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Four Kinds of Baptists, One Common Good?
Barry Hankins, Baylor University
When I was originally asked to come to this meeting and speak on Baptists and
the common good, I thought about doing something covering the whole sweep of Baptist
history. Kind of like snapshots of different ways Baptists have considered the common
good over the past four hundred years. This filled me with dread, however, largely
because I’m not really a Baptist historian. I’ve never done any primary research in early
Baptist history, and the thought of spending time reading Smyth, Helwys, Roger
Williams, and John Clark just felt like too big a project for the time I had. I found myself
wishing that my topic was twentieth-century evangelicals, fundamentalists, and the
common good. I knew that if this were the case I could spin out something interesting
and perhaps provocative with some confidence that I was not making a gaffe of some
sort. I finally decided to do what both scholars and politicians often do. Take the
reporter’s question, and give whatever answer I want. Or, in this case, take the theme of
the conference, then just talk about what I know.
So, I decided to focus on the twentieth century and to incorporate some of my
own research on fundamentalist and evangelical Southern Baptists with the research of
some of my doctoral students and with the work of David Stricklin in his book
Genealogy of Dissent. What I initially proposed to argue was that we can identify four
kinds of Southern Baptists in the twentieth century—fundamentalists, moderates,
conservative evangelicals, and progressives—and that all four have pretty similar, almost
identical, conceptions of the common good. At least when it comes to big issues on
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which Baptists pride themselves on making a cultural contribution. This twentiethcentury conception of the common good, at its worst, I believe, has been formed more by
the relationship Southern Baptists have with American culture than by any serious
biblical formation or contact with a more historic form of Baptist witness. As I worked
through the paper, I’ve had to revise my thesis somewhat, as you will see, because I’m no
longer convinced that the progressive dissenters shared the same culturally assumed
conception of the common good that the other three groups shared.
So, here’s a little trick you may not have learned yet. When you have to give a
title of an address that you haven’t written yet to a conference organizer, then you write
the address and find that your original thesis doesn’t hold up, just put a question mark at
the end of the title. Then, at the conference, start by telling the audience, “There was
supposed to be a question mark at the end of my title. Apparently, it was left off when
the conference program was printed.” The REAL title of my lecture is “Four Kinds of
Baptists, One Common Good?”
First, a caveat: To be fair, I need to note that I’m focusing on the “at its worst”
aspect of Baptists and the common good. I will concede that all four of these kinds of
Baptists have done much good in society. Like other American evangelicals they
instinctively and intuitively care about their neighborhoods, towns, individual states, and
the American nation as a whole. While sometimes on the wrong side of important issues,
especially race, Southern Baptists have exhibited a deep sense of concern and care for the
common good of those around them.
Earlier this summer my mother in law was staying with us for a few days and
asked me about the Oxford trip and what my role would be. Now, my in-laws spent their
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careers owning and operating one of the largest independent Christian bookstores in
America and were very active in the Christian Booksellers Association, various
evangelical publishing outlets, and other institutions in the evangelical world. They are
Church of Christ by background, of a fairly progressive sort. Which means they let their
daughter go to Texas Tech rather than Abilene Christian, not to mention allowing her
marry outside the faith and even join a non-Church of Christ denomination—all without
ever suggesting that she isn’t going to heaven. My in-laws have retired and moved to a
ranch outside the very small town of Forestburg, Texas, population 47 with several
hundred more in the sprawling Montague County. The tiny town of Forestburg, about
two square blocks, has a Baptist Church, a Methodist Church (??), and a Church of
Christ.
When I told my mother-in-law that our topic here at Oxford would be Baptists
and the common good, she had an immediate response. She said, “The little Baptist
church in Forestburg sends a bus all over the county picking up children from poor rural
familes that don’t attend church. Because of the Baptists these kids learn about the bible
and have recreational and educational opportunities they wouldn’t otherwise have.
They’ll be better people and the county will be a better place because of this work. For
what it’s worth, that’s what I think about when I think about Baptists and the common
good.”
Not a bad report from a non-Baptist, and not a bad reputation to have. That’s
what I’m conceding—that all over Baptist history has been this desire to reach people
with the gospel so that they are converted, become better people, and help form better
communities. Like other evangelicals, Baptists have been pretty good at DOING. As
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Mark Noll has written about evangelicals, “The tendency of American evangelicals,
when confronted with a problem, is to act”—in other words, to do something. But, I
want to focus on how Baptists think about what they’re doing—how they understand
their social action, justify it, how they try to motivate each other to press forward with
work done in behalf of the common good. This part of Baptist history hasn’t been very
good, at least since the dawn of the twentieth century. Baptists fit the first part of Noll’s
quote above, but they also fit the second half of the quote. Here’s the whole quote: “The
tendency of American evangelicals, when confronted with a problem, is to act. For the
sake of Christian thinking, that tendency must be suppressed.”1 Applied to Baptists, what
this has meant is that even Baptist intellectual elites have tended to think about what
needs to be done and how best to accomplish these tasks, without deep enough reflection
about theology and political theory, especially pertaining to the nature of the church.
