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In 1967 historian Rufus Spain published a social history of late-nineteenthcentury Southern Baptists entitled At Ease in Zion. In that book Spain showed how Southern Baptists were comfortable in a culture they had largely built. This did not necessarily mean that Southern Baptists had succeeded in making the South distinctly Christian, let alone Baptist, just that they had come to identify with southern culture and feel comfortable in their role of supporting and perpetuating its norms and mores.1 Throughout much of the twentieth century, the easy identi¤cation of Southern Baptists and southern culture persisted, so much so that church historian Martin Marty once referred to the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) as the “Catholic Church of the south.” He argued that southern Protestants in general, along with African American Protestants and Mormons, had the most intact religious subcultures in America.2 As the SBC grew, its dominance over the South only increased, especially as other mainline denominations in the region ceased to identify so closely with southern culture. And as the SBC became ever more dominant, the historic Baptist tradition of dissent was largely lost, at least at the highest levels of denominational life.3 It was left to a minority on the fringes of SBC life to carry that dissenting tradition forward. During the last quarter of the twentieth century, however, the time was largely passed when an intact Southern Baptist Convention could dominate a largely homogenous southern culture. It is neither as clear nor as easy as it was once to know exactly what it means to be a southerner or a Southern Baptist.4 In the late twentieth century, a group of Southern Baptists quite different from Spain’s subjects came to control the Southern Baptist Convention, but they do not dominate the South like their Baptist forebears of a century ago. Introduction They are not at ease in their Zion. Rather, Southern Baptist conservatives, as they prefer to be called, are convinced that American culture has turned hostile to traditional forms of faith and that the South has become more like the rest of the United States than ever before. This being the case, they are seeking to put America’s largest Protestant denomination at the head of what they perceive to be a full-scale culture war. This book is an attempt to understand and explain who Southern Baptist conservatives are, how they became evangelical culture warriors, and what they intend to do with their considerable in®uence. Although this is not a study about the Southern Baptist controversy, it is impossible to discuss SBC conservatives without some reference to the denominational clash that brought them to power. It is important at the outset, therefore, to give a brief overview of the con®ict in order to set the stage for understanding the conservatives. The SBC Controversy Historian David Morgan, in his history of the SBC controversy, asked, “Why did the idea of inerrancy capture the imagination of so many Southern Baptists in 1979 and throughout the 1980s when it failed to do so in 1969 and during the early 1970s?” His shorthand answer is “that it took time for society to react in an organized fashion to the disturbing revolutionary decisions of the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren and to the excesses of student protesters and others during the Vietnam War.”5 Morgan makes a connection between the theological controversy over the inerrancy of scripture that rocked the SBC and the changes in the culture that preceded the controversy. The current study is a more extended answer to a question very similar to Morgan’s. Put most simply, how did the conservative leaders of America’s largest Protestant denomination come to hold cultural views that put them at odds with the moderates who had preceded them in the leadership positions of their denomination? The short answer is that these leaders, as young men, moved outside the South intellectually, and in some cases even geographically, and began to adopt an evangelical critique of American culture. They became convinced that the South was no longer immune to diversity, pluralism, and secularism, and they began to mobilize. The ¤rst stage of mobilization would be within the SBC as they organized to take control of their denomination. Beginning in 1979, the Southern Baptist Convention experienced one of the most contentious and signi¤cant denominational battles in American 2 • introduction religious history. It is best known now as the Southern Baptist controversy, and it resulted...

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