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Backlash Baptist Republicanism as Fundamentalist Reaction The most striking evidence of the strength of the New Religious Right . . . [is] the continuing shift to the right within the Southern Baptist Convention. —Jerome Himmelstein, To the Right: The Transformation of American Conservatism About 150 years ago the Mormons began moving West. They traveled by horse and wagon in parties of 30 to 40 families, leaving at intervals of two or three weeks. The first party left in early spring. At the end of every day they stopped to make camp. But before they rested, some of the men unhitched their horses from the wagons , re-hitched them to plows, and began plowing together in the prairie. They did this again the next evening and the next, and the next, until they reached Utah, leaving a chain of little fields across the prairie. Later when the next party passed through, they planted corn in the little fields, carefully covering each seed. Throughout the summer, each subsequent party tended the fields. Even the children would help to pull weeds in the cool of the evening. Sometimes , they erected scarecrows to protect the little fields. All summer they labored faithfully and diligently because they knew the winter was coming. The winter party left Illinois in October and before long the cold winds blew across the prairie out where there’s nothing between you and the North Pole but a barbed wire fence. Snow fell and covered the grass, and the horses began to starve. But the winter party found those little fields, shook the snow from the stalks, and fed the ears of corn to the horses. And they could pull one more day to the next little field, and the next, and the next. The winter party came through because others had taken a turn at the plow. —Eldred Prince, Jr., Commencement Address, Coastal Carolina University 28 2 As the second decade of the twentieth century drew to a close, in much of the United States religion had been toppled from its lofty pedestal. After being legally disestablished in the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment a century and a half before, the church was suffering a second , or cultural disestablishment.1 Whereas the official disestablishment set the church free to compete for parishioners in the marketplace of ideas among free people of free conscience, the second was a negative verdict on the church from popular culture. Indeed, the church had begun the new century in a weakened condition . America was not as religious as it had been at the end of the American Civil War only thirty-five years earlier. Unlike during the founding era or even during the sectional crisis, Americans were decidedly cool toward religion. A survey conducted of passers-by on a street in any city north of the Mason-Dixon line in the 1910s would have revealed a religious posture dramatically different from that of the last century: a large number of citizens no longer believed that earth and man were created in seven calendar days, and a shrinking ratio revered the Bible as the inspired word of God. Huge waves of immigration from predominantly Roman Catholic countries had begun to undermine the orthodox Protestant consensus as well. Politically, the campaign against rum, romanism, and rebellion had lost its potency. Then came the Great War. It is at this point we undertake a brief excursion into the political background of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), or more properly , we seek to develop a long view of the role of conservative politics in the Southern Established Church. As the opening quotation states, the final shift of the SBC to conservatism was a “striking” event. We start here to understand why. As shown in the last chapter, for a number of reasons, the South and Southern Baptists in particular have a history of being distinct from the rest of the United States religiously, culturally, and politically. In some cases, as evidenced by immigration patterns, this means that the South simply did not have the same cultural experience as the rest of the nation. This affected politics, with the South supporting the nineteenth-century anti-immigrant American (“Know-Nothing”) party2 and the twentiethcentury effort to deny Al Smith of New York, an urban Catholic “wet,” the Democratic presidential nomination.3 In some cases, however, the South experienced the same inputs, but Southern society processed them differently, making the output at variance with the rest of the country. For example, the twentieth century...

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