In the Name of the Father: The Rhetoric of the New Southern Baptist Convention (review)

In the Name of the Father: The Rhetoric of the New Southern Baptist Convention. By Carl L. Kell and L. Raymond Camp. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999; pp. xvii +176. $45.00 cloth; $20.00 paper.

This book is a sad tale of a religious tradition that lost its democratic soul in exchange for the despotism of order and purity. When I was a child living in Kentucky in the 1960s there were two things I could count on: everyone was a Democrat and my father's denomination, the highly democratic Southern Baptists, were outspoken champions of grace and religious liberty. The Southern turn to the right has made these truisms go the way of the dodo. While it was deeply racist and conservative, the South could produce Jimmy Carter, Bill Moyers, and Will Campbell, persons of progressive temperament deeply rooted in Baptist culture. In the South of my youth the Southern Baptists vigorously combated the suspected heresies of my mother's Campbellite heritage (the Churches of Christ), Pentecostals, and other sectarians outside the Baptist circle, but now the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) has turned its considerable resources inward, thrusting out suspected moderate Baptist heretics. Kell and Camp open up a world with which many readers of Rhetoric & Public Affairs will not be familiar.

Kell and Camp, clearly on the moderate side, lay out fundamentalist rhetoric and offer a biting critique. They propose that the persuasive strategy of the fundamentalists in their takeover of the SBC had three "rhetorics." First is a fundamentalist rhetoric that is a complex of arguments that sets fundamentalists "against any who would act as if some part of the Scripture was merely symbolic or poetic" (28). Second is "a rhetoric of inerrancy," another set of "arguments based on various scriptures that affirm the Bible as totally accurate" (28). Lastly is "the rhetoric of exclusion," which is a set of arguments from scripture designed to exclude women (who sought preaching positions), gays, and lesbians.

Drawing on Burke, Weaver, and Bormann, the authors weave a theoretical and tightly argued analysis of these three rhetorics. They argue in chapter 4 that the written rhetoric of James Draper, a key SBC president, sets out the perimeters of the inerrancy ideology. After showing the inconsistencies of his arguments, they convincingly show that inerrancy still functions as an argument from definition—what Weaver calls the best form of argument. The fundamentalists said, "If the believer cannot or will not accept such belief [inerrancy], then by definition, the believer is unqualified or unfit to be a member and exclusion is justifiable" (46). Unfortunately the moderates mistakenly assumed that the old forms of liberty and dissent based on dialogue remained effective and failed to respond with counterarguments from definition. Suddenly they found themselves defined as "heretics" and considered unworthy Baptists.

In chapter 5 the authors analyze the sermons of the SBC fundamentalist presidents as they led the takeover of the denomination, arguing that the rhetoric of inerrancy "chained out" throughout the SBC at local churches and at various state-level organizations. From 1979 to 1994, SBC presidents "produced the finest defense of pulpit sermons on a single theme that had ever been seen or heard in the 150-year history of the denomination" (61). The best sermon was Jerry Vines's 1987 "A Baptist and his Bible." They describe Vines as a combination of a "country preacher and gifted scholar of the Bible" (56). Vines captivated the convention audience for 40 minutes with "a literate, prepared text and clear purpose combined with . . . [a] folksy rhetorical style" (56-57). There were other effective but less eloquent moments, when for example, W. A. Criswell blasted "liberals" and "moderates," claiming, "A skunk by any other name still stinks."

In chapter 6 Kell and Camp call the exclusionary and victimage rhetoric aimed primarily at women "unethical." Appropriately using Burke, they...