by Bruce Bawer
In many ways the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention was a warmup for the Christian Coalition's later seizure of the Republican Party in the South. A friend who is active both in the SBC and in the Democratic Party recalls how members of the Christian Coalition took over local Republican parties. "They used to be run by country-club types," he says of the local Republican parties. "Then suddenly you'd have two buses full of people show up from a church in Selma or someplace." They would all vote as a bloc for their own candidate, "and you'd realize your candidate had lost, and it wasn't even close. It was five to one. Who were these people who had shown up out of nowhere? Economically, they were traditional Democrats. But suddenly they'd taken over the local Republican Party."
That, my friend notes, is "exactly how they took over the Southern Baptist Convention. They bused people in by the thousands. The moderates did a poor job of resisting it." One problem, he said, was that the SBC's Training Union, which used to educate Baptists in the fundamentals of Baptist freedom, had been dissolved by the time my friend, born in the sixties, was in high school. As a result, he recalls, he "never heard of the separation of church and state till I went to college." Between the 1950s and the 1980s, the SBC doubled in size. The new members, who had never learned why the separation of church and state is important, were suddenly in the majority—and moderate SBC leaders "realized that this was no longer their Convention."
Since 1979, fundamentalist candidates have won every election for SBC president; as their hold on this top job has lengthened, they have steadily gained power at all levels and used it to remove moderates from posts in the denominational hierarchy and at Baptist seminaries. (In 1996, for instance, Richard R. Melick, Jr., was forced to resign as president of Criswell College in Dallas because he didn't believe in the pre-Tribulation Rapture.) Several Baptist seminaries are now nothing more than fundamentalist indoctrination centers; at many of them, every non-inerrantist professor has been fired and every entering student is compelled to declare his belief that the Bible contains no error of any kind. In response, moderate Baptists have established new seminaries in Richmond, and at Baylor, Hardin Simmons, and Mercer Universities, and Baptist Studies programs at various non-Baptist seminaries. Another thing the fundamentalists have done is to pass resolutions at the denomination's annual conventions. One after another, these resolutions have, in the name of tradition, laid waste to the Baptist heritage of freedom.
The 1980 convention, for instance, passed a resolution declaring that it was important "to carefully preserve the doctrinal integrity of our institutions" and proclaiming the infallibility of the Bible. This resolution was a direct result of the biblical inerrancy movement of the late 1970s, which in the wake of Harold Lindsell's 1976 book The Battle for the Bible reversed a gradual drift among New Evangelicals away from insistence on inerrancy. Heading up the inerrancy movement in the SBC was its ex-president (and notorious former segregationist) W. A. Criswell, pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas and author of the book Why I Preach That the Bible Is Literally True. Though inerrancy had never been a Baptist doctrine, Criswell and other Baptist fundamentalists acted as if it had always been one.
It was also in 1980 that Bailey Smith, then SBC president, created a stir by saying that "God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew." Smith never retracted or apologized for this comment, and far from damaging his reputation among his constituency, it affirmed him as a hero. Indeed, Smith's comment might well be a good one-line test by which to divide the SBC into moderates and fundamentalists.
Further SBC resolutions tell the story:
• At the 1982 Southern Baptist Convention, a resolution was passed endorsing the unscientific doctrine of "creation science" that fundamentalists proffer as a substitute for evolution.
• Also passed in 1982 were resolutions supporting constitutional amendments to outlaw abortion and to permit voluntary prayer in public schools. Both resolutions reversed the historic Baptist opposition to government involvement in religion.
• In 1984, a resolution was passed endorsing female submission to men, "because man was first in creation and the woman was first in the Edenic fall." This represented a direct repudiation of traditional Baptist doctrine, which makes no gender distinctions.
• In 1988, two years after Criswell proclaimed that every pastor was the "ruler" of his church, a resolution was passed affirming that "the doctrine of the priesthood of the believer in no way contradicts the biblical understanding of the role, responsibility, and authority of the pastor." The resolution cited Hebrews 13: "Obey your leaders, and submit to them."
By 1989, the fundamentalists enjoyed solid control of the Convention. In 1996, still firmly in charge, they passed several resolutions that made headlines across America:
• One of those resolutions censured the Disney Company for releasing the movie Priest (about a gay clergyman), for providing healthcare coverage to its employees' same-sex companions, and for other actions that were seen as placing "promotion of homosexuality" ahead of "commitment to traditional family values."
• Another resolution—by far the longest passed that year—fulminated over the Hawaii Supreme Court's ruling that the state may be constitutionally obligated to recognize same-sex unions. "Promotion of homosexual conduct and relationships by any society," the resolution declared, "is an abominable sin calling for God's swift judgment upon any such society."
• A third resolution said that Jews "need to come to their Messiah, Jesus, to be saved" and that Southern Baptists should step up efforts at converting Jews.
