Richard Land retires, and good riddance

Richard Land, of the Southern Baptist Convention Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, announced earlier this week that he will retire next year [link]. The linked article, from the Washington Post blog On Faith, by Adelle Banks, suggests that his departure has something to do with the loss of his radio show, resulting from some comments he made regarding the death of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin, and that it may also have something to do with the ascension of Fred Luter to the presidency of the Convention.

Maybe; the Convention is more complicated than simple racial identity political issues, regardless of the racial demographic crisis Al Mohler has been describing at great length on his podcast, etc.

I frankly don’t care; I’m glad to see the back of Land. I listened to two of his podcasts, For Faith and Family and Richard Land Live! for a couple of years each, and I always got the impression that he was more concerned with repeating Republican talking points to Southern Baptist than he was anything else. I stopped listening to Land in 2009 after he suggested that the profitability of insurance companies was necessary to the continued viability of the health care industry in the United States.

But the bigger problem from my perspective was Land’s selling of the Iraq War in 2002; he is the last living signatory of the Land Letter [link], an endorsement by five evangelical leaders (Land, Colson, Bill Bright, D. James Kennedy, and Carl Herbster) on the basis of Just War Theory.

I would really encourage careful readers to follow the link from the page above to the text of the letter and decide for themselves how well it has aged, and whether it deserves critical reappraisal and, dare I say it, repentance. Hint: I’d opt for repentance, and I am inclined to consider an open and honest dialog on the latter Bush Administration a good place to start any further discussion of evangelical leaders and their involvement in contemporary politics.

In other words, if you’re an evangelical opinion leader I don’t care what you have to say until you’ve reassessed the Bush years. They were a disaster, and since we believe in openness, honesty, and repentance, we owe it to ourselves to start the discussion there.

I appreciate Land retiring, of course, since it effectively puts the punctuation on his career, full stop, while he’s still alive. I try to avoid speaking ill of the dead (see e.g. this week’s non-discussion of Gore Vidal), and I consider it something like providence to have a chance to take a long hard look at Land’s shall we say corpus all at once.