There has been a tendency to take certain cultural ideas for granted, the result of which
has been that as Baptists attempt to accomplish something positive for the common good,
they have—again, at their worst—tended to confuse the common good of culture with
what it actually means to be Baptist, and sometimes with what it means to be Christian.
And this has done real harm to the Baptist witness in the late twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries.
For my four kinds of Baptists—fundamentalists, moderate, late twentieth-century
conservative evangelical, and progressive dissenters—I will use an individual or two to
illustrate each kind—J. Frank Norris as the fundamentalist, E.Y. Mullins and George
Truett as the moderates, Richard Land as the conservative evangelical, and Clarence
Jordan and others of his lineage as the progressive dissenters or dissidents. I want to
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emphasize again that with each I’m looking intentionally for the ways that while DOING
in behalf of the common good, they failed to think sharply about either common good or
their own identity as Baptists and Christians.
J. Frank Norris
Norris, as many of you know, was the pastor of First Baptist Fort Worth for most of the
first half of the twentieth century. I believe he was one of about four of the most
influential fundamentalists in America in the first generation of American
fundamentalism, which would be from the Scopes trial of 1925 until Norris’s death in
1952. He built First Baptist Fort Worth into one of the largest churches in America, with
about 12,000 members by 1940. The church took up an entire city block in downtown
Fort Worth. It was an early version of the megachurch. In addition to his Fort Worth
enterprise, at the height of his career Norris took over as head pastor at Temple Baptist in
Detroit and led both churches from 1935 until 1950. Temple also had about 12,000
members, which allowed Norris to boast, probably accurately, that with roughly 25,000
parishioners he had more people under his pastoral care than any other preacher in
America.
Norris was a militant, rabble-rousing fundamentalist. He was always on the
attack against something—theological modernists, Catholics, Communists, evolutionists,
other Southern Baptist leaders. You name it; Norris attacked it. Norris was infamous
nationwide, if for no other reason than the fact that he shot and killed a man in his own
church office in 1926 and was subsequently tried for murder. He got off on a self defense
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plea because his attorney was able to convince the jury that Norris had reason to believe
that the man he shot had come to his office to attack him. Norris testified that he feared
for his life, even though the other man was unarmed. The victim’s name was D.E.
Chipps. When I covered this part of Norris’s life in the first draft of my dissertation, and
came to the place where Norris shot Chipps three times, my dissertation adviser wrote in
the margin, “Good Bye Mr. Chipps.”
What we need to focus on for a few minutes today is Norris’s approach to public
life. Norris began his career as something of an urban reformer. This was not unusual
for big-city fundamentalist pastors of that era. William Bell Riley in Minneapolis was
much the same, as were some others such as C.E. Mathews in Seattle and John Roach
Straton in New York City. Norris, for his part, regularly called on Fort Worth’s city
fathers to eradicate prostitution, more stringently regulate or shut down the saloons, and
end graft and corruption. Moreover, First Baptist Fort Worth had soup kitchens, a
clothing bank, recreational and educational programs—many of the features of the
institutional churches of the northern social gospel.
On a national level Norris crusaded against evolution, alcohol, Catholicism, and
Communism. His support for prohibition was second to none and this issue led to his
first major foray into national election politics. When the wet Catholic Al Smith ran for
president in 1928, Norris barnstormed Texas and Oklahoma campaigning for Herbert
Hoover, believing that the election of a Republican was the only hope to salvage
prohibition. There were all sorts of reasons Norris didn’t like Smith, of course. In
addition to the liquor issue were Smith’s Catholicism and his connection to the corrupt
machine politics of Tammany Hall in New York City. But on the liquor issue and later
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on communism, Norris clearly had a sense that a Baptist pastor had a responsibility to
protect the common good, even nationally. Norris seemed to be genuinely concerned
about the effects of alcohol and the potential for prohibition to curb the problems
associated with alcoholism. He was also vigilant, even bellicose, in defending American
democracy from the possible inroads of communism, both real and imagined, and
Catholicism, as it was typically understood in his time.
In short, in a variety of areas, Norris just assumed that a Baptist pastor of a large
urban church was a public figure, a civic leader, and that the church was a public
institution. As an individual, city pastors stood alongside mayors, city managers,
councilmen, police and fire chiefs, and other public officials as part of the structure of
society. All of these individuals and institutions had responsibility for the common good
of the city of Fort Worth. Nationally, Norris thought of himself as working hand-inhand with U.S. Representatives, Senators, and even presidents to protect America. Norris
rarely defended his role as a public reformer because it was taken for granted that this
was a part of his job description. When he saw a problem, his tendency was to act, or at
least shout.