Only two of the fourteen resolutions passed in 1996 seemed to take the Great Commandment into account. One was an obligatory, pro forma condemnation of the burning of black churches. (This resolution's flat language formed a stark contrast with the passion of the anti-gay resolutions.) The other, which acknowledged "the need to support hunger and relief ministries," suggested that Southern Baptist churches "set aside one Sunday each year as a time for considering the role that Baptists can and must play in meeting" the needs of the hungry and homeless. One Sunday each year, out of fifty-two! Even this resolution, though, defended concern for the poor not as an obligation under the Great Commandment but as a way of carrying out the Great Commission: "Southern Baptists recognize the vital role that meeting human needs plays in their effort to demonstrate Christ-like compassion in bringing the lost to saving faith in Jesus Christ." It is as if SBC fundamentalists wanted to be sure that no one mistook their evangelical Church of Law for a Church of Love.
And so it goes. In June 1997, citing Disney's continued "promotion of homosexuality" and in particular the coming-out episode of Ellen (a sitcom on Disney's ABC network), the SBC overwhelmingly passed a resolution calling on Southern Baptists to boycott the theme parks, TV networks, film and recording companies, and sports teams owned by Disney. "Disney," said Richard Land, president of the SBC's Christian Life Commission, "is going to find out just how many regiments and how many divisions of godly people Southern Baptists have."
Such is the current status of what Finke and Stark glowingly call "The Baptist Triumph." Their book came out in 1992, at which time they noted that "it was not until about 1986 that the traditionalists [their erroneous term for the fundamentalists] began to be a majority on most of the SBC boards, and thus there has not been much time for the Patterson-Pressler plan to produce results." Well, by 1997 the plan's results were clear: It had turned the SBC, against all its finest traditions, into America's standard-bearer of hate. Finke and Stark claim that the SBC, which has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years, has done so because it has challenged its members; on the contrary, it was the SBC's pre-takeover moderate leadership that represented a challenge to the denomination's fundamentalist majority. "When successful sects are transformed into churches," write Finke and Stark, "that is, when their tension with the surrounding culture is greatly reduced, they soon cease to grow and eventually begin to decline." But a big part of the reason
why the SBC has been so "successful" in recent years is that it has been in no tension at all with its culture—that is, the white southern underclass.
"As recently as 1990," write Finke and Stark, "nearly two thirds of self-identified Southern Baptists ... expressed firm agreement with the statement 'The Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word' and rejected the alternative 'The Bible is the inspired word of God but not everything in it should be taken literally, word for word.'" Finke and Stark approve of this vote. Yet it is utterly irrational, ignoring the plain fact that scores of biblical passages directly contradict one another. Pat Robertson has equated supposed modernist revisionism about the founding fathers' religious views with 1984, George Orwell's novel about a totalitarian dystopia in which today's newspaper is dropped "down the memory hole" so that history may be altered tomorrow. Yet to declare belief in a totally inerrant Bible is in fact the equivalent of what that novel's hero is ultimately forced to do: affirm that two plus two equal five. One is reminded of the all-powerful Party's slogan in 1984: "IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH." To Finke and Stark, and to others who defend legalistic Christianity on the sheer pragmatic grounds of its worldly "success," this is apparently what authentic religion is about: zealously embracing the "truth" of a statement about the universe that educated people recognize as false. Finke and Stark approve of this zealous embrace, and are far from alone in doing so.
Legalists aver that whole areas of learning must be avoided because they threaten faith. To believe this, of course, is to belie the notion that one's religion is in any sense "God's truth." For truth is never a threat to truth. A believer confident of the truth of his faith does not fear truth from any source, but welcomes it as a means to enhance his understanding of God's truth. Nonlegalistic Christianity, at its best, is based on the belief that there is a truth at the heart of Christianity— a truth that we have yet to fully discover, that at its deepest level can be reconciled with the truth claims of most other faiths, and that growing scientific knowledge can help bring us closer to. The best kind of nonlegalistic Christianity views knowledge as something to be embraced, not feared; reflected on, not rejected out of hand. By contrast, the faith of legalistic Christians often seems to have as its foundation an unspoken belief that religion is all really fake, and that one must consequently run from truth in fear.
For many Protestants, amazingly, the fundamentalist-run SBC is not nearly legalistic enough. In a 1994 attack on the SBC, an independent Baptist complains that the SBC is "radically ecumenical" (because it has, among other things, "conducted formal dialogue with the Roman Catholic church"); that SBC fundamentalists refuse to "separate" from moderates, as true fundamentalists would do; that SBC churches "set up deacons over God-ordained pastors"; that "women are allowed to hold leadership roles in the SBC"; that "the SBC has refused to discipline Billy Graham," a Southern Baptist, who has done "more than any other man in this generation to break down the wall between truth and error and to muddy the waters of the Gospel"; and that "the charismatic movement is working unhindered in many SBC churches." The critic's chief complaint, however, is that the SBC is permeated by "false teaching," which he defines as follows: "Any denial or questioning of the Bible is false teaching. I don't care if you call it Modernism, or Liberalism, or Neo-orthodoxy, or Neo-evangelicalism. ... If a man questions the authenticity of any portion of the Bible, that man is a heretic, and he should be marked as such and rejected from the congregation and avoided." Thus speaks the Church of Law in our time.
