A couple weeks ago, I wrote a post expressing frustration that Baptists only get in the news when they say something crazy. So said I: ‘I don’t want to be a be a Baptist today.’ I encouraged readers to ‘talk me down’ in Rachel Maddow Show fashion. I was succesfully talked down. Tripp assigned me (trying to get a head start on being a professor) to write a blog post entitled ‘Why I am Still a Baptist with a Blue Snowball Microphone’. So here it is.

Four presidents have come from Baptist families: Lincoln, Truman, Carter, and Clinton. And let’s add VP and Nobelist Al Gore. He even attended divinity school briefly. These administrations believed in justice and the common folk. And one bad one, Harding, but he came from a northern Baptist family so it’s OK. Then there was colonist Roger Williams, who believed in religious liberty for all people, not just Christians. Then there was a certain civil rights leader named Martin Luther King, Jr. and a post-civil rights era leader, Cornel West. In music, we’ve got Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, Buddy Holly, and Louis Armstrong.

And of course there are theologians like Walter Rauschenbusch and Paul Fiddes.

But the biggest reason that today I am happy to say I’m still a Baptist is:

Baptist Leaders Endorse ‘American Clean Energy and Security Act’

By the way, click here to urge your congressional representative to strengthen and pass ACES (H.R. 2454). Check out my earlier post about the bill.

And I have a Blue Snowball USB Microphone because for the price its the best plug-and-play mic out there for podcasting on a Mac. I use it to tell the world that we Baptists are pretty cool sometimes.