The column said Southern Baptists have become “raging Shiite Baptists” after drifting “to the right” for the past four decades. “Santa and the Easter bunny are simply the devil in disguise and cable television and the Internet are his playground. The Boy Scouts are his evil minions,” she wrote.

A newspaper column lampooning Southern Baptists, calling the group “the crazy old paranoid uncle of evangelical Christians,” is causing quite a stir in a Kentucky city and put a pastor’s job in jeopardy.

The column was written by Angela Thomas, the wife of Bill Thomas, an assistant pastor at the First Baptist Church in Madisonville. Her column was done in response to the Southern Baptist Convention’s opposition to a new Boy Scouts of America policy that welcomes gay members.

“Sexuality doesn’t come up and isn’t relative to typical scouting activities but now, thanks to Southern Baptists, the parents of little innocent scouts everywhere are having to have The Talk,” she wrote June 19 in The Madisonville Messenger. She writes a weekly humor column for the community paper, which publishes daily.

In the weeks since, the status of Bill Thomas’ job with the church has become unclear. The First Baptist pastor said he had accepted Thomas’ resignation, but Thomas’ wrote in a letter obtained by the newspaper he had not quit.

Thomas has worked at the church for 10 years and was also its musical director.

Bill and Angela Thomas declined to be interviewed by The Associated Press on Tuesday. But he previously told the newspaper he agreed with what his wife wrote.

The column said Southern Baptists have become “raging Shiite Baptists” after drifting “to the right” for the past four decades.

“Santa and the Easter bunny are simply the devil in disguise and cable television and the Internet are his playground. The Boy Scouts are his evil minions,” she wrote.

Madisonville is a city of about 19,000 in the western part of the state, about 115 miles southwest of Louisville.

First Baptist Church Pastor Joe Leonard said the opinion piece was not the cause of Bill Thomas’ departure.

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