Stetzer’s comment inspired #the15, a growing number of people using a highway marker with the number 15 as their Twitter profile picture to show anger against a denominational elite they say maintains power by ridicule, marginalization and attacks on anyone who questions its authority. J.D. Hall, a Southern Baptist pastor in Montana who contributes to a group blog called Pulpit and Pen, said Calvinists aren’t the only one fed up with groupthink in the nation’s second-largest faith group behind Roman Catholics, and they number a lot more than 15.

A denominational worker’s tweet over the holidays sparked a social media campaign alleging the Southern Baptist Convention’s bookstore chain values profit more than doctrinal fidelity and that an inner circle of “evangelical intelligentsia” calling the shots doesn’t listen to the rank-and-file.

Before Christmas Ed Stetzer, executive director of LifeWay Research, posted a tweet characterizing people concerned about an apparently collegial reference to Pope Francis by author John Piper as “the same 15 Calvinists who are mad at everyone — for everything.”

Stetzer’s comment inspired #the15, a growing number of people using a highway marker with the number 15 as their Twitter profile picture to show anger against a denominational elite they say maintains power by ridicule, marginalization and attacks on anyone who questions its authority.

J.D. Hall, a Southern Baptist pastor in Montana who contributes to a group blog called Pulpit and Pen, said Calvinists aren’t the only one fed up with groupthink in the nation’s second-largest faith group behind Roman Catholics, and they number a lot more than 15.

“This isn’t just tongue-in-cheek whimsy for Stetzer,” Hall, pastor of Fellowship Church of Sidney, Mont., said in a blog posting titled Who are #the15. “We realize what’s happening here. It’s what is happening every single day — those who are concerned are marginalized. We are few in number, they tell us. And to these people, numbers are everything, and so to be few in number is to be marginalized. It’s a license to ignore, but more than that, it’s a license to ridicule.”

Hall said Stetzer’s engagement in social media about Piper’s critics comes after months of ignored emails and social-media posts asking why LifeWay Christian Stores continue to sell products likeHeaven is for Real, a New York Times bestseller tacitly condemned in an SBC resolution last June affirming “the sufficiency of Scripture regarding the afterlife.”

Hall, who in the past has reported on SBC politics at a Baptist college in Louisiana and contradictions in a popular ex-Muslim testimony in a radio program on Brannon Howse’s “Worldview Weekend” on conservative Christian radio, said the pattern is always the same: Those in positions of power avoid and obfuscate. When that doesn’t work they ridicule and marginalize. If that fails, they attack, usually with the aid of sycophants.

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