywhere. And while their personal behavior may be far more desirable, the real-world implications of their beliefs are positively gruesome.

They positively FREAK OUT over things like The DaVinci Code, but are either in total denial or in total support of America's bobsled ride into totalitarianism. They recklessly pervert Scripture in order to justify the total state.

They want you to think that Jesus' instruction to "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's - Luke 20:25 - means that we should give unto Caesar everything Caesar demands and then siddown and shuddup.

They want you to think that Romans 13 commands unquestioning obedience to secular government. Never mind that the Bible contains numerous examples of civil disobedience. Never mind that Paul, the author of Romans, was a chronic jailbird who wrote four of his Epistles while behind bars.

If the SBC wants a cause, why aren't they focusing on the attacks on home schooling? You'd think a church would be more interested in defending parental rights and keeping families together than in promoting political propaganda:

The California Court of Appeal ruled Feb. 28 that it is illegal for parents without teaching credentials to home school their children. Violation of that law can lead to fines and criminal prosecution. The court even warned that such violations would subject parents to the juvenile court system, which 'has authority to limit a parent's control over a dependent child.' The threat is clear: Home-schooling families can end up in jail or even possibly lose custody of their children if they don't comply. Some bloggers have argued that the decision does not imperil home-schooling, because the court only struck down these parents' attempt to enroll their kids in a private school while teaching them at home. They argue that the parents would have been OK had they followed the 'statutorily prescribed' methods for home schooling...