Truett and Mullins
At the same time that Norris was pastor of First Baptist Fort Worth, George Truett (d.
1944) was pastor of First Baptist Dallas. They were rivals, largely because Truett was a
Southern Baptist insider, a spokesman and statesman for the mainstream of Southern
Baptist life, while Norris was by choice an outsider, constantly on the attack against those
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in power in the SBC, whom he called “the Sanhedrin.” On one occasion in 1940 Norris
sent a nasty letter to Truett and tried to time its delivery for Sunday morning just before
Truett entered the pulpit to preach. The telegram was intercepted by an associate whose
family held onto it for decades before turning it over to the library and archives at
Southwestern Seminary. In the letter Norris alleged that all Truett’s efforts to derail the
Norris juggernaut had been in vain. Norris said his success had defied Truett’s prediction
that Norris’s career would not prosper.
While Norris and Truett were holding forth in Texas, and both on a national stage
as well, the erudite Mullins was president of the flagship Southern Baptist Seminary in
Louisville, until his death in 1928. Although Truett and First Baptist Dallas occupied a
place in Dallas city life much like that of Norris and his church in Fort Worth, with
Mullins and Truett I want to focus briefly on their views of Baptist democracy and its
relationship to American politics and culture. Here I am relying largely on the
dissertation of my former student Lee Canipe. Lee did his dissertation on Mullins,
Truett, and Walter Rauschenbusch—specifically on the degree to which all three Baptist
leaders took for granted the notion that Baptist democracy and American democracy
were virtually synonymous. We’ll leave Rauschenbusch for later in the week and focus
primarily on a some representative statements from Truett and Mullins.
In a 1911 sermon entitled “God’s Call to America,” that would be a chapter in
Truett’s 1923 book by the same title, the venerated Dallas pastor said this: “The triumph
of democracy, thank God, means the triumph of Baptists everywhere.”2 Far from an
anomalous utterance on some isolated July 4th celebration, this equation of American
democracy and Baptist democracy was Truett’s and Mullins’s studied view. In a later
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sermon published in 1932, Truett said that democracy “is the goal for this world of
ours—both the political goal and the religious goal. . . . [D]emocracy is the goal toward
which all free people must travel. . . both in government and in religion.”3
In his famous sermon on the steps of the U.S. Capitol building in 1920, a sermon
that subsequently went on to mythic status in Southern Baptist history, Truett further
cemented the connection between church and state, even as he called for the separation of
church and state. He concluded his sermon by saying, “Standing here today in the
shadow of our country’s Capitol, compassed about as we are with so great a cloud of
witnesses, let us today renew our pledge to God, and to one another, that we will give our
best to church and to state, to God and to humanity, by his grace and power, until we fall
on the last sleep.”4 Notice here the twin commitment to church and state. Moreover,
when he mentioned the “cloud of witnesses,” it was not altogether clear who they were
because he had referred Baptist forefathers and the American founders in the sermon.
His reference to our commitment to “God and humanity,” seems to suggest a
commitment to the common good.
Mullins was no less an advocate of the convergence of American democracy and
Baptist ways. In a 1911 article he wrote, “The Baptist type of religion is most
fundamentally in accord with the ongoing of the world toward democracy.”5 In his
famous Axioms of Religion, Mullins made no attempt to develop theologically his religiocivic axiom, which is “a free church in a free state.” Instead of developing this axiom
theologically, as he did the other five, Mullins turned instinctively to the American
principle of church-state separation and drew this theological axiom from the U.S.
Constitution. This axiom, he wrote, “which states the American principle of the
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relationship between the Church and State is so well understood and is accepted by the
people of the United States so generally and heartily that it is unnecessary to spend time
in pointing out at length what the axiom implies.” Later, he noted that this American
view came from “the fundamental facts of human society and the Gospel.”6
Moving from the religio-civic axiom to his social axiom, Mullins rejected what he
viewed as a “mere social Christianity” and argued that Christianity must be both
individual and social, with the social being a by product of the individual. “To regenerate
the individual is the sole condition of permanent moral progress in the social sphere.”
Then, summarizing this final axiom, (again, the social axiom), he made this observation:
“It is the essence of Christianity to send a man after his fellows. The Christian who
understands the meaning of his religion, therefore, will be a force for civic, commercial,
social, and all other forms of righteousness. Thus Christianity in America will become
the religion of the State, although not a State religion.”7 Indeed, it goes on and on, as
Mullins later in the book Axioms of Religion wrote, “We may regard American
civilization as a Baptist empire for at the basis of this government lies a great group of
Baptist ideals.”8
In aftermath of WWI, in the wake of the defeat of the autocratic regimes of
Europe, moderates of the 1920s such as Truett and Mullins were flush with the potential
for Baptists to lead in the promotion of democracy. They believed that the demise of
autocratic government would go hand in hand with the demise of sacramentalism,
opening the way for the free church tradition to ascend hand in hand with American
democracy. Speaking at Mullins’s silver anniversary celebration at Southern Seminary in
1924, Truett said, “Autocracy must pass, is passing, and with it will go sacramentalism
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and sacerdotalism, the grave clothes of a moribund and decadent faith.” Of course, this
“moribund and decadent faith” was Catholicism. The statement was an example of the
anti-Catholicism Protestants exhibited during that era. Autocracy, in the view of these
moderate Baptists, was buttressed by the Catholic Church in much the same way that
democracy was furthered by Baptists. At the same event where Truett announced the
decline of sacramentalism, the next speaker remarked, “This is a Baptist age because we
are living in a world of expanding democracy.”9 (Interesting that these statements were
made as the shadow of fascism was about to fall across Europe.)
