Last November Kenneth L. Woodward, a reporter for Newsweek, penned an analysis of President Clinton's bizarre personal behavior. He suggested that the president's personal beliefs allow room for "plenty of license" and cited the moderate Baptist ethos in which Clinton was raised as a contributing factor to the chief executive's sloppy morality.

 Southern Baptist fundamentalists - architects and guardians of the new Southern Baptist order - went ga-ga over Woodward's analysis. It confirmed their opinions about Clinton and the old Southern Baptist Convention, and it gave them compelling spin to use in the public relations campaign to convince Baptists that a moderate SBC was evil while the new fundamentalist SBC is good.

  Baptist Press, the public relations arm of today's SBC, offered Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President R. Albert Mohler Jr. a forum to affirm the Newsweek analysis. Last week, Mohler's article was carried in SBC Life, the monthly voice of the SBC executive committee.

 Mohler's argument runs something like this. President Clinton felt at home in the Baptist theology and ethical positions of the old SBC. His "twisted moral worldview" is a product of his upbringing in the old moderate Baptist climate. Baptist leaders such as James Dunn, Glenn Hinson and Foy Valentine, moderates who lost favor during the conservative resurgence of the SBC, were Clinton's moral advisors who thereby served as his "enablers in a lifestyle of gross immorality." The rightward shift of the SBC over the past 20 years, therefore, was necessary to save Southern Baptists from years of theological compromise. This theological rescue led directly to a recovery in Baptist ethics and morality.

 It is an interesting argument, and at its starting point Mohler is correct. By any reasonable definition, President Clinton's behavior in the sexual scandal that led to his impeachment is sin, and his faith did not rescue him from behavior that was wrong and loaded with consequences. To suggest that his actions were neither sexual nor adulterous defies credulity.

 Beyond this, however, Mohler misses the mark. So eager is he to demonstrate the theological and ethical superiority of the SBC's new-found conservatism that he misses several obvious chinks in his position.

  First, Mohler blames Clinton's immorality on the president's Baptist nurture during a "liberal denominational regime," but he makes no attempt to explain the thousands, maybe millions, of Southern Baptists, who continue to be straight shooters while being raised in the same denominational milieu. If a moderate Baptist ethos is the key ingredient to ethical decline, why are Baptist churches filled with men and women who have never cheated on their spouses, always paid their taxes on time, neither smoke nor inhale and oppose abortion on demand? Every Southern Baptist over 20 was raised in this Baptist culture, including Mohler.

 Second, Mohler is quick to pin the president's "gross immorality" on moderate Baptist influences, but he fails to account for the sexual immorality that felled several prominent Southern Baptist conservatives in recent years. Was it immersion in conservative doctrine and denominational politics that brought down these men whose names and sins are known by most denominational leaders but out of decency are not enumerated here? Hardly.

 Third, Mohler's argument adopts a naive, simplistic notion about the way in which human behavior is formed. It is undoubtedly true that one's views of faith and morality are shaped by the ecclesiastical culture in which one is nurtured. Religious traditions cast long shadows over our lives.

 But no intelligent person would argue that a distant denominational culture and its faceless leaders will carry the same shaping power as one's mother and father, brothers and sisters, classmates, elementary and secondary teachers, and pastor and church staff. No larger cultural context is likely to influence us as much as these close individuals, and when