The Southern Baptist Wars

What can we learn from the conservative victory?

In the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), The Controversy is over. This does not mean that all the fighting has stopped, much less that the belligerents on either side have suddenly been seized with the spirit of genuine reconciliation. Far from it. Ecclesiastical wars, like those fought with real bullets and bombs, leave lingering scars that only time and a new generation of noncombatants can begin to heal. For this shalom we must wait.

Still, as everyone on all sides now admits, the battle for control of America’s largest Protestant denomination has resulted in a decisive shift in direction for the SBC—a shift called takeover by moderates, and turnaround by conservatives. This process is not likely to be reversed in the foreseeable future, despite continuing skirmishes between incumbents and insurgents, and guerrilla maneuvers played out at all levels of local Southern Baptist politics.

The recent conflict in the SBC is part of the wider struggle of American evangelicals to come to grips with the crisis of modernity and can only properly be understood in that larger context. Of course, there are many other aspects of The Controversy that can be and have been studied with much profit: its “Southern” dimension, its demographic make-up, its populist appeal, its political configurations, and so on. However, when viewed against the background of recent religious history, one fact stands out above all others: For only the second time in this century, a major American denomination veering from its historic, evangelical roots toward a mainline Protestant posture has changed its trajectory. (The first involved the Missouri Synod Lutherans.) It is little wonder, then, that sociologists of religion would seize on a phenomenon that even a close reading of American denominational history would not have prepared one to predict. This change has been as sweeping and dramatic as it was unexpected and, I would argue, has been a midcourse correction necessary for the health and survival of the denomination.

Nevertheless, the settlement of The Controversy has prompted a profound crisis of identity for Southern Baptists in this last decade of the twentieth century. Moderates, as defenders of the latest Lost Cause, must now decide whether they can find a place to stand in the new order or else seek alternative alignments. For most of them, secession is not an option; but how to function within a fractured family is not clear, either.

Conservatives have even greater worries: Can they survive their own success? Can they forge a new consensus that will include most, if not all, Southern Baptists who really do stand with them on the crucial issues, and can they do so without replicating the very system their movement was launched to correct? The replacement of one set of bureaucrats with another doth not a reformation make. As Southern Baptists move from an era of conflict into one of reintegration, a host of identity issues needs continued attention.

Roots Of The Controversy

Issues of Southern Baptist identity, of course, are not limited to the recent squabbles. In 1900 the Southern Baptist Sunday School Board, then only nine years old, published a remarkable collection of essays entitled Baptist Why and Why Not. In the opening paragraph, J. M. Frost declared: “Baptists are one in contending for the faith; one in their history and the heritage of their fathers; one in their purpose to preach the gospel of the grace of God among all nations.” The chapter titles of the book have a polemical ring: “Why Baptist and Not Campbellite,” “Why Immersion and Not Sprinkling,” “Why Missionary and Not ‘Omissionary.’ ”

The purpose of the volume was to provide a “campaign book,” a tool for the promotion of denominational interests such as Baptist schools, missionary endeavors, and benevolent concerns. While recognizing diversity among themselves on many ancillary matters, the 25 contributors to this volume (including college presidents, seminary professors, leading pastors, and missions strategists), stood together on a common doctrinal foundation:

We accept the Scriptures as an all-sufficient and infallible rule of faith and practice, and insist upon the absolute inerrancy and sole authority of the Word of God. We recognize at this point no room for division, either of practice or belief, or even sentiment.

Church leaders appended a “Declaration of Faith” to the volume, incorporating many of the articles that would later be adopted in the Baptist Faith and Message statement of 1925. It clarified a number of important doctrinal issues, asserting, to give one example, that Scripture has God as its author, salvation as its end, and truth without any mixture of error for its matter. Also in 1925 the convention provided a confessional and organizational basis for consolidation and expansion by approving the Cooperative Program, a unified plan for distributing contributions to various agencies and boards of the church.

What About “Indoctrination”?

While there has never been absolute uniformity among Southern Baptist congregations, the denomination entered the twentieth century remarkably united in its basic mission and purpose. Three developments during the early decades of the century further solidified the Southern Baptist synthesis: the refusal to join the emerging ecumenical movement, the containment of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, and the construction of an impressive denominational bureaucracy supported by a systematic plan of finance. These were not isolated strands but rather interwoven threads of the developing Southern Baptist consciousness. Each reinforced the other and each provided a common enemy (or enemies) to oppose the “bastard” Union Movement, as one denominational executive described it; theological liberalism, safely sequestered in the northern denominations; and ecclesiastical separatism, epitomized by Texas-based J. Frank Norris, whose guerrilla tactics against the denominational “machine” were more of a nuisance than a genuine threat.

Two trends of the 1950s portended ill for the conflicts of the next three decades: the introduction of historical-critical studies in Baptist seminaries and colleges, and the dominance of a program-centered approach to ministry. The success of the latter imbued SBC leaders with a sense of invincibility as they steered the denomination in an increasingly progressivist direction during the 1960s and 1970s, while conservatives picked up the term inerrancy as a rallying cry. As Southern Baptist sociologist Nancy Ammerman notes, the moderate agenda was camouflaged by an amorphous appeal to “freedom” because moderates knew that they could not rally majority support for their progressivist ideas. The underlying theological basis of the conflict was seldom explored. Moderates largely denied that there was a theological rationale for the conflict, while conservatives so fixated on inerrancy that other doctrinal areas were ignored or pushed to the side.

By the early sixties, Southern Baptists had developed a style of denominational life characterized by theological fuzziness. This was the result of a long process of slippage going back at least 50 years. An illustration of how far things had moved is provided by quoting a statement of George McDaniels, a leading pastor and later president of the SBC, issued in 1919:

In other decades Baptists were better indoctrinated than they are today. The environment in which they lived, sometimes inimical to them, was conducive to the mastery of their principles. Of later years, a tendency to depreciate doctrinal discussion is easily discernible, and young converts particularly are not rooted and grounded in the faith. Modern nonchalance acts as if it made little difference what one believes.

By the 1960s the word indoctrinated, which McDaniels used in a positive sense, had taken on a sinister connotation for many Baptists. Whatever it was, they didn’t want it done to them!

Earlier generations had been nurtured on the classic Baptist catechisms of Spurgeon, John Broadus, and J. P. Boyce. Later they were nurtured in the solid instruction of B.Y.P.U. (Baptist Young People’s Union). Gradually, however, these models of explicit Christian education yielded to the educational philosophy of John Dewey. The discourse of conviction gave way to the religion of civility. Within polite circles of the Baptist establishment, to ask about one’s theology was taken as a gauche intrusion into the realm of privacy. It was almost like inquiring into the method of birth control one used: Everyone assumed its presence, but it was hardly relevant to the discussion of the practice of religion. Even conservatives who were still sure they “believed the Bible” were often woefully ignorant of its contents and even less aware of the rich doctrinal heritage to which they were heirs. Thus Billy Bob Baptist, as a recent SBC president has dubbed the typical preacher boy (preacher girls in those days were beyond the structures of plausability), was totally unprepared for the vigorous assault on the traditional understanding of Scripture he encountered at—of all places!—his home-state Baptist college and his pastor’s recommended seminary. This repeated saga reinforced the sense of mistrust, alienation, and betrayal that would eventually issue in revolution. When later, in the midst of crisis, denominational leaders tried to reassure an aroused constituency that all was well, vast numbers thought they had reason to know better.

It would be a gross mistake, of course, to assume that SBC seminaries in the sixties and seventies were suddenly hi led with death-of-God liberals, and even more preposterous to imagine that mainstream Southern Baptists were seduced by the theology of the secular city. Most Southern Baptists, then as now, remained strongly committed to a conservative, evangelistic expression of faith. What did occur, however, was a discernible loosening of these commitments. The educational and bureaucratic elites who set policies and guided the boards and agencies of the convention developed an increasing preoccupation with a mainline Protestant agenda. This trend was subtle and usually held in check by a pragmatic concern not to overturn the apple cart. But it manifested itself in various ways: a one-way ecumenism to the left, a flirtation with the faddish theologies of the day, an uncritical dissemination of historical-critical presuppositions concerning the Bible, an intellectualist disdain for the kind of piety held dear by the grassroots constituency, an affinity for left-of-center politics, and a covert prochoice advocacy on abortion. Most Southern Baptists would have been outraged to know that the head of their Christian Life Commission during this period was supportive of the Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights.

The SBC’s structure allowed for the insulation of elites from the great majority of church members. More and more ordinary Baptists in local churches sensed a growing gap between themselves and their church leaders in Nashville and Atlanta. To be sure, many of the Baptist bureaucrats of this era were sincere and devout, if somewhat colorless, persons. Only a few were true liberals in the theological sense. Many others, however, were not a little embarrassed by the “fundamentalist” roots of their own religious past. They had left the sawdust trail long ago. Now they were eager to nudge their buoyant if backward denomination along the same path of liberation they had found so emancipating themselves. Alert to all the evils of Baptist fundamentalism, of which they were true cultured despisers, they were theologically naïve and ill-prepared to believe any warnings of a leftward drift within the denomination.

The Toppling Of The Moderates

In most mainline denominations, evangelicals voted against the new culture with their pocketbooks and their feet. They simply quit giving and going—hence the precipitous decline suffered by these church bodies over the past 30 years. Some Southern Baptists also became frustrated and gave up on their denomination. A few of these were bright progressives on the Radical Left fringe—the “missing generation,” as Ammerman calls them. There was also a “missing generation” on the Right—those who became independent Baptists and non-Baptist evangelicals, having concluded either that the convention was hopelessly lost to liberalism or had become increasingly irrelevant to wider evangelical concerns.

Most Southern Baptist conservatives, however, decided to stay and vote with their votes. Ironically, the very watchwords of the moderate movement—freedom, soul competency, the priesthood of all believers—provided a basis, through the democratic governance of a voluntary association, for the toppling of the moderate regime.

Thus, at precisely the time a significant segment of SBC leadership was being drawn into the orbit of mainline concerns, more and more Southern Baptists were beginning to take notice of the common ground they shared with other conservative Christians outside the SBC. This was not an entirely new development. As far back as 1942, Southern Baptist leaders R. G. Lee and John W. McCall had been active in the founding of the National Association of Evangelicals. More than anything else, the ministry of Billy Graham had made large numbers of Southern Baptists aware of and receptive to the wider world of American evangelicalism. Meanwhile, on college campuses across the nation, thousands of Southern Baptist students were being converted and discipled through the work of Campus Crusade for Christ, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, the Navigators, and other evangelical ministries against which the blander Baptist Student Union approach could hardly compete.

Rather than cultivating closer ties between Southern Baptists and other evangelicals, some moderate leaders responded with a standoffishness that reinforced old stereotypes of isolationism and parochialism. Typical of this attitude was the reaction of an SBC agency head to the press’s dubbing of Jimmy Carter as a “Southern Baptist evangelical” during the 1976 presidential campaign:

We are not evangelicals. That’s a Yankee word. They want to claim us because we are big and successful and growing every year. But we have our own traditions, our own hymns and more students in our seminaries than they have in all of theirs put together.

Despite such efforts to equate “Northern” evangelicalism with Yankee imperialism, the 1970s and 1980s were marked by increasing fellowship and cooperation between Southern Baptists and evangelicals. The writings of inerrantist scholars such as Carl F. H. Henry, Harold Lindsell, John R. W. Stott, J. I. Packer, and Francis Schaeffer, among others, began to circulate among Southern Baptist pastors. Such writings were critical in focusing the widespread, populist concern over the erosion of scriptural authority. Schaeffer in particular had a personal, shaping influence on Paige Patterson, one of the principal architects of the conservative resurgence in the SBC. When The Controversy finally burst into full blaze with the election of Adrian Rogers in 1979, Southern Baptist conservatives, or at least their leaders, were well aware of other recent “battles for the Bible”—some “won” (Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod), others “lost” (Fuller Theological Seminary).

In retrospect, it appears that the moderates had only one chance to stem the tide. Had they from the start recognized and responded proactively to the legitimate concerns raised by the conservative movement—rather than merely reacting defensively to the raucous and sometimes distasteful way in which such concerns were aired—they might have seen a more balanced and harmonious resolution of the conflict achieved. Later in The Controversy, in the 1980s, when they did try something of this approach, it turned out to be too little, and much too late.

Instead, the moderate movement itself was deeply divided between those who saw the conservative resurgence as a benign swing of the pendulum requiring no vigorous response, and others who believed it to be a cancerous intrusion that had to be cut off.

What both wings of the moderate party failed to realize was the deeply ideological character of the conflict. For most conservatives—which is to say most Southern Baptists—The Controversy was about theology, however “political” it may all have seemed to insider moderates and curious onlookers. Students of Christian doctrine who have seen how much rested on a single iota in the fourth-century debates over homoousios and homoiousios will not be surprised that the future of the SBC came down to whether the miracles in the Bible were really miraculous and the history truly historical. As writer Richard Condon notes, “A nuance in an ideological difference is a wide chasm.”

Where did this passionate concern for doctrinal integrity come from if, as I have argued, the traditional theological consensus had already worn thin by the “acids of modernity” on the one hand, and denominational pragmatism gone to seed on the other? The concern came primarily from two sources. First, it grew out of a vestigial memory of, and intuitive loyalty to, the Baptist heritage, with its reverence for the primary icon of the tradition, the written Word of God. Second, the concern for doctrinal integrity came from the impetus of the wider evangelical resistance to new values in the culture. The conflict with culture’s pluralism led conservative Southern Baptists to look warily at mainline denominational trends and pull in evangelical reinforcment embodied in such writers as Harold Lindsell (himself a Southern Baptist) and Francis Schaeffer.

What’S Next In The Sbc

Despite the recent ascendancy of the conservatives, the SBC stands today on the brink of schism. The next several years will very likely witness the emergence of a splinter denomination guided by activist moderates who have abandoned their hopes for reforming the SBC in a mainline Protestant direction. Like Landmark Baptists and Independent Baptists, who left the convention in earlier generations, these “Free Baptists” (as they might like to be called) will continue to exist side-by-side with Southern Baptists. They will offer still another Baptist alternative on the religious landscape, much as the conservative Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) and mainline Presbyterian Church, USA (PCUSA), churches coexist in most Southern cities.

The conservative victory in the SBC will prove hollow, however, unless accompanied by genuine spiritual and theological renewal and a process of reconciliation with cooperating, Bible-believing moderates who are willing to take some theological boundaries seriously. Conservatives cannot afford to gloat in victory, or relax into the halcyon routine of a new establishment. For, as sociologist Peter Berger points out, the very social and political successes of evangelical movements are frequently their undoing, as they are sucked into the ambience of a culture inimical to their most basic purpose and ideals. Perhaps the greatest lesson of the past 30 years is this: We are able to understand the present and illuminate the future only to the extent that we do not forsake the warranted wisdom of the past.

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