The idea that the advance of Baptist democracy is also the advance of American
democracy, and vice versa, is still prominent within Southern Baptist moderate circles.
Let me illustrate with an example from 1997, at a Baylor meeting of the Lilly
Convocation of Church-Related Schools. Among the three speakers that day was James
Dunn, at the time the executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee. Dunn lectured
from his Southern Baptist moderate church-state separationist position, extolling soul
freedom and the inviolability of individual rights. Over against these Baptist distinctives
stood the Christian Right’s attempt to use the power of government to establish
theocracy. One of those asked to give a response to the lectures was Notre Dame
philosopher David Solomon, himself a former Texas Baptist. In critiquing Dunn’s
lecture, Solomon said, “Of the three addresses we’ve heard today, James Dunn’s is the
most vigorous defense of political liberalism.” Then Solomon said that if Dunn’s view of
individualism and individual rights were to prevail in our culture, he feared there would
be no more publicly spirited people such as Dunn.
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Solomon’s critique was basically that Dunn had articulated no basis on which to
build a sense of community that could sustain a conception of the common good, as well
as form individuals who were imbued with a sense of public spiritedness. Dunn could
not even account for the type of community that had formed him as he grew up in
Amarillo as a Texas Baptist. What Solomon wanted to expose was that all Dunn had was
liberal individualism, indeed the autonomy of the individual. In response Dunn said
something to the effect that a good Christian is always a good citizen, which brought
Baylor philosopher Scott Moore to the microphone to point out that such a statement was
essentially Constantinian.
The point I want to make is that Dunn was acting as the intellectual and spiritual
son of Truett and Mullins. He was quite thoroughly confusing a Baptist sense of
democratic polity, soul freedom, and religious liberty, with liberal notions of individual
autonomy as formulated by John Rawls and others. Moreover, Dunn assumed that what
was good for Christianity would always be good for civic life, hence a good Christian is
always a good citizen. That Dunn would be like Truett and Mullins we would expect, but
what we would not expect is that Dunn was also the intellectual and spiritual son of J.
Frank Norris. Along with Truett and Mullins, Dunn assumed that the advance of
American styled individual rights and democracy was the advance of the Baptist way.
Along with Norris, Dunn assumed that a good Christian is always a good citizen.
In Norris’s tirades against Catholicism then Communism he was a fundamentalist
super-patriot, always blurring the line between the militant fundamentalist fight to save
Christian orthodoxy, with the fight to save America from foreign influences.
During the
1928 presidential campaign, Norris routinely warned that if Smith were elected, it would
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be the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572 all over again, as Catholics would use
the power of the state to make the nation Catholic much as the Catholic League tried to
crush the Huguenots during the French Wars of Religion (1562-1596). For him, electing
a Catholic was allowing the foreign enemy of Protestant America to gain a foothold in
the U.S. government that would lead to disaster, almost like electing a Communist in
1948 or a member of Al Qaida today. Ironically, Norris’s anti-Catholicism put him in the
same league with his arch-enemies Truett, Mullins, and many mainline Protestants who
also spoke of Catholicism as un-American.
Later, when the primary threat to America seemed to be communism, Norris
assumed and preached that a good Christian would be an anti-communist, which was just
another way of saying that a good Christian is always a good citizen. He became so anticommunist in the 1940s that when the pope was anti-communist, Norris stopped being
anti-catholic. In an early version of culture war co-belligerency, he spoke highly of the
Catholic Church as the “Gilbralter against communism in Europe,” and he even traveled
to Rome, gaining an audience with Pope Pius XII. This pro-Catholic position gave him a
new angle from which to attack moderate Southern Baptists who remained anti-Catholic
but not anti-communist enough for Norris’s tastes.
All this can get pretty confusing pretty fast, so let me pause and restate the
argument thus far. The fundamentalist Norris and his moderate arch-enemies Truett and
Mullins, and their intellectual and spiritual descendent Dunn, all took the same thing for
granted. That thing was America’s liberal democracy, and more specifically individual
freedom. That was the common good they all wished to defend and cultivate. Norris,
Truett, and Mullins were thus anti-Catholic, then Norris came to view the communist
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threat as so immense that he dropped his anti-Catholicism in favor of co-belligerency
with the Pope. Moderate Southern Baptists, like most other Protestants, continued being
anti-Catholic in their defense of the separation of church and state. Against the threats of
Catholicism, Communism, or, in the case of Dunn, the Christian Right, all these Southern
Baptists defended individual rights and democracy, which they believed were the sine
qua non of Baptist history and the common good of American democracy.