The year 1979, which saw the beginning of the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention, also saw the founding by Jerry Falwell of the Moral Majority. In that year, Ralph Reed has written, Falwell and other preachers "awakened the slumbering giant of the American evangelical church." Ten years later, the Moral Majority having come and gone, Reed's boss Pat Robertson founded the Christian Coalition. In the intervening years, a conflict that had come to be known as the culture wars had taken center stage in American society.
James Davison Hunter's 1991 book Culture Wars has been widely regarded as an objective depiction of that conflict. Yet Hunter's picture is seriously skewed. Central to that picture is a division of America into two ideological camps, the "orthodox" and the "progressive." His "orthodox" label would seem to correspond roughly to the same phenomenon that I designate with the word legalistic; but his characterization of that group could hardly be more different from mine. Whether Catholic or Protestant or Jewish, Hunter says, orthodoxy "is the commitment on the part of adherents to an external, definable, and transcendent authority" (his italics) which "defines, at least in the abstract, a consistent, unchangeable measure of value, purpose, goodness, and identity, both personal and collective. It tells us what is good, what is true, how we should live, and who we are."
By contrast, in progressivism "moral authority tends to be defined by the spirit of the modern age, a spirit of rationalism and subjectivism. Progressivist moral ideas tend, that is, to derive from and embody (though rarely exhaust) that spirit. From this standpoint, truth tends to be viewed as a process, as a reality that is ever unfolding." Those pro-gressivists who continue to "identify with a particular religious heritage," he writes, tend "to translate the moral ideals of a religious tradition so that they conform to and legitimate the contemporary Zeitgeist. In other words, what all progressivist worldviews share in common is the tendency to resymbolize historic faiths according to the prevailing assumptions of contemporary life." Hunter argues that such progressivism is seen in the "rejection of Biblical literalism" and the notion that "people have to interpret the Scripture for themselves."
Hunter's representation of this dichotomy is worth examining closely because it reflects a widely accepted (yet incorrect) view of religion in America. That view derives almost entirely from Religious Right propaganda, according to which the orthodox are driven by "faith" and by disciplined subordination to eternal values and unchanging truths, while the progressivists are driven by moral relativism and subjective self-indulgence. But Hunter, the author of a book on evangelical Christianity, certainly must know that most legalistic sects in this country didn't even exist a few generations ago, and, contrary to what he suggests about their devotion to eternal truths, have adjusted their theology frequently in response to "the spirit of the times"—as they did, for example, in embracing dispensational premillennialism in a reactionary backlash against modern thought. And legalists have done their share of accommodating with the Zeitgeist: Many legalistic Protestant groups that once opposed racial integration and interracial marriage on supposed religious grounds changed those views (at least publicly) when they became socially and politically untenable; many such groups have also, in practice, repudiated the biblical passages affirming slavery and enjoining women to be silent in the churches; Mormons' belief in the legitimacy of polygamy, once central to their faith, was reversed by a timely "divine revelation" when the federal government threatened to stop the practice by force.
The Roman Catholic Church, too, has repeatedly adjusted its theology in response to "the spirit of the times." During the nineteenth century, members of the educated upper classes, and men of all classes, ceased attending services in droves, leaving behind a church composed mostly of women and the undereducated. To appease those members' sentimental superstitions, the Vatican added new doctrines about the Virgin Mary, first declaring that she had been conceived without sin, and later (in 1950) professing that she had been assumed bodily into heaven; both doctrines—which, to a thinking believer, were meaningless—had their basis not in scripture but in folk piety.
Of course, Hunter's argument that a rejection of biblical literalism is a facet of "progressivism" ignores the fact that the doctrine of scriptural inerrancy is itself a relatively recent development. And even those who claim to read the Bible literally and to lead their lives according to its precepts are, in actual practice, highly selective about which parts of the Bible they live by and which they don'
t. Jesus' condemnations of wealth and war are generally ignored; so are Levitical prohibitions on eating pork, wearing mixed fabrics, and so forth. Though legalistic Christians accuse nonlegalistic Christians of selective interpretation and relativistic morality (of adjusting the Bible, in short, to suit their own lifestyles and prejudices), what is usually happening is that nonlegalists are, as the Baptist tradition puts it, reading the Bible with Jesus as their criterion, while the legalists are, 'without any philosophical consistency whatsoever, embracing those laws and doctrines that affirm their own predilections and prejudices and ignoring the rest.
Which brings us, at long last, to Pat Robertson.
* * *
9
GOD'S GENERALISSIMO