A little clarity

One of the unintentional frustrations that has emerged from the development of the New Baptist Covenant is that this is some sort of politically liberal response to the move rightward by the Southern Baptist Convention, a narrative further advanced in this Atlanta Journal-Constitution article. To buy into that line of thinking is to misunderstand the vast complexities of the rift between the SBC and the coalition of other Baptist organizations.

While it's true that you're considerably more likely to find progressive individuals in these moderate Baptist churches (case in point, yours truly), you're just as likely to find a good number of Republicans in them as well. To say that SBC values personal piety over social justice is misguided as well as most SBC churches are some of the most active in charitable efforts (though they're more likely to do so independently rather than participate in collective and interfaith efforts).

A primary reason for the split is over structure and adherence to traditional Baptist principles (priesthood of the believer, independence of local churches, historical values of separation of church and state, wariness of creeds, etc.) in that the 'moderate' Baptist churches, truth be told, resemble more of the traditional model of the Baptist church.

Or, to put it more succinctly, when I joined First Baptist Church of Athens, I asked my former pastor why they left the SBC, expecting the political answer. His response was quite simply 'well, if we had members who wanted to go to Walt Disney World, I didn't want to tell them they couldn't.'