Let’s now push forward to the late twentieth-century and the Southern Baptist
conservative evangelicals. In particular, let’s look at Richard Land, who I’ll use to
illustrate the Southern Baptist conservative evangelical approach to the common good.
Richard Land and the Conservative Evangelicals
Like Norris, Land also grew up in Texas, in Houston. He then went to Princeton
University for his undergraduate degree, New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary for
his M.Div. and these very halls of Regents Park College, Oxford University for his
doctorate in Baptist history. He seemed a prime candidate for a position at one of the
moderate Southern Baptist Seminaries, but because of his own theological conservatism,
and perhaps other factors more personal, he ended up identifying with the conservative or
fundamentalist wing of Southern Baptist life. He landed at Criswell College in the mid1970s. Somewhere in his move outside southern and Southern Baptist culture, probably
during his years at Princeton and Oxford, he encountered Francis Schaeffer and Carl F.
H. Henry and began to identify with the larger evangelical world outside Southern Baptist
life. As most of you know, when the conservatives took control of the SBC, Land was
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named executive director of the denomination’s Christian Life Commission. Then, when
the SBC defunded James Dunn and the Baptist Joint Committee, the Christian Life
Commission took on religious liberty issues as well as ethical concerns, and changed its
name to the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. Land has emerged over the past
twenty years as one of the most visible and influential spokespersons of the Christian
Right. While not quite as high profile as James Dobson, Land is nevertheless consulted
by Republican Party leaders and even the president on a fairly regular basis.
On the one hand, as I have argued elsewhere, Land and the SBC conservatives see
themselves as being at war with the secularizing forces of democratic liberalism, which
helps explain why they were so opposed to James Dunn and other moderates whom they
believe side too strongly with the secular liberal emphasis on individual rights. Land and
the conservative evangelical Southern Baptists also view American culture as being
hostile to theistic positions of faith. This is true in one sense, but not in the way they
think. There are secular liberal forces in American culture that oppose faith based
comprehensive doctrines, but those hostile forces are not as representative of the whole
culture as conservatives seem to believe. If those forces were so dominate, how could we
explain Land moving prominently through the halls of Congress, appearing so regularly
in the media, all the while fielding calls from the president and his people. While
posturing as outsiders, Land and SBC conservatives are cultural insiders, at least within
one of the armies fighting the culture wars.
What is Land fighting for? If you want to know what Land believes on public
issues these days, consult his most recent book, The Divided States of America: What
Liberals and Conservatives are Missing in the God and Country Shouting Match.
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Published by Thomas Nelson, the book is something of an answer to Jim Wallis’s God’s
Politics: Why the Right Gets it Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It. These two evangelical
culture warriors of the right and left both want to claim the vital center of American
politics.
Land critiques and rejects the Christian America view of many Christian Right
activists and warns that such views can easily become idolatrous. At the same time,
however, he argues along with Truett and Mullins, that [Quote] “The First Amendment is
essentially the codification of the Baptist understanding of a free church and a free
state.”10 Fortunately, Land need not contrast this great Baptist achievement with the
views of Roman Catholics. Instead, he cites Vatican II’s Dignitatis Humanae as the
Church’s proclamation of “the right of all to give public witness to their beliefs and to
seek actively to persuade others to share them.” He even quotes extensively from the
document and glosses his quote by writing “[T]he Vatican Council is basically affirming
the Baptist viewpoint that the state must not use its power on behalf of itself, religion, or
any other authority to impose on individual religious conscience.” 11 (So, Baptists wrote
the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the Vatican II statement on religious
liberty. There’s nothing quite like Baptist triumphalism.)
Later, Land quotes Walter Shurden’s view that “Soul freedom is the historic
Baptist affirmation of the inalienable right and responsibility of every person to deal with
God without the imposition of creed, the interference of clergy, or the intervention of
civil government.”12 Land then equates soul freedom with American religious liberty,
and counts America’s soul freedom as part of American exceptionalism. “America’s
uniqueness as a nation founded upon the concept of soul freedom is at the heart of why
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this country is different from all others.”13 Land hardly differs from Truett and Mullins
when he argues for the way in which Baptist views were written into the U.S.
Constitution, and he uses this as a basis for his support of an activist American foreign
policy based explicitly on American exceptionalism. Like George Bush, Land believes
that because America has been uniquely blessed with abundance and with freedom, the
nation has an obligation to foster freedom around the world.
Land makes a brief effort to distinguish between soul freedom and the liberal
view of individual autonomy when he writes, “Liberals’ most prominent value tends to be
personal freedom. Their ultimate value is often individual autonomy. This is the fatal
blind spot of the boomer generation: the presumption that they have the right to do
whatever they please, whenever they want, with whomever they want, and nobody else
has any right to judge them for it because it’s nobody’s business but theirs.”14
Land obviously believes there is a basis for judging the actions of others, and this
does distinguish soul freedom from individual autonomy—somewhat. But me mentions
the difference almost in passing. This is hardly a criticism, however, given that the
moderates who have touted soul freedom so prominently in the past century have done so
little to distinguish it from American freedom and democracy. Land believes his actions
have consequences for others, and he quotes John Donne (not James Dunn) and the
famous saying “no man is an island.” Beyond that, in a book about how Christians ought
to be involved publicly, he doesn’t develop in theological detail how we should form our
beliefs. But, to be fair, the problem isn’t just that Land has failed to locate an authority
for spiritual formation outside the individual; the problem is that all Baptist thinkers
combined over the past century have done so little to tell us how we are to form beliefs
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and practices that differ in any significant way from the American notion that we are all
free to make up our own minds about everything. I’ll bet that Land, like virtually all
Baptist seminarians of his generation, read Axioms while in seminary. And it’s just as
likely that at some point in his training some moderate suggested that, “Nobody but Jesus
gonna tell me what to believe.”
The progressive dissenters
I’ll say much less about the progressive dissenters than the others, and, as I said at the
beginning today, I’ll be following largely David Stricklin’s book A Genealogy of
Dissent. Notice that thus far we have Norris who began his career as an insider then
chose to become an outside dissenter on the right; Land started as a right-wing outsider—
a dissenter on the right—then became an insider when his group took control of the SBC;
and Truett and Mullins, who were ever the quintessential insiders. Stricklin’s dissenters
were left-wing outsiders. Existing on the fringes of Southern Baptist life, they chose
intentionally the posture of the prophet. Unlike the conservative dissenters such as Land,
they harbored no desire to take over the denomination and wouldn’t have known what to
do with it if they had.
One can argue that in the pre-civil rights South in which the dissenters were
reared and trained, churches were bound together by accidents of race, class, and custom.
Charles Marsh makes this point in God’s Long Summer in a chapter on First Baptist,
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Jackson’s pastor Douglas Hudgins. Marsh traces this defective conception of the church
directly to Mullins’s theology of soul competency.
Hudgins was in many ways the typical big-city Southern Baptist pastor. In the
face of the violence against Civil Rights workers in the early sixties, he argued that the
gospel had nothing to do with social or political questions because the gospel dealt only
with individuals and their direct experiences with God. Even when the local Jewish rabbi
pled with Hudgins to speak out against the bombing of the Jackson synagogue, Hudgins
refused to intervene. When the rabbi’s home was bombed a few weeks later, Hudgins
finally made a passing remark that no one should bomb another man’s home (duh), just
before launching into his exposition of a scriptural text—one that no doubt related to an
individual’s relationship to Jesus.
Soul competency for Hudgins meant that each individual had to deal directly with
God with no intermediary, the corollary of which was that there was no corporate
expression of community beyond the church as a collection of transformed individuals
bringing together their solitary encounters with God.15 And what will hold these
individuals together in Christian community? As Marsh puts the case, all that is left are
race, class, and custom around which to form some a sense of community. There can be
no mystical “body of Christ,” or any other theologically thick community. Marsh alludes
to Harold Bloom’s critique of Mullins. In his book The American Religion, Bloom
interprets Mullins’s theology as meaning that the interiority of the solitary encounter with
God precedes all other forms of authority, certainly that of the church, and perhaps even
the authority of scripture.16
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Stricklin makes it clear that in some ways white Southern Baptist dissenters such
as Walter Nathan Johnson and those he influenced, especially Martin England and
Clarence Jordan, attempted to develop a conception of the church that had been missing
in typical Southern Baptist congregations such as First Baptist, Jackson. Johnson,
England, and Jordan argued precisely this point: that the typical Southern Baptist had a
defective understanding of Christian community. England characterized Johnson as
being obsessed with the way that Baptist churches “had missed the mark on what it meant
to be church [because a] class church . . . of only well-to-do people . . . was a denial of
the basic spirit and teachings of Jesus.”17 That was England paraphrasing Johnson.
England and Jordan attempted to develop a Christian community that would be a living
witness against segregation, discrimination, and, perhaps most importantly, against the
typical Baptist church that was based on race, class, and custom.
I want to suggest that there was a sense in which Stricklin’s dissidents were
working against the common good—at least as it was understood at the time. The South,
as we all know, was an organic, hierarchical society based on race, class, and custom.
Everyone benefited by learning his or her place and staying in it. The common good was
the maintenance of this organic society. One thinks of the film footage of Governor
George Wallace in an automobile heading to the University of Alabama in 1964 to try to
stop the integration of the university. As he rides to his destiny with history, the camera
catches him muttering, “Segregation’s just as good for the blacks as it is the whites.”
“Sweet Home Alabama, where the skies are blue, and the governor’s true.” There are
countless examples.
21
This organic hierarchy of race, class, and custom provided southern society with
its peace and stability. The dissidents were met with violent resistance precisely because
the message of the Civil Rights movement, the message that segregation was sinful and
had to go, directly threatened the very fabric of southern life. The churches were part of
that fabric. They were, in fact, not much more than voluntary societies dedicated to the
preservation of what held southern culture together. Southern Baptist dissidents who
insisted on racial integration within the community of Christ and within the larger social
community were working against the common good as commonly understood by white
southerners. In this sense, they were Christian, but they were not good citizens.
One of the interesting dynamics that Stricklin covers is the tension and even
hostility between Christian Life Commission executive director Foy Valentine and the
dissidents. Valentine was a product of the dissident network, having been heavily
influenced by Clarence Jordon. Valentine chose the path of the prophetic insider,
however, attempting to steer the denomination in the direction of racial integration. Part
of Valentine’s critique of the dissidents was: First, that they were ineffective dreamers
who really didn’t care if they were ever successful in changing the denomination.
Second, he accused them of not having paid their dues within the SBC. He contrasted the
dissidents to fellow insider T.B. Maston, the renowned ethicist at Southwestern
Seminary. Maston, Valentine argued, had paid the price by attending prayer meetings,
writing denominational Training Union guides, and so forth. He was a denominational
loyalist and therefore carried authority among Southern Baptists. The dissidents, by
contrast, could be easily dismissed as outsiders no one needed to listen to. Third,
22
Valentine criticized the dissidents for being enamored with the North, where many of
them had received their education.
What I want to point out is that the standard that Valentine applied to the
dissidents was the effectiveness or success standard. They could not effectively or
successfully influence the denomination because they were outsiders—outsiders to their
denomination, and, as illustrated by Valentine’s charge that they were enamored with the
North, outsiders to their larger culture. This is a telling criticism—not of the dissidents,
but of Valentine. The idea of being an outsider—that is being separate from the
culture—would seem a biblical prerequisite for the church. Moreover, the standard for
the church is faithfulness, not effectiveness or success. Even effectiveness in moving
one’s culture toward a common good that would include all people, not just whites, is
secondary to faithfulness to Christ. I don’t know enough about Clarence Jordon to make
definitive statements, but it seems that at Koinonia Farms, folks cared a good bit less than
Valentine whether they were being effective or successful in reshaping the culture. If
I’ve read the situation correctly, they were trying to live out the gospel in faithful
community, in part to stand as a witness for Christ. A happy byproduct may have been
that they helped reshape the southern notion of the common good, but I don’t think this
was their primary goal. It may well be that promoting the common good is like
happiness—best accomplished when that is NOT what one is seeking, but is rather a
byproduct of living as dissenters from the commonly understood common good, faithful
to the gospel’s call to be the church.
As I said at the beginning, I began working on this address thinking it likely that
all four types of Baptists I’m identifying sought to foster some notion of the common
23
good. I’m willing to concede now that there may have been a difference between the first
three types who pretty thoroughly confused Baptist identity with cultural and even
national ways, at least at some points, and Stricklin’s dissenters who may have gotten
closer to a conception of Christian community that was distinct from cultural definitions
of the common good. (Did I mention there was suppose to be a question mark at the end
of my title? Printer problem, I suppose)
Still, however, I wonder if we tracked Stricklin’s genealogy forward to some of
the most progressive Southern Baptist churches today we would find that they moved
from Civil Rights to women’s rights to gay rights with such a straight line trajectory and
so little consideration of theology that it seems likely that faithfulness as a community of
believers has been superseded by a commitment to the rights of individuals as solitary
dissenters. Sound familiar?? The echo of Truett and Mullins?? In short, a community
bound together by race, class, and custom, has been replaced by a community held
together by underdeveloped notions of dissent, the result being that culture is still calling
the shots. If traditional culture does one thing, the dissenters do the opposite, or perhaps
if progressive culture goes one direction, the dissidents go with it in order to dissent
against the Southern Baptist traditionalists, who are then characterized as being bound by
culture. This tendency to let the culture define where one stands is in many ways similar
to the SBC conservative evangelicals who, being as they are uneasy in Babylon (huh,
huh), almost instinctively do the opposite of what they see as the secular cultural norm.
Perhaps what we’re seeing here is a perennial tendency in Christian history to
either dominate the culture and live triumphally within it, or if that is not possible to
develop a sub-culture of dissent and live triumphally there. In either case there seems a
24
powerful temptation to create a common good—dominant or dissenter—then serve that
common good by allowing the accidents of the culture to be the stuff of community. At
this point in my life, I’ve come to believe that this difficulty in resisting the temptation to
create a culture or subculture and live triumphally in it, is a perennial problem that we
will never overcome. It is THE struggle for all who attempt to be the church.
