It's a generalization. Certainly there are great Baptists today like John MacArthur and John Piper who are very well grounded in the word. Then who can forget the great Baptists of the past; Matthew Henry, John Gill, Charles Spurgeon, etc.?
But an inherent problem in Baptist church structure is they tend not to be focus on theology. They have 6 or 7 major statements that they adhered to and that's it. Consequently you have people like Rick Warren and John Piper being lumped together in the same group.
I'm not being unkind. This is documented and acknowledged to be a problem among the Southern Baptists. They have acknowledged that for years they've spent too much time focusing on evangelism and not enough time on theology. I posted an article on this quite a while ago (probably a year or two). The problem is not emphasizing doctrine. Here is another article on the matter and it's about half way down, but this isn't a secret. A simple Google will pull up all sorts of these articles.
Well, the almost takeover by those Baptists with a lower opinion of Scripture . . . imho . . .
was a horrid prospect.
And the mission board of the SBC was taken over by some foolish expedience oriented folks that . . . made some very poor decisions vis a vis China.
Yes, Quix, this is unfortunately true. And, of those 6 or 7 major statements that Harley mentions, I find that many of them try to straddle a very important fence, without coming out on one side or the other. That is the fence between synergism and monergism. I am saddened that Baptist leaders won't take a position as a body, and I assume it is to be inclusionary. However, I think it really hurts our ability to STAND for SOMETHING theologically. So, as an SB myself, I agree with Harley that this is a weakness in our faith.