In the spring of 2019, I was tapped to testify on behalf of Southern Baptists against the policy of registering women for the selective service. That day, a number of us (we panelists and others such as Hope for America’s Robert Miller, a retired Navy captain) urged the commission to not recommend this change in the draft law. But this year, they went ahead and did so. Though the Convention had spoken on this before, it seemed to me that recent developments should prompt us to speak again at this moment. 

The Resolutions Committee’s wording: 

While the Committee believes that the Southern Baptist Convention’s messengers are sympathetic to the message of this resolution, the Committee located two resolutions titled On Expanding the Selective Service to Include Women(2019) and On Women Registering For the Draft(2016) that adequately represent the position that women should not be required to register for the Selective Service.

Okay. I get it. For one thing, there are dozens of resolution proposals submitted each year, and only about ten are passed along to the messengers. I remember that in 1989, when I chaired the committee, we fielded about fifty, one of which urged support for NASA, so that we might preserve the possibilities for evangelizing outer space. We decided to pass on that one, despite an in-person plea from the submitter. (You can watch our report at https://vimeo.com/394307930). Incidentally, this year’s chairman, James Merritt was on that 1989 committee.

Later on, in 1992, I was the Executive Committee’s staff liaison to the Resolutions Committee, when Al Mohler was chairman. As I recall, they decided not pass along one objecting to the USPS’s Elvis stamp and one bemoaning the sequined choir robes worn by a church choir on the Convention program. So, yes, you pick and choose.

Nevertheless, we’ve not shrunk from speaking again and again when an important issue was still in the play. The prophets of old did that, and we’ve done it a host of times on abortion, including this year. 

All that being said, I thought you might like a look at what I put together. Perhaps you can draw on it should Congress move toward a vote on this. I hope you’ll join me in raising objections if it’s in the works.

On Draft Registration for Women

WHEREAS, despite repeated calls from the Southern Baptist Convention and a range of other religious and secular voices, the National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service (a commission weighted toward those appointed by members of President Obama’s political party, he himself appointing three) recommended to Congress in 2020 that Selective Service registration be extended to women; and

WHEREAS, having worked, with some success, through the federal court system, the National Coalition for Men (NCM)has appealed, on grounds of gender discrimination, to the U. S. Supreme Court to reverse a 1981 ruling (in Rostker v. Goldberg) that secured male-only draft registration—their plea (predicated upon the reduced likelihood that men will be called up and the increased likelihood that women will be conscripted in their place) antithetical to true manliness, despite their group’s name, and

WHEREAS, the Supreme Court’s refusal, June 7, 2021, to hear the case was a temporary measure according to the words of Justice Sotomayor: “But at least for now, the Court’s longstanding deference to Congress on matters of national defense and military affairs cautions against granting review while Congress actively weighs the issue”; and

WHEREAS, NCM’s reasoning could be extended to cover attempts to shift the burden of compulsory military service onto other heretofore protected groups, such as those younger and older than those currently in the 18-25 year old draft range, arguing, for instance, that the Medal of Honor has gone to males as young as 11 and as old as 41; and

WHEREAS, after the Clinton administration introduced the policy wedge expediting reversal of the Rostker decision, i.e., opening combat units to women, Southern Baptists spoke biblically and bluntly a word of rebuke in 1998 (through a resolution “On Women in Combat”), insisting that God, in creation,  “set the gender-based role and responsibility of males in the most basic unit of society (the family) to be that of leader, provider and self-sacrificial protector (also cf. Ephesians 5:25; 1 Peter 3:70), and likewise has set the gender-based role and responsibility of females to be that of help and nurture (Genesis 2:18) and life-giving (Genesis 3:20) under male leadership and protection (cf. 1 Peter 3:7)”—a position opposed to that of ushering women into battle, either as volunteers or conscripts; and

WHEREAS, rationales for males-only conscription, embodied in earlier SBC resolutions on this matter (1998, 2016, and 2019) still stand—creation-based complementarity; the folly of gender interchangeability; contempt for scriptural precepts concerning the special status of women;  the abrogation of the husband’s headship in the life of his wife; manifest differences in lethality and survivability on the battlefield; women’s special vulnerability in P.O.W. settings; subversion of the military’s war-fighting and deterrence roles to serve the cause of social engineering; and

WHEREAS, the issue is not only the offense of forcing women into the ranks, but also of conscripting them away from the freedom to focus on familial relationships and motherhood, instituted in the opening chapters of Genesis, with this threat applying to all forms of imposed national service—not a matter of forcing women unto “hearth and home” but of tearing them away, in critical years, from family-nurturing and homemaking paths foundational to civilization, given that the institution of the family predates all other human institutions, including  government, the military, commerce, academia, the media, and even the church; and

WHEREAS, a policy of gender-blindness, androgyny, and male-female fungibility in the military would exacerbate and cruelly codify the moral and mental derangement besetting society (and even, some instances, the Church), a madness driven by conceptual, legal, and spiritual assaults on gender integrity; and

WHEREAS, the normalization and glorification of women’s assuming the armed defense of the nation, with its forced indifference to biblical and natural norms, is an affront to the protective duties of fathers and husbands, resulting in disgrace (calling to mind the words of Shakespeare’s Henry V, when he spoke, on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt, of absent men “now a-bed” back home, who must “hold their manhood’s cheap” while others fought in their place) and demoralizing to biblically-acute men either contemplating or serving in the military, men whose careers would be tenuous should they express reservations over this emerging cause; and

WHEREAS, draft registration for women would put us at odds with the moral and indeed chivalric convictions of all but a handful of nations around the world, nations unlike the United States, such as the totalitarian, atheistic regime in North Korea, or the uniquely situated and imperiled state of Israel, whose entire populace is ever on the front lines (a nation that, nevertheless allows religious exemptions for women who count gender-blindness on this matter illicit); and

WHEREAS, the Church has, through the ages, been warned of the wickedness of casting and regularizing its women as armed warriors—commanding them to kill and subjecting them to the horrors of the battlefield—as in the words of the venerable John Chrysostom (c. 347-407): “O you subverters of all decency, who use men, as if they were women, and lead out women to war, as if they were men! This is the work of the devil, to subvert and confound all things, to overleap the boundaries that have been appointed from the beginning, and remove those which God has set to nature. ..." (Homily 5 on Titus).

BE IT THEREFORE RESOLVED, that the SBC renew its commitment to the principle of male-female complementarity, as opposed to interchangeability, and

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that the SBC, walking in the footsteps of biblical prophets, shall persist in its calls for the employment of godly wisdom and the abandonment of ruinous behavior, even as the waywardness of our officials and society increases, yet while time for repentance remains;  and

BE IT FINALLY RESOLVED, that the SBC implore Congress to reject the recommendation of the National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service, and, if Congress ignores this plea and presses ahead with registering women for the draft, we urge the Supreme Court to strike it down.