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7. United We Survive: Baptist Republican Alliances
- NYU Press
- Chapter
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In the last six chapters, we have traced the unique formation of an attraction between Southern Baptists and the Republican party through that attraction’s many antecedents. Along the way, we have found that Southern Baptists embody American Religion. It is in the United States that Baptists have grown so phenomenally. Their church government is historically so democratic that they have earned the label “hyper-Americans.”1 If Southern Baptists are hyper-American, then, to coin another term, they must be “hyper-Southerners” as well. • In their rigidness and conservatism, Southern Baptists have taken a path opposite to that of their northern brethren, preaching to their Southern Zion a narrow theological message with immense social and political implications. • We have noted also that, like the Southerners they are, Southern Baptists are large in number but provincial in their consciousness. • Southern Baptists are fundamentalists, but because of their size not truly separatists. • Southern Baptists are Southern, but they are growing fastest outside the old Confederacy. • Southern Baptists are culturally strong but socially defensive. There is a “churchlike” and a “sectlike” quality to the SBC as it relates to politics.2 The convention sees itself as large and community-spirited , almost Rotarian-like, while simultaneously bearing on its shoulders a small chip of fundamentalist sectarianism. This causes both separatist and worldly strains to coexist in the SBC. • Southern Baptists are a paradox politically, filling the ranks of the fundamentalist right but without a desire to lead it. • Southern Baptists are politically conservative, but have both ultraconservative and moderate strains. United We Survive Baptist Republican Alliances 179 7 • Because the social upheavals of the North arrived in the isolated South one generation later, Southern Baptist reaction to social and political changes has taken place mostly in the last twenty-five years. • Southern Baptist elites and the rank and file have awakened from their sleep as Emerging Fundamentalist Right Republicans with the development of a two-party (faction) convention and a two-party South. This disparate picture of Baptist Republicanism has been laced with a number of overarching themes that seem appropriate to summarize and expand here. In summarizing the past and seeking to predict the future of the SBC, we arrive at two important questions: (1) Is it true that, as sociologists have predicted, groups like the SBC will struggle internally to grow and maintain a conservative political impact?3 and (2) As political scientists have already noted, is the SBC indeed finding that many of the strategies that led it from its “one-party” moderate “don’t rock the boat” moorings to militant movement Republicanism are at work in the national electorate as well?4 The first factor concerns the elites who lead the SBC, the second relates to the rank and file parishioner/voter. To Survive and Stay Right: The Strain of New SBC Alliances Sociologists think that fundamentalist religious groups like the SBC may be headed for extinction in the long run. According to James Davison Hunter, as the culture becomes more progressive, “orthodox” groups like the SBC will be hard pressed to find new members and keep old ones. Modern Americans and new generations will be turned off by the anachronistic biblicism of fundamentalists and their poorly crafted attempts to come to terms with an increasingly irreligious America.5 Taking his thinking a step further, we may also assume that in our electronic, scientific age, in which the earth revolves around the sun, humankind is descended from lower forms of life, and separation of church and state (including in public schools) is the law of the land, American culture will turn increasingly secular. This scenario seems most alarming for Southern Baptists. At fifteen million adherents, they push the envelope for growth. An added concern is the challenge of being in a rapidly growing and changing region. The 180 | United We Survive [54.221.110.87] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 14:35 GMT) statistics can be confusing here, but as we have seen, the SBC is still growing , but at a slower rate than before, and at a much slower rate than population growth. In financial terms, there is both good news and bad news. The SBC Convention Annual shows that monetary giving is down, but a recent Congregational Giving Survey funded by the Lilly Endowment shows Southern Baptists to be among the most generous givers.6 The changing South, of which the SBC is a part, presents two internal challenges for the Convention. It must defend its post...