Another Young Sheldon question (nothing about football)

Cafe Society
1

In a Young Sheldon episode that was in reruns recently, Mary (Mrs. Cooper) reminds Missy that an outfit of hers is for ballet class only, full stop.

In an episode a few seasons later, Missy and Mary clash over Missy going to a high school activity because it’s a “dance,” ie, popular music with boy-girl dancing, and Mary objects, ostensibly to the “dancing.” Georgie coaches Missy in debating her mother by showing her Footloose, and preparing her to read to her mother the same passages from the bible Kevin Bacon reads regarding King David “leaping and dancing” before the Lord. Which, incidentally, fails.

My question is this: is this a continuity failure, or is the objection actually to the boy-girl mixing, so that dancing in a single sex environment, like a children’s ballet class, would be fine-- or even a mixed sexes group involving very small children.

The family is “Baptist,” but it’s never been stated (that I recall) whether they are American Baptist or Southern Baptist, and I don’t know how to tell, so I can’t just look up the doctrine of one or the other. (And, yes, I know there are independent Baptist churches, and a couple of other smaller Baptist denominations as well.)

My only point of reference here is Orthodox Jews, among whom same sex dancing is perfectly fine in a lot of circumstances, and a little girls’ ballet class would be one of them, but mixed sex dancing for high school students would be a definite no. FWIW, my experience is with Haredi and Chabad Jews (among whom, men dancing on one side of the room, away from the women, but visible to them is OK, but the reverse is not, just for the sake of completeness). Modern Orthodox Jews may have other standards, but if so, I don’t know what they are.

I apologize if the correct term should have been “gender” instead of sex, but I went with “sex,” because the groups doing the judging are concerned only with your bathing suit area, not what you feel you are. In other words, someone fully identified as a woman, but who was a pre-operative trans woman would be free to dance with men in a group at a Haredi Simchat Torah celebration.

Anyway, is there anyone with direct experience with this prohibition who can shed some light here? Is this a continuity error, or just a subtle distinction that the show has followed correctly?

2

The latter, definitely. Ballet is “culture”. Mixed-sex popular dancing is a gateway to impure thoughts and actions (from a certain Baptist standpoint).

There’s an old joke that is relevant here:

Q. Why don’t Baptists have sex standing up?

A. It may lead to dancing.

3

Mary Cooper is more extreme about her religion than her church.

I believe the church has some dances in fact, I feel like Georgie wanted to take the one girl to a Church Dance in one episode.
I think Mary Cooper objected to her daughter going to a high school dance more because Georgie was conceived out of wedlock than actual religious issues.

4

As someone who grew up in an actual East Texas Southern Baptist church, I’ll just say that Young Sheldon gets a lot of things right—and a few things quite wrong. One that particularly irks me is the idea that Bingo Night would be part of a Baptist church’s programming.

As for dancing, when I was growing up in the 1970s, my Baptist church elders scolded us about lots of things—boys with long hair, wearing jeans to church, any form of gambling—but never warned us against dancing. Neither my church, nor Baylor University (run by the Baptist General Convention of Texas) would have sponsored a dance back then, but they didn’t forbid us to attend them.

Baptists—especially prior to the late 1990s inerrancy takeover by conservatives—determined doctrine church by church rather than it coming from some central authority. We knew that some more conservative, rural churches (sometimes called hardshell Baptists were more disapproving about dancing.

5

I’m familiar with churches having a prohibition against dancing, but not a Baptist church in particular. I remember specifically being in the SCA in high school, and doing medieval and Renaissance dancing, and there once being a guy there who was just watching. A couple of us went over to him, and asked him to join in, telling him it was really easy to pick up-- it looked choreographed, but it was really very repetitive, etc.

He said that he wasn’t joining in because his church prohibited some dancing. He said that “this” looked OK, but he wanted to ask his family first.

He wasn’t specific about “some,” but I assume it had to do with full frontal contact; SCA dancing involves lots of hand contact, but not body contact.

Being sixteen, I blurted “What church do you belong to?” (totally ingenuous, not challenging at all). He said it was a Nazarene church, which I was vaguely familiar with, as being something some of the kids I went to school with attended-- I sort of knew it was fundamentalist, like the Pentecostals, but the Nazarenes weren’t always trying to convert people, and leaving tracts on lockers, and such, or mentioning god in class discussions, and the girls could wear jeans.

And since a Nazarene pastor (who was also a sergeant) came vehemently to my defense once, when someone made a very nasty anti-Semitic remark to me inside a military facility, when we were all in uniform, I have been very well-disposed toward Nazarenes.

I guess I kind of built an idea in my head that while the Southern Baptists were sort of hardcore, being very political, while American Baptists were mainline protestant, like Methodists and Presbyterians, any non-specific Baptist, or [other adjective] Baptist was some kind of warm, fuzzy fundamentalist, like the Nazarenes.

But the show has never been clear exactly what [adjective] Baptist the Coopers are.

6

I’d say this. We know from TBBT that Sheldon and Missy also learned to dance for Cotillion. Mary’s more worried about the type of socializing that would occur, rather than the activity. We know that she was pretty wild as a teen, and as parents the folks that caused the most worry tend to worry more.

7

I just remembered that there’s a scene at the church potluck, in the episode in which Mary first begins working at the church, where we see a pretty little (season 1) Missy dancing by herself to the band playing “This Little Light of Mine.” Pastor Jeff walks by and waggles his finger at her, so she stops briefly. Then after he leaves, she starts again.

So I’d interpret that as the kids getting mixed or inconsistent messages.

I guess it’s not really possible to answer the question other than speculatively, or anecdotally, as long as we don’t know what kind of Baptist they are.

8

Probably Southern Baptists, but 1980s Southern Baptists, not today’s. It’s not unlikely that a Baptist church in a small-ish East Texas town wouldn’t necessarily be all fire and brimstone, especially in the late 80s/early 90s. Basically what @Mr_Downtown is saying- it would depend totally on the local pastor, and by extension the local congregation. If someone was too conservative, they’d boot them and find someone who lined up with their way of thinking.

For a truly odd event, one of the most racially integrated churches I’ve ever been to was a Baptist church. that was down the street from where I grew up (literally; could see it from my front yard.)

9

Well, my familiarity with various branches of Baptist in the Midwest (growing up there in the late 70s and early 80s) and in north Texas (early-mid 80s) showed me that there were many congregations that would have booted any pastor that wasn’t sufficiently conservative.

Dancing was held in the same class as hard drugs and rock 'n roll music. At a minimum, and indication of significant backsliding. At worst, the power of Satan and a sure sign of a soul in need of (but avoiding) salvation.

10

Oh, absolutely. That’s what’s so interesting and infuriating about the SBC; by having such a decentralized organization, it means that there’s no real institutional subtlety or anything- it’s all “big tent” large scale things they agree on at their annual conventions. And even then, there’s a fair amount of latitude for individual pastors to vary with respect to how they run their own churches.

As a teenager/college student, we actually went to that church I linked to for a few years- like I said, it was literally up the street, and Dr. Woo was as tolerant and accepting as any clergyman I’ve ever met. Definitely not the stereotypical fire and brimstone Baptist preacher that you’d expect.

But others- my grandparents’ church (near Galveston; 50 miles away) had a pastor who was not so much about tolerance, love and understanding, and was more about sin and salvation. Which makes sense; the white population of their town skewed pretty old, so that sort of thing was what a bunch of white elderly people wanted to hear about, so they hired a guy whose schtick was exactly that.

I’d be entirely willing to attribute any heterodoxy in the Young Sheldon world to that sort of variation between individual Baptist churches and pastors. It’s not at all unheard of in that church.

Of course, it could also be writers from elsewhere in the country not quite understanding how small-town Southern Baptist churches work; that’s entirely possible as well.

11

That may be true as far as the show goes—but you may rest assured that the “First Baptist Church” of any city in Texas is Southern Baptist.