Robert Downen’s superb article about Paul Pressler in the May issue of Texas Monthly may not have covered new ground. We are well aware of the tawdry beginnings of the conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention as well as the moral failings of the principal architects, Pressler and Paige Patterson. But Downen’s retrospective now, nearly five decades later, provides an occasion to assess the damages and reckon with what was lost.
The “origin” story of the takeover has long been lodged in Southern Baptist lore. Pressler, an appellate judge in Texas, worried that the Southern Baptist Convention had been hijacked by theological liberals, citing as evidence the 1961 publication of The Message of Genesis, by Ralph Elliott, a professor at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.
Employing the historical-critical method, Elliott argued that the stories in Genesis, including the creation accounts, need not be considered literally true. They were “symbolic stories” that carried important meaning even if they were not intended as history.
Paul Pressler
For Pressler and other Southern Baptist conservatives, the publication of this book—by a Southern Baptist imprint, no less—signaled a slippery slope into theological liberalism, and it had to be stopped.
This led to the famous meeting between Pressler and Patterson, then a seminary student at New Orleans Theological Seminary, at Café du Monde in New Orleans. Pressler later characterized the meeting as “a time for ones who had experienced liberalism in the Southern Baptist Convention to share their mutual concerns about the effect this was having on the proclamation of the gospel.”
My eyebrows always twitch a bit when I hear about “liberalism” in the Southern Baptist Convention, but Pressler and Patterson were convinced it had to be rooted out. Studying denominational documents, they determined that if conservatives elected a succession of conservative presidents, the aggregate of their appointments to denominational agencies and especially seminary boards would eventually root out the dreaded “liberalism” in the Southern Baptist Convention.
By 1979, they were ready to strike. Conservatives arrived by the busload at the annual meeting in Houston, casting their votes for Adrian Rogers, pastor of Bellevue Baptist Church in Memphis. A dozen or so presidents later—all conservatives; they tend to dislike the term fundamentalist—the Southern Baptist Convention had all but purged itself of any progressives in positions of leadership.
The central issue was the old Protestant bugaboo of biblical inerrancy, the notion that the Bible was without error in the original manuscripts (none of which have survived). But the newly empowered conservatives then took aim at women’s ordination, conveniently ignoring the fact that ordination historically has been vested in local congregations, not the denomination.
Baptist Battles by Nancy Ammerman
Those who endured what Nancy Ammerman has called “Baptist Battles” carry deep scars to this day. Seminary professors and agency staff members were fired. When pastors retired or left their pulpits, freshly minted seminarians, schooled in the new conservative “orthodoxy,” took over. Some congregants whose families had supported a local church for generations no longer felt welcome in their own congregations. Talented female pastors were shoved aside.
As a historian of American religion, I can think of only one other instance of a major religious group choosing to deplete its ranks in pursuit of doctrinal purity.
In the middle of the eighteenth century, the Quakers of Pennsylvania chose to abandon politics in an attempt to reclaim their pacifist identity. The Quaker Party dominated the Pennsylvania Assembly, but that entailed voting for military appropriations during the Seven Years’ War, which violated the Quaker conscience. So the Society of Friends chose to cull its ranks and abandon politics.
The new leadership of the Southern Baptists, however, did no such thing. Instead, they cast their lot with the newly minted Religious Right, even though it entailed abandoning one of their own, Jimmy Carter, in the 1980 presidential election.
But aside from the personal toll, the biggest loss in the conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention is incalculable. The new conservative leadership abandoned one of the pillars of the Baptist tradition: liberty of conscience and the separation of church and state.
The heedless rush to support taxpayer funding for religious education and the posting of religious sentiments in public places is utterly opposed to Roger Williams’s imperative to protect the integrity of the faith by shielding the “garden of the church” from the “wilderness of the world.”
Whereas Americans could once count on Southern Baptists to patrol the wall of separation between church and state, that important task now falls to others. Defenders of religious liberty can still find Baptist allies—but no longer in the same places or with the same vast cultural reach as the Southern Baptist Convention.
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An Episcopal priest, Balmer is John Phillips Professor in Religion at Dartmouth College and the author of more than a dozen books, with commentaries appearing in newspapers across the country. He is a contributing correspondent at Good Faith Media.