Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T09:54:23.206Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Southern Baptists and Northern Evangelicals: Cultural Factors and the Nature of Religious Alliances

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Barry Hankins
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

At times in history, groups of people with very different ideologies have allied with one another because of a common threat. The most striking example of this was the World War II alliance of the United States and the Soviet Union. In a religious matter, Baptists and other free-church evangelicals in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries joined with deists like Thomas Jefferson to combat the threat to religious liberty posed by the establishment of religion. At other times, groups with similar ideas have been unable to come together because they did not share similar attitudes toward or positions within their cultures. This essay is concerned with the latter phenomenon and uses Southern Baptists and northern evangelicals as a case study. The historical relationship of these two groups illustrates something profound about the very nature of religious alliances; specifically, it illustrates how cultural factors and intuitive notions of uneasiness about theological security determine whether or not religious groups with great theological similarities can find common ground.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , Summer 1997 , pp. 271 - 298
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 1997

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1. In this essay, I use the term “evangelical” in its broad sense, usually distinguished by the following five features: (1) the Reformation belief in the final authority of Scripture, (2) emphasis on the historical character of God's saving work as recorded in Scripture, (3) belief that salvation comes through the redemptive work of Christ, (4) the importance of evangelism, and (5) a spiritually transformed life. See Marsden, George M., Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), 5.Google Scholar Using this definition, Southern Baptists are clearly evangelicals.

2. Wright Barnes, William, The Southern Baptist Convention, 1845-1953 (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1954), 270-88Google Scholar; and Baker, Robert A., The Southern Baptist Convention and Its People, 1607-1972 (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1974), 304-6.Google Scholar

3. Garrett, James Leo Jr., Hinson, E. Glenn, and Tull, James E., Are Southern Baptists “Evangelicals”? (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1983), 96.Google Scholar For a brief and helpful discussion of the Landmark movement, see McBeth, H. Leon, The Baptist Heritage: Four Centuries of Baptist Witness (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1987), 447-61.Google Scholar For some recent insight, see Hill, Samuel S., One Name but Several Faces: Variety in Popular Christian Denominations in Southern History (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 29–33.Google Scholar

4. Ellis, William E., “A Man of Books and a Man of the People”: E. Y. Mullins and the Crisis of Moderate Southern Baptist Leadership (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1985), 74–75.Google Scholar Mullins's book that does not mention “Baptist” was entitled Why Is Christianity True? Christian Evidences (Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1905). His The Axioms of Religion: A New Interpretation of the Baptist Faith (Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1908) exuded a strong Baptist preference.

5. Ellis, , “A Man of Books and a Man of the People” 64–65, 66, 70-73.Google Scholar For southern Protestant attitudes on race, see Bailey, Kenneth K., Southern White Protestantism in the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 6–7, 102-3.Google Scholar

6. Marsden, George M., Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870-1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 118-23.Google Scholar

7. Quoted in Carpenter, Joel A., “Is ‘Evangelical’ a Yankee Word?” in Southern Baptists and American Evangelicals: The Conversation Continues, ed. Dockery, David S. (Nashville: Broadman and Holman, 1993), 96.Google Scholar

8. Carpenter, Joel A., “The Fundamentalist Leaven and the Rise of an Evangelical United Front,” in The Evangelical Tradition in America, ed. Sweet, Leonard I. (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1984), 283.Google Scholar

9. Ibid., 279.

10. The definition of the term “theological liberalism” is admittedly very elusive. It is used here to refer to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century movement that sought to harmonize Protestant theology with modern modes of thought in areas such as science and literary criticism. Underlying this attempt is a willingness to revise basic tenets of the Christian faith in light of modern discoveries. For an excellent discussion of liberalism, see Pierard, Richard, “Liberalism,” in Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, ed. Erwell, Walter (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1984), 631-35Google Scholar; see also Hutchison, William R., The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976).Google Scholar

11. Marsden, , Fundamentalism and American Culture, 6 and 184-95.Google Scholar

12. Marsden, George M., Reforming Fundamentalism: Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987).Google Scholar Key leaders among the neo-evangelicals were Carl F. H. Henry, Harold John Ockenga, and Edward John Carnell. Ockenga apparently coined the term when he called for a “new evangelicalism.” By the 1950's, the movement was rallying around and being promoted by Billy Graham.

13. Sweeney, Douglas A., “Fundamentalism and the Neo-Evangelicals,” Fides et Historia 24, no. 1 (Winter/Spring 1992): 81–96.Google Scholar In this article, Sweeney argues that, once having broken with fundamentalism, neo-evangelical theologians reverted back to their main task of defending evangelical tenets against liberalism. In other words, having dropped dispensationalism, neo-evangelicals continued to defend the faith much as the early-twentieth-century fundamentalists had.

14. Marsden, , Fundamentalism and American Culture, 160-61Google Scholar; and Garrett, Hinson, and Tull, Are Southern Baptists “Evangelicals”? 100, n. 45.

15. For a full discussion of all the SBC controversies of the 1920's, see Thompson, James J. Jr., Tried as by Fire: Southern Baptists and the Religious Controversies of the 1920s (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1982).Google Scholar For Norris, see Hankins, Barry, God's Rascal: J. Frank Norris and the Beginnings of Southern Fundamentalism (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996).Google Scholar

16. See Ellis, , “A Man of Books and a Man of the People,” 185–208 Google Scholar; and Shurden, Walter, Not a Silent People: Controversies that Have Shaped Southern Baptists (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1972), 94–101.Google Scholar

17. Thompson, Tried as by Fire, 77) and Torbet, Robert G., A History of Baptists, 3d ed. (Valley Forge, Pa.: Judson Press, 1963), 431.Google Scholar Thompsons book reveals more controversy than Torbet's Statement would allow for, but Torbet was writing in the context of controversy between fundamentalists and modernists. The conflict covered by Thompson was between the moderate leaders of the denomination and the denomination's militant right wing.

18. See Shurden, , Not a Silent People, 104-11Google Scholar; and Elliott, Ralph H., The “Genesis Controversy” and Continuity in Southern Baptist Chaos: A Eulogy for a Great Tradition (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1992), 122-26.Google Scholar In his autobiographical account, Elliott is critical of moderates as well as conservatives, the former for being unwilling to contest theological issues and for engaging in a “doublespeak” whereby moderate professors rarely mention in public settings what they teach in their classrooms at the seminaries.

19. Shurden, , Not a Silent People, 111-17.Google Scholar

20. Elliott, “Genesis Controversy,” 133, 177-78.

21. Marsden, , Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism, 58 Google Scholar; Harrell, David Edwin Jr., “The South: Seedbed of Sectarianism,” in Varieties of Southern Evangelicalism, ed. Harrell, David Edwin Jr. (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1981), 46–47.Google Scholar Harrell quotes a Nashville preacher in 1891 as saying, “The Southern Methodists are protesting against the tendency to reject the word of God by the Northern Methodists. Southern Presbyterians are objecting to the loose teachings of their Northern brethren. Baptists South are protesting against setting aside the word of God by their Northern brethren, and loose rationalistic and semi-infidel teachings are prevailing in some churches of the Disciples in the Northern states” (47). He also quotes from an editorial that appeared just after the Scopes trial: “There are millions of people in other parts of the United States who do not want to raise their children in an atmosphere of agnosticism and atheism so prevalent throughout the North and West, … and who, having learned as a result of this trial that there is a section in this country where religion pure and undefiled still holds sway, will turn their eyes longingly to the land of Promise, hoping that in the South they may be able to have their children raised in an atmosphere of Christianity” (47-48). Harrell's source for the second quote is Gatewood, Willard B. Jr., ed., Controversy in the Twenties: Fundamentalism, Modernism, and Evolution (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1969), 354.Google Scholar

22. Barry Hankins, “Defending Dixie: J. Frank Norris and Southern Fundamentalism,” unpublished paper delivered at Phi Alpha Theta Session of the Southwestern Social Sciences Association Meeting in Dallas, Texas, March 24, 1995; and Samuel C. Sheppard, Jr., “Virginia Confronts the Southwest: R. H. Pitt and Baptist Fundamentalists,” unpublished paper delivered at Phi Alpha Theta Session of the Southwestern Social Sciences Association Meeting in Dallas, Texas, March 24, 1995.

23. Carpenter, “Is ‘Evangelical’ a Yankee Word?” 81-88.

24. Troeltsch, Ernst, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, 2 vols. (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992).Google Scholar Troeltsch's book was originally published in 1912. There are editions in print in English other than the one cited here.

25. For an excellent discussion of religion and regionalism, see Gaustad, Edwin S., “Regionalism in American Religion,” in Religion in the South: Essays, ed. Wilson, Charles Reagan (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985), 155-72.Google Scholar While the Southern Baptist Convention has certainly moved beyond being merely a regional entity, the preponderance of Southern Baptist influence still rests in the states of the old Confederacy. Some have suggested that Southern Baptists exercise an ecclesia mentality in the South and a sectarian Status when found in other regions of the country

26. Hinson, E. Glenn, “One Baptist's Dream: A Denomination Truly Evangelical, Truly Catholic, Truly Baptist,” in Southern Baptists and American Evangelicals, ed. Dockery, 213.Google Scholar In this chapter, Hinson says that the average age at which baptism takes place is now eight years old, and he supplies a table showing the increasing number of baptisms by year of preschool chil- dren and those between the ages of six and eight years old.

27. Conversations with Samuel S. Hill, Wheaton, Illinois, April 1992, and by telephone April 18, 1994. Hill compared the difficulty of becoming fully Southern Baptist in a cultural sense when one has not been raised Southern Baptist to the difficulty of converting to Judaism. It is possible, but one tends to miss the subtle nuances if he or she enters from another tradition. Writing in the early 1970's, John Lee Eighmy discussed the degree to which Southern Baptist churches have been culture-bound in his book Churches in Cultural Captivity: A History of the Social Attitudes of Southern Baptists (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1972). John Boles has traced the historical development of evangelical churches in the South in “Evangelical Protestantism in the Old South: From Religious Dissent to Cultural Dominance,” in Religion in the South, ed. Wilson, 13-34. Boles calls it “one of the great ironies of southern history” that evangelicals, who were at first critics of their slave-holding society came to defend it, by the 1830's, as “the most Christian society known to man” (29).

28. Gaustad seems to use the South as the benchmark by which other regional religious groups are measured when he writes, “Is regionalism in American religion a phenomenon peculiar to the South?” Gaustad, “Regionalism in American Religion,” 157. He proceeds to highlight other religious regionalisms but, as stated above, finds only the Mormons to be more regionally established than Baptists in the South.

29. Niebuhr, H. Richard, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper, 1951).Google Scholar The relationship of Niebuhr's work to that of Troeltsch's is intentional. Niebuhr writes in his “Acknowledgments” that “The present book in one sense undertakes to do no more than to Supplement and in part to correct [Troeltsch's] work on the The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches” (x). For a provocative critique of Niebuhr, see Stassen, Glen H., Yeager, Diane M., and Yoder, John Howard, Authentic Transformation: A New Vision of Christ and Culture (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996).Google Scholar Yoder's chapter is entitled “How H. Richard Niebuhr Reasoned: A Critique of Christ and Culture,” 31-89.

30. Niebuhr, Christ and Culture, 83.

31. Ibid., 170-85. Niebuhr is careful to say here that he does not mean dualistic in the Manichean sense (149).

32. Harrell, “The South: Seedbed of Sectarianism,” 55. Harrell includes here some fascinating quotes by sectarian preachers that reveal this glorification of Outsider Status. I am not suggesting that Southern Baptists were going the theological route of mainline denominations, a charge made by SBC conservatives. See George, Timothy, “The Southern Baptist Wars: What Can We Learn from the Conservative Victory?” Christianity Today, March 9, 1992, 26.Google Scholar

33. Moore, R. Laurence, Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 165.Google Scholar

34. This is an allusion to Woodward, C. Vann, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951)Google Scholar, where he says, in effect, that the Bourbon redeemers ran the South.

35. I first heard this term from a thirty-something-year-old associate editor of a Southern Baptist State newspaper who had been educated at a Southern Baptist seminary by the generation of moderates to whom I am referring here.

36. This Statement can be found in Woodward, Kenneth L. and others, “Born Again! The Year of the Evangelical,” Newsweek, October 25, 1976, 76.Google Scholar It is quoted in full in Carpenter, “Is ‘Evangelical’ a Yankee Word?” 78. James Leo Garrett, Jr., also quotes and critiques the Statement in Garrett, Hinson, and Tull, Are Southern Baptists “Evangelicals”? 119, as does Timothy George in “The Southern Baptist Wars,” 27. Along with the Reverend Bailey Smith's claim in the early 1980's that God does not hear the prayers of Jews, Valentine's Statement must be one of the most widely analyzed soundbites in Southern Baptist history.

37. See Carpenter, “Is ‘Evangelical’ a Yankee Word?” for an analysis of Valentine's Statement.

38. Woodward and others, “Born Again! The Year of the Evangelical.”

39. McBeth, H. Leon, “Baptist or Evangelical: One Southern Baptist's Perspective,” in Southern Baptists and American Evangelicals, ed. Dockery, 69.Google Scholar

40. Ibid., 76.

41. See Marsden, , Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism, 76–77 Google Scholar; Falwell, Jerry, with Dobson, Ed and Hindson, Ed, The Fundamentalist Phenomenon: The Resurgence of Conservative Christianity (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1981).Google Scholar

42. George, “The Southern Baptist Wars,” 27. The best extended treatments of the Southern Baptist controversy that resulted in conservative control of the denomination are Leonard, Bill, God's Last and Only Hope: The Fragmentation of the Southern Baptist Convention (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990)Google Scholar; Ammerman, Nancy, Baptist Battles: Social Change and Religious Conflict in the Southern Baptist Convention (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; and, the most recent book on the controversy, Morgan, David T., The New Crusades, the New Holy Land: Conflict in the Southern Baptist Convention, 1969-1991 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996).Google Scholar

43. Niebuhr, , Christ and Culture, 191.Google Scholar

44. George, Timothy, “Passing the Southern Baptist Torch,” Christianity Today, May 15, 1995, 33.Google Scholar

45. See Martin, William, A Prophet with Honor: The Billy Graham Story (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1991).Google Scholar A perusal of Martin's index supports the point I am making here. There are a mere handful of references to “Southern Baptist” and “Southern Baptist Convention” but an entire list of references to “evangelical Christianity,” complete with numerous subcategories. Interestingly, there are more than twice as many references to Carl Henry in Martin's index than there are to Southern Baptists and the Southern Baptist Convention combined. Furthermore, in reading Martin's biography, it is clear that, after Graham's childhood, Martin could omit references to the Southern Baptist Convention entirely and the story of Graham's life would not be substantially altered. David S. Dockery lists several people whom he considers evangelicals first and Baptists second. These include Henry, Graham, Harold Lindsell, Bernard Ramm, Vernon Grounds, George Ladd, and Millard Erick- son. See Dockery, David S., “American Evangelical Responses to Southern Baptists,” in Southern Baptists and American Evangelicals, ed. Dockery, , 101.Google Scholar Marsden has also said that Graham is more evangelical than Southern Baptist in “Introduction: The Evangelical Denomination,” in Evangelicalism and Modern America, ed. George M. Marsden (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984), vii-xvi. In Dockery's edited volume, Joel Carpenter affirms Marsden's view. See Carpenter, “Is ‘Evangelical’ a Yankee Word?” 80.

46. Roark, D. M., “Carl F. H. Henry,” in Dictionary of Christianity in America, ed. Reid, Daniel G. (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1990), 520-21.Google Scholar Henry gets wide coverage in Marsden's Reforming Fundamentalism: Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism. Marsden's index contains twenty-eight subcategories under Henry's name, and not one of them has any relationship to Southern Baptist history. Marsden lists only four page numbers and no subcategories under the entry “Southern Baptist Convention.”

Henry was born in New York City and grew up on Long Island. Before becoming a founding faculty member at Fuller, Henry taught at Northern Baptist Seminary where he had received his Th.D. He later did a Ph.D. at Boston University. One of Henry's colleagues at Northern and then at Fuller was Harold Lindsell, who was ordained as a Southern Baptist but who also spent his entire career in northern evangelicalism. Lindsell wrote about Southern Baptists in the 1970's, alleging that the denomination was in danger of drifting away from the inerrancy of Scripture. His book Battle for the Bible (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1976) has been credited, in part, with awakening SBC conservatives to the issue of inerrancy Citing Lindsell as a Southern Baptist, while plausible and technically correct, is also misleading. George does not, however, cite him along with Graham and Henry

47. See Mohler, R. Albert Jr., “Carl F. H. Henry,” in Baptist Theologians, ed. George, Timothy and Dockery, David S. (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1990), 518-38.Google Scholar Mohler, himself something of an evangelical protege and leader in the conservative wing of Southern Baptist life, states explicitly, “These linkages [with Southern Baptists] notwithstanding, Henry's most critical involvements have been outside denominational life” (531).

48. George, “Passing the Southern Baptist Torch,” 33. The numbers in brackets are mine.

49. See Kuhn, Thomas, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).Google Scholar In this extended essay, Kuhn argues at length that the political revolutionary model of change is appropriate to the scientific realm. Here I am merely bringing the scientific application back around to a religious denomination that is highly political. See Kuhn, , Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 91–109.Google Scholar

50. Wuthnow, Robert, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith since World War II (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1988).Google Scholar

51. Spain, Rufus B., At Ease in Zion: Social History of the Southern Baptists, 1865-1900 (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1967).Google Scholar Carpenter also notes the ways in which the South, no longer an isolated region, has been making its own contributions to American life. He writes, “Since World War II the South … has exported its culture, both high and popular, to the nation and the world. The South has been a veritable factory of American poets and prophets, ranging from Martin Luther King, Jr., to Oral Roberts, from Flannery O'Connor to B. B. King, and from Clarence Jordan to Michael Jordan, not to mention Billy Graham, Elvis Presley, and the Williams boys—Hank and Tennessee.” See Carpenter, “Is ‘Evangelical’ a Yankee Word?” 85.

52. This sort of thinking on the moderate side may stem from the difficulty they often have in recognizing the difference between a fundamentalist and an evangelical. On the conservative side, the difficulty comes in appreciating fully just how diverse northern evangelicals are. Southern Baptist conservatives often mistake the Reformed, conservative, inerrantist wing of evangelicalism for the whole evangelical movement. Many seem to believe that anyone less conservative than Henry or Graham cannot really be an evangelical. Southern Baptist conservatives appear to be unaware of the progressive, Sojourners-type wing of evangelicalism, to say nothing of holiness evangelicalism that has never advocated either the Calvinist perspective or the theological rationalism that attracts Southern Baptist conservatives.

53. Harrell, “Introduction,” Varieties of Southern Evangelicalism, 1-2.