Question: A high percentage of Southern Baptist laymen and pastors belong to the Masonic Lodge....Is ...

Question: A high percentage of Southern Baptist laymen and pastors belong to the Masonic Lodge. This could be a major issue at the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention June 9-11 [1992]. Is there a conflict between Masonry and Christianity?

Response: Masonry is an anti-Christian religious cult that "does not specify any God of any creed [but] requires merely that you believe in some deity, give him what name you will . . . any god will do. . . ." It claims to be the religion around whose altars the Christian, the Hebrew, the Moslem, the Hindu, the followers of Confucius and Zoroaster, can assemble as brethren and unite in prayer . . ." (See Global Peace, p. 159).

Masonry's "God," symbolized by the All-Seeing Eye, is called "The Great Architect of the Universe" (G.A.O.T.U.) and its "Heaven" is called "the Celestial Lodge above." Its rituals and initiations into the ascending degrees are highly religious. Masonry teaches salvation by good works and secret rituals and rejects the finished work of Christ upon the cross as the only way to God.

In the initiation into the very first degree, the lambskin is presented as representing "that purity of life and conduct which is necessary to obtain admittance into the Celestial Lodge above, where the Supreme Architect of the Universe presides." In the 19th degree of Scottish Rite Freemasonry the initiate is told that attachment to Masonry's "statutes and rules of the order" will make him "deserving of entering the celestial Jerusalem [heaven]." In the 28th he is told that "the true Mason [is one] who raises himself by degrees till he reaches heaven" and that one of his duties is "To divest [him]self of original sin. . . ."

Masonry, as its own documents reveal, comes from pagan religions and occultism and involves the Mason in oaths and rituals that are a blasphemy against the God of the Bible and are opposed to the gospel of Jesus Christ. For documentation I highly recommend Secret Teachings of the Masonic Lodge and The Facts on the Masonic Lodge by John Ankerberg and John Weldon.