I was baptized in 1959 at Truett Memorial Baptist Church in Hayesville, North Carolina, the birthplace of George W. Truett. My father was the pastor there, and from an early age, I was aware of Truett’s legacy.
A historical marker stood on Highway 64, right in front of the church, noting: “George W. Truett, great Baptist leader and forty-year pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas, Texas, was born three miles west of here.” There is still a camp in Hayesville named in his honor.
During those years, Hayesville occasionally sat on the periphery of larger Baptist controversies. I remember the visit of the great Baptist statesman Stewart A. Newman, who came through town with Southeastern Seminary president Sid Stealey and Olin Binkley as they traveled to Nashville during the early days of the Elliott controversy. My mother prepared a meal for them. Afterward, Newman—already uneasy about what awaited them in Nashville—turned to Binkley and said, “You fellas go ahead. I think I’ll stay here with Billy.”
Newman, as I later learned, was a mentor to James Dunn. He taught at Southeastern and was an influential voice for my father’s generation—his students included Randall Lolley and Bill Self.
In 1956, W. A. Criswell addressed a South Carolina Baptist evangelism conference, delivering a speech opposing racial integration. As Curtis W. Freeman recounts in “Dead from the Neck Up,” the address was filled with racially charged rhetoric and reflected a broader resistance to desegregation among white Southern Baptists of the era. The following day, at the invitation of then-Sen. Strom Thurmond, Criswell delivered a substantially similar address before a joint session of the South Carolina Legislature, remarks that drew national attention and appeared on the front page of The State newspaper in Columbia. Freeman notes that Criswell’s comments provoked controversy even at the time and later became emblematic of a strand of Baptist resistance to the civil rights movement.
From Baylor’s archives, an oral history interview with Newman reveals another window into this era. He recalled riding a train with George Truett from Fort Worth to Memphis in the late 1930s. They talked for four hours, and Truett eventually opened up about his long-running entanglement with J. Frank Norris. Norris persistently sought to belittle Truett and undermine his legacy at First Baptist Dallas.
The broader historical context matters. As historian Jill Lepore argues in her sweeping American history, These Truths, the ideology embodied by Norris helped poison American politics well into the twentieth century and fueled the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention. Later political strategists—Lee Atwater under George H. W. Bush and Karl Rove under his son—refined what could be called a manipulation of Southern Baptist anxieties, culminating in today’s Christian nationalist MAGA base.
This trajectory helps explain the world that shaped figures like Tim Tebow’s mother, who was deeply influenced by the fundamentalism of former SBC president Jerry Vines at First Baptist Jacksonville, Florida, and was named Eagle Forum Woman of the Year in 2018. The Eagle Forum played a key role in resisting the nation’s slow progress toward more inclusive social policy in the Clinton and Obama eras.
In contrast, the mid-twentieth-century Baptist tradition also produced figures such as Judge Frank Johnson of Alabama. Johnson viewed the Constitution as a living, breathing document—he was no inerrantist. Bill Moyers once said that had Lincoln lived in Alabama in the 1960s, he would have been Frank Johnson, and had Johnson lived during the Civil War, he would have been Abraham Lincoln.
Harold Bloom, in his 1993 book The American Religion, described the tragedy of the Southern Baptist Convention as “the result of purely political machinations masquerading as religious conviction.” That assessment still resonates.
Randall Balmer’s new book on church–state separation and the First Amendment highlights the best of the Baptist tradition on these questions. Interestingly, he does not mention the 1568 Edict of Torda, issued amid Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinist tensions in Transylvania—a groundbreaking move toward religious toleration more than two centuries before the United States was founded. I have not been able to determine whether the Founders were aware of Torda as they crafted the First Amendment, which Balmer calls “America’s greatest idea.”
Balmer’s book includes fourteen chapters on the First Amendment and its development over the past two centuries. Holly Hollman of the Baptist Joint Committee praises the work as “an antidote to the persistent threat of Christian nationalism.” Balmer covers the Blaine Amendment, the Mormons, school prayer, and LBJ, to name a few.
In his chapter on Roy Moore’s Ten Commandments monument in Alabama twenty years ago, Balmer doubles down on George W. Truett to illustrate how far astray Moore had wandered. Citing Truett’s famous May 16, 1920, Capitol-steps sermon on church-state separation, he concludes by echoing Roger Williams’s warning about the trivialization of faith when religion and state become entangled.
Balmer writes: “Baptists have one consistent record throughout their long and eventful history. As George W. Truett declared from the Capitol steps in 1920, ‘They have never been a party to the suppression of conscience.’ America needs more Baptists.”
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Stephen Fox is a freelance writer and a graduate of Furman University.
