Pulpit and Politics: Clergy in American Politics at the Advent of the Millennium

8. Southern Baptist Convention

Over the past twenty years, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) has undergone a remarkable theological, organizational, and political transformation . Throughout the 1980s, theological conservatives mounted a sustained and ultimately successful campaign to “take back” the SBC from the hands of denominational bureaucrats and theological moderates . As a result, conservative militants not only came to dominate elected offices, but denominational seminaries and agencies were “purged” of those unwilling to adopt the fundamentalist theological standards imposed by the new regime (Ammerman 1990). By the mid1990s , the SBC’s organizational transformation was complete.These changes had enormous social and political ramifications. The new SBC elites were both theological traditionalists and political conservatives. The newly established leadership not only cut organizational ties with their old Baptist lobbying allies, but also created a new set of denominational structures to advance conservative values. As part of that effort, the new Baptist leadership encouraged pastors and laity to be politically active—a campaign that had considerable effect. Not only did many Southern Baptist clergy set aside old reservations about political involvement , but Baptist laity emerged as prominent leaders of the new Chapter 8 Southern Baptist Convention James L. Guth 101 Republican Right, from the state level to the United States House of Representatives. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND The Southern Baptist Convention is not only part of the biggest “family ” of American Protestants—Baptists—but is also the nation’s largest Protestant body, with more than 17 million members in 40,000 congregations . In most of the South, the SBC is considered the “established church” because, as the ancient witticism puts it, “there are more Baptists than people.” Despite its name, the SBC is not a regional body, but a national group; migration and evangelism have taken its churches to every state in the Union. This success has been remarkable, given the Baptists’ origin as religious outcasts. Emerging from the Reformation’s radical wing, colonial Baptists faced persecution, not only in Puritan New England but also in Anglican Virginia. Ardent friends of the American Revolution, Baptists later joined Madison and Jefferson in the fight for separation of church and state. Their tenets about believer’s baptism (adult, rather than infant), individual interpretation of Scripture, congregational autonomy , and a called (rather than professional) clergy were shaped by, and in turn, fostered democratic culture. In one sense, however, the SBC itself began in a less democratic vein as Southern Baptists abandoned their Yankee brethren in 1845, following a quarrel over slaveholding. This split was a harbinger of the Civil War, and unlike later schisms among Presbyterians and Methodists, the rupture has never been overcome . During the post-Civil War period of Reconstruction, Southern Baptists began a steady expansion that accelerated after World War I. The SBC centralized in the 1920s, replacing a multitude of semiautonomous agencies with one Cooperative Program in which churches merged their funds for mission agencies, seminaries, and other institutions . The Program not only strengthened mission capabilities, but fostered institutional loyalty as well, encouraging Baptists to ignore minor theological differences and work toward denominational success. The new SBC agencies planted churches, trained thousands of religious workers (by 1981, four of the five largest American seminaries were run by the SBC), and produced materials for almost every church function. Indeed, the Program’s success eliminated any need to cooperate 102 Southern Baptist Convention with other denominations, and with few exceptions, the SBC strenuously avoided such entanglements, even with like-minded conservative Protestants. During this era, Southern Baptist politics combined varying proportions of church-state separationism, premillennialist passivity, and activism on issues involving moral standards such as prohibition, gambling , and the teaching of evolution. On the whole, Southern Baptist ideology was deeply conservative, accepting the social and political status quo, a posture clearly evident in Baptist resistance to the 1960s civilrights movement. Nevertheless, by the 1970s there was evidence of change. The SBC leadership was inching toward the left on issues ranging from abortion and civil rights to the emerging environmental and women’s movements, a tendency epitomized by a Baptist Sunday-school teacher named Jimmy Carter. This shift toward the center was soon challenged, however. In the 1980s the SBC was torn internally by bitter factional warfare. After sidestepping theological quagmires for decades, the SBC faced a campaign by conservatives to eject the moderate leaders, who had supposedly allowed infiltration by theological and political liberals. After fifteen years of massive mobilization, countermobilization, strident confrontations, and tightly contested annual...