A Texas Baptist Power Struggle: The Hayden Controversy (review)

At a time when the Texas Baptists are split among themselves, Early hopes that by taking the reader back to a time a century ago when the Baptists were split among themselves he might provide a caution to the contemporary Baptists about the risks that they are taking. To caution contemporary Baptists, Early reconstructs the Hayden controversy in all its intricacy. He is the first to do so. Although earlier authors have dealt with various aspects of the dispute between the Dallas-centered Hayden and the Waco-centered reformers, A Texas Baptist Power Struggle is the first effort to collect all the archives and newspapers into a coherent story. Early finds that the earlier perceptions of the Hayden controversy are inaccurate or incomplete.

So what was the Hayden controversy? Disputes over doctrine and organization and politics split Texas Baptists. What's controversial about that? Disagreement is common to all religions. Catholics excommunicate their dissenters; Baptists form new denominations. In late-nineteenth-century Texas there were five separate Baptist organizations. Southern Baptists were trying to come to grips with modern organizational forms (not to be confused with modernism as a doctrine, which the Baptists arguably haven't gripped quite yet). Some wanted to create a stronger central organization to provide for mission support and other needs more efficiently. Others, including Hayden and Landmark Baptists, opposed the centralizing tendencies. Baptist churches historically are autonomous; they send messengers, not delegates, to their annual conventions, and they do not regard the convention decisions as binding. The convention lacked even the right to unseat a messenger. The centralizers were threatening the very nature of the Baptist church.

On a more mundane level, Texas Baptists were changing. Baylor College at Independence was geographically isolated as Baptists left the coast for the center of the state. Waco College was the growing Baptist institution. Baptists split over which college—Baylor or Waco—would be the Baptist institution. And there was the matter of which privately owned newspaper would be the denominational paper—Samuel A. Hayden's in Dallas or the centralizers' in Waco.

With all that as background, according to Early, the strong-willed Hayden and a group of strong-willed men in Waco fought in convention and in the press over the future of the Texas Baptists. At one point the bitter and personal competition led to a confrontation in which one of the centralizers shot at Hayden in a rail car washroom. When the dust settled, Hayden lost the battle for control of the Baptists, was refused a seat at the state convention, and formed his own organization (which faded fairly quickly).

The story of the controversy is sometimes confusing, but Early tracks it carefully. He takes the time to explain the in-house controversies in language that a non-Baptist can follow. He does a nice job of analyzing the character of the characters involved. And he shows the consequences on institutions of personal behavior. Most important, he minimizes the doctrinal component of the Hayden controversy. He makes clear that Hayden split the church for personal reasons, and the doctrinal and political issues were secondary.

Early has a nice touch with the telling anecdote, the trivial bit at the right time. He even noticed that Landmark Baptists were identifiable by the style of their beards. And the book is well documented and nicely illustrated. This work probably will not heal the split among contemporary Texas Baptists, but it will provide a stimulating diversion for those interested in Texas Baptists, inter-city rivalries, and the ways in which the personal forms policy (the little man in history theory).