American Baptist History

The Origins of Cultural Captivity

Charles Lippy has written that "the Baptist presence" has so dominated "Southern mainstream Protestantism for more than a century, to such an extent that in some circles critics cavalierly refer to Dixie as the region 'where there are more Baptists than people.'" And yet, it is easy to forget that Southern Baptists were once a minority in the region. Nor is it easy to recall that there was a time when Baptists in the South did not see "themselves as a distinctively regional body."

The process whereby Baptists came to be identified with the South, and became the dominate religious denomination in the region began in 1861. When the Southern Baptist Convention met in Savannah, Georgia, the delegates clearly identified themselves with secession and everything Southern. They defended the right of the South to secede, pledged themselves to the Confederacy, and substituted the phrase "Southern States of North America" in the Southern Baptist constitution where it had formerly said "United States." It was during the war years, and the period of Reconstruction that Baptists living in the South became Southern Baptists.

The Southern Baptist Convention was formed in 1845, but it was not until Southern Baptists underwent a "baptism in blood" during the Civil War that their identity became clear. It was at this point in time, that the denomination became deeply enmeshed in the anti-Yankee, anti-modern spirit of the region. In the post-war period, in particular, Southern Baptists partook deeply in the norms and experiences of the emerging Southern nationalism. This became a unifying force in a denomination with multiple centers.

Prior to the Civil War, Southern Baptist life revolved around four major centers. Charleston was the focal point of those Southern Baptists who choose to emphasize a regular and orderly worship. Sandy Creek, North Carolina came to be the focal point for those Baptists who were separate and revivalistic. Georgia was the heart of Landmark and Primitive Baptists, while Texas where Baptists tend to be larger than life. Within these of these centers, there were numerous conflicting opinions about the correct content of doctrine, appropriate norms of piety, and best way to influence the culture. But once there was an identity as "Southern," there emerged a sufficient uniformity of belief and practice to keep the denomination united around the twin goals of evangelism and culture maintenance.

The process that started in the Civil War intensified when the War Between States ended, and Southern Baptist leaders grew more and more concerned that they might loose their separate identity. The issue which the denomination has split over was gone, and Southern Baptists had reason to fear they would be re-absorbed into the national convention. To combat this possibility, they worked hard to emphasize their separateness from the North. They were doing so at the same time as the broader culture of the South was trying to sustain a separate identity in the face of military defeat. If the South could not have a separate political identity, then it would have a cultural one. Perhaps the North had won the battle of arms, but the South would win the battle for the hearts and minds of its people. So it was not surprising that Southern Baptists embraced wholeheartedly the Religion of the Lost Cause. From this point on, both region and denomination would struggle together to remain distinctly Southern.

As we saw last time, Southern Baptists played a number of prominent roles in shaping the orthodoxy that prevailed in the region during the last three decades of the nineteenth century. J. William Jones, a Baptist minister, helped shape the cult of the Lost Cause, and wrote the definite biography of Lee, a work that made him into a revered saint. Thomas Dixon, another Baptist minster, did much the same for the Klan, making it into a heroic army fighting to preserve the Southern way of life. In 1872, Baptists refused to include black members in their official denominational statistics, and Baptists as a denomination were still passing resolutions justifying slavery as late as 1892. This close identification with the culture, did much to advance the denomination in the post-war period. Some have called this close identification of the denomination and the region a "cultural captivity," and they are probably correct. Clearly, Southern Baptists were unwilling to do anything that might run counter to the mainstream of contemporary Southern policy.


Explosive Growth

Southern Baptists deliberately set out to build a denomination that would be geographically based, and which would assume leadership in all of the benevolences that anyone might care to cultivate. During the 1890's, the number of benevolent agencies sponsored by Southern Baptists grew exponentially. And during the 35 years between the Civil War and the turn of the century, Southern Baptists also enjoyed phenomenal growth in membership, income, property values, and cultural influence. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Southern Baptists had blanketed the region. Furthermore, the denomination's quantitative growth was matched by a qualitative dominance of regional religious life, and beyond that to the accepted values and truth-claims of the society generally. It became normative, and probably no other institution typified the culture more accurately or influenced it more profoundly.

During this era, the Southern Baptist Convention expanded its efforts through establishing a press to publish Sunday School materials, strengthening the role of its colleges, developing a foreign missionary enterprise, founding theological seminaries and much more. White Baptists were quite conservative in theology and ideology. Where many of these evangelicals had been ecumenically oriented during the revivals of the Second Great Awakening, now they came to be rather provincial, and denominationally conscious. A competitive attitude developed on the subject of doctrinal teachings particularly with the Methodists over "infant baptism." Southern Baptists also boasted of Southern purity, a point of view which strengthened their appeal to the region.


Liquor and Race

Interestingly, there were only two areas where denomination and region seemed to be singing from different pages in the hymnal: the liquor question, and the place of the negro in Southern society.

The first issue was that of liquor. The making and consuming of alcoholic beverages had been routine in the colonial and antebellum South. As a matter of fact, these activities continued largely to be taken for granted down to the 1880's. Many have observed that the South was the heaviest drinking section of the country down to the Civil War, and celebrations of all sorts--including weddings and funerals--were marked by the loosening of inhibitions provided by whiskey and rum. Baptists and Methodists were just as apt to enjoy spirits as Episcopalians or Presbyterians. Similarly, no distinctions existed between the customs of the clergy and the lay people where alcohol was concerned.

But all this changed--owing to a complex host of factors--with the beginning of the Jim Crow Era in the 1880's. Complicity in the liquor traffic, whether as user, manufacturer or retailer, came to be regarded as a rank evil. One's position on this all-important moral issue went far toward identifying whether the individual was a Christian practitioner or not. Organized efforts to control or even outlaw the entire liquor business consumed a large portion of Baptist moral energies, a program which contributed a great deal to the achievement of statewide prohibition in most of the Southern states by 1919 when the 18th Amendment became law.

The racial question competed with the drinking issue for first place in the Baptist conscience. What to do with, about, and for the once enslaved people in their midst was an item white Southern society could not avoid in the post-war years. Southern Baptists began the post-war period with an acknowledgements of their "special obligations to the Negro." Even at this stage, however, "systematic efforts to facilitate the freedmen's religious reconstruction were almost negligible." With the passing of the next couple of decades, this stated obligation and the organized efforts of (or lack thereof) Southern Baptists diverged even more sharply. Work among the blacks was never altogether lacking, but little of consequence was begun, and even less endured.

Instead, Southern Baptist attention was focused elsewhere: the mission enterprise. One example of this can be found in the story of Miss Lottie Moon. She was a missionary who served from 1873 until her death in 1912. In terms of her statistical success, Miss Moon's achievements were not particularly notable. But her name was seized upon by the Women's Missionary Union of the Southern Baptist Convention for it's annual Christmas foreign missions offering which would soon generate 40+ million dollars a year. Why did this woman capture the imagination of a denomination? In part, it was because she was involved in a life that was interracial...an atonement for white racial crimes at home. Leslie Fiedler puts it this way: "all become wanderers...and find love and forgiveness in some exotic place, with a non-white race more palatable than...people sinned against at home. Such lovers also choose partners of their own sex and love them chastely, thereby conveying an impression more acceptable than the thought of any kind of interracial male-female affection."

This highly symbolic expression of concern about the problem of race was quite different from the more direct approach made to the question of drinking where it was thought easy and necessary to identify the Christian position. With reference to racial ethics, the ordinary mode of addressing "the negro problem" was more often political than ecclesiastical, although churches did act in a number of ways. One way they acted was by not acting to integrate congregations. Yet, another was to support Negro colleges and domestic missionary efforts. But most significantly, Southern Baptist Churches quietly encouraged their members to accept the cultural ethic that Negroes were inferior, that all institutions and facilities were to be segregated along racial lines, and that Negroes had a special need for personal services which compassionate white people should be sensitive to provide, in roughly the manner that adults treat children. In other words, Baptist churches "buttressed a conservative social philosophy with an orthodox theology."

White Baptist churches had little to do with their black counterparts, and when there was intercourse between them it flowed one way, expressing itself in a structure in which white was placed over black. Black and white Baptists might share the same denominational label, but they developed into radically different communities.


Some Concluding Remarks

In this discussion of the two great moral issues facing the Southern Baptist people, we have really been reciting facts applicable to Southern church life in general. But it was the Southern Baptists who came to epitomize and shape Southern society. (The stories of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South and Southern Presbyterians are similar.) Southern Baptists never expressed any serious or widespread interest in rejoining their co-religionists in the North, and they had little to do with other denominations even in the South. This denomination lived unto itself, and set out to be faithful to its own standards and vision. This attitude towards outsiders coincided with that of the region which was seeking to withdraw and create its own identity. Not surprisingly, the Southern Baptist faith and message proved attractive to proponents of the Lost Cause.

This attractiveness can be seen in the fact that 98 percent of the counties in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, and Mississippi, Southern Baptists constitute the largest denomination. The same is true for 80 percent of the counties in Oklahoma, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Florida, Kentucky, and Missouri. A similar situation exists in 50 percent of the counties in Texas, Virginia, and New Mexico. In the remaining 32 states, there are only 13 counties where Southern Baptists are the largest denomination.

It would be difficult to close without some mention of the problems Southern Baptists are facing today. The roots of the divisiveness in Southern Baptist life today were laid in their past effort to identify with the region. The denomination's focus on Southern-ness has not served it well as it has grown into a national denomination. As the Southern Baptist Convention has grown and spread beyond Dixie, a growing cultural pluralism has been created. But perhaps more important is the theological diversity that has come about as the denomination has moved out from the Bible belt.

Much of the present divisiveness is a result of these cultural and theological tensions. Today, Southern Baptists are divided into two principle camps: moderates and conservatives, and are well on the way to being divided into two denominations. Both sides of this chasm claim to be the heirs to the Southern Baptist heritage. Moderates, for their part, argue that minor theological differences should be submerged for the sake of missions and outreach, while the Conservatives (Fundamentalists) claim they are simply trying to preserve the doctrinