There was once a Baptist minister who was shipwrecked on a desert island for several years. When the rescue boat finally came ashore, the visitors noticed three grass huts along the shoreline. They asked what they were.
“The one in the middle is my home,” the preacher said. “The one on the left is my church.”
“What about the one on the right?”
“Oh,” the minister replied, “we had a split in the church.”
The Baptist church has more flavors than Baskin-Robbins.
You have your basic, garden-variety Southern Baptist, of course.
But then you have the National Baptist Conventions, the American Baptist Churches USA, the North American Baptist Conference, the reformed, the Particular (Calvinistic), the general/Free Will (non-Calvinistic, the Primitive Baptists, the Seventy Day Baptist, the Missionary Baptist, the Congregational Independence Baptists, the Strict (as opposed to not-so-strict?) the Berean Baptist Church, the Independent Fundamental Baptists, the latter two born because members felt the Southern Baptist were too (ahem) liberal. Speaking of oxymorons, I personally don’t know what a liberal Baptist is, so if any of you know, please enlighten me.
Ministers in the Berean Baptist Church have been credibly accused of the rape of teenage girls being held in church-affiliated group homes, including New Bethany Home in Bienville Parish.
And those wild and crazy Independent Fundamental Baptist! Here’s Jack Schaap, former pastor of First Baptist Church of Hammond, Indiana, (before his arrest, conviction and SENTENCING to 12 years imprisonment for child sexual exploitation and abuse) as he demonstrates POLISHING THE SHAFT during a church service before his fall from grace. (Two things here: Watch the other men on the stage and how there is absolutely no reaction from them to this spectacle – except for the one on the far left; he’s absolutely mesmerized. Also, don’t go getting your feathers ruffled at me for posting this; Schaap is the one who did the “polishing.”)
And now we have a new player because they don’t think the Baptists have swung far enough to the political right. And it’s a group from BOSSIER CITY’S FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH and closely-aligned with our distinguished Speaker of the U.S. House, one Mike Johnson, he of the covenant marriage and cellphone app to keep him off porn sites.
In 2022, the fledgling Conservative Baptist Network received a $50,000 contribution from the far-right Turning Point USA for the purpose of fostering “awareness of traditional American values.”
Turning Point USA is led by Charlie Kirk, one of the most visible proponents of Christian nationalism and Trumpism and of the merger of church and state. The now defunct Falkirk Center at Liberty University was named by combining the names Falwell and Kirk.
Liberty University was founded by Jerry Falwell Sr. and was more or less inherited by his son, Jerry Falwell, Jr. until Junior got caught with his pants literally down while watching his wife having sex with their pool boy.
It’s certainly curious how all these so-called political conservative preachers end up in sex scandals.
The Conservative Baptist Network is led by BRAD JURKOVICH, pastor of Bossier City’s First Baptist where Johnson was once a member. The church has been ordered by the Louisiana Supreme Court to turn over FINANCIAL RECORDS to a group of members who sued over what call inappropriate expenditures.
Even Johnson’s financial disclosures have come under SCRUTINY.
Stay tuned. We’re going to be following this saga closely as it unfolds in the courts.
Louisiana Voice 
The Conservative organizer Charlie Kirk-mentioned in the piece-took one in the neck for the would be dictator. As Leonard Cohen -paraphrase-said” First we take Queens then we take the world.” Blood ought not be shed in the course of honorable political discourse but since the arrival of D.J. Trump in the Oval Office there has been an appalling increase in the amount of vile and vituperative commentary.issuing from the sociopathic mouth of Trump. This is the real trickle down effect. Not some delusional distribution of tax money. The money is retained and expanded by the oligarchs. The amount of violence that has been excused and fomented by the current occupant of the Oval Office-and the $200,000,000 dollar ballroom annex-has inflamed the disillusioned and the deranged. Make no mistake this is to grease the establishment of a private militia. In order to be in the cabinet of this administration beyond fealty to a deeply flawed individual one needed to be unfit to be qualified. Trump is both a cause and a symptom. The prejudicial right has been assiduously conniving since the uprising at the Democratic Convention in 1968. Now Trump has overwhelmed and embarrassed the Republican establishment. It may well be the Epstein investigation and the survivors that ultimately brings down the mendacious Trump in a swamp of his own making. Hoist on his own villainous petard.