A New Baptist Covenant
The looming Baptist Covenant is a good example of what happens when a people travels
down the road of closely identifying the ways of God (or at least Baptist history) with the
ways of their culture. The Baptist Covenant, of course, is not organized along lines of
race, class, and custom. Rather, it is organized around the opposites of these cultural
accidents. The themes of the plenary sessions for the January 2008 meeting are: Unity in
Seeking Peace with Justice; Unity in Bringing Good News to the Poor; Unity in
Respecting Diversity; Unity in Welcoming the Stranger; Unity in Setting the Captive
Free. One wonders if this so-called Baptist Covenant convocation—meeting as it is on
the eve of the New Hampshire Primary—is political, not theological or even
ecclesiological. How easily will “Unity in seeking peace with justice” be translated into
opposition to the War in Iraq; “Unity in Bringing good news to the poor” translated into
support for government programs for those in poverty; “Unity in respecting diversity”
translated into support for a particular understanding of the separation of church and
state; “Unity in welcoming the stranger” translated into particular positions on
immigration; and “unity in setting the captive free” into—I really have no idea, but I if
25
this were a Christian Right gathering “unity inn stetting the captive free” would, no
doubt, mean freeing the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein.
These are all good causes, and politically I’m pretty much in step with those who
will meet in the Baptist Covenant meeting in January. Still, it seems to me a real sign of
trouble when a denomination of Christians can no longer rally together around biblical or
theological notions such as a triune God as manifest uniquely in the person of Jesus
Christ, experienced through salvation by faith, and baptism into the body of believers that
becomes the transcendent as well as earthly alternative to all other ways of organizing
ourselves as human beings. It seems a clear sign of theological impoverishment when the
accidents of politics are what we really have in common as REAL Baptists, as opposed to
those other Baptists of the Christian Right. Although the themes of the Baptist Covenant
meeting in January are biblical on their face, I’m suggesting that given the history I’ve
outlined today, those concerns will become particular political and cultural positions
pretty easily. In short, it will take a heroic effort for the leaders to keep the meeting nonpolitical, let alone non-partisan. This is especially so because the lead figures, Jimmy
Carter and Bill Clinton, are active and vocal partisans of the Democratic Party. If the
leaders cannot succeed in this nearly impossible task, the Baptist Covenant will be little
more than an alternative to the politics of the Christian Right and the Southern Baptist
Convention.
Conclusion
26
In short, and in conclusion, the Southern Baptist habit of identifying Baptist democracy
and liberal democracy dies hard when there is an overdeveloped tendency to see a social
problem and act and an underdeveloped notion of resisting the activist tendency in order
to carefully consider the deeper theological basis for how we practice community and
relate to the culture around us. Noll said that “the tendency of evangelicals when they
see a problem is to act; for the sake of the evangelical mind, that tendency must be
suppressed.” I’m suggesting that the tendency of Southern Baptists in the twentieth
century was to promote the common good of American or southern culture, or to develop
a dissenter culture and then promote its good. For the sake of Baptist identity this
tendency to build and promote cultural concerns by touting individualism, democracy,
freedom, and dissent should be suppressed and then superseded by a deeper
contemplation of what it means to be the church, and even more by Christian practices
carried out in a community of worship.
1
Mark Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans,
1994), 243.
Canipe, 233; George Truett, “God’s Call to America,” in God’s Call to America (New Y ork: George H.
Doran Company, 1923), 19.
3
Canipe, 233-34 and 237; George Truett, “The Prayer Jesus Refused to Pray,” in Follow Thou Me
(Nashville: The Sunday School Boar of the Southern Baptist Convention, 1032), 43.
4
Canipe, 244; George Truett, “Baptist and Religious Liberty,” reprinted in Baptist History and Heritage 33
(Winter 1998), 82.
5
Canipe, 191; E.Y. Mullins, “ Baptists in the Modern World,” Review and Expositor 8 (1911): 348.
6
Canipe, 203-206; E. Y. Mullins, The Axioms of Religion, 185.
7
Canipe, 207; Mullins, The Axioms of the Christian Religion, (Philadelphia: Judson Press, 1908), 207.
8
Canipe, 208; Mullins, Axioms, 255.
9
Canipe, 176.
10
Richard Land, The Divided States of America (Nashville, Tennessee: Thomas Nelson, 2007), 125.
11
Land, 125.
12
Quoted in Land, 214.
13
Land 216.
2
27
14
Land, 230.
Charles Marsh, God’s Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton
University Press, 1997), 109.
16
Marsh, 110; See Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992).
17
England characterizing Johnson as quoted in David Stricklin, A Genealogy of Dissent: Southern Baptist
Protest in the Century (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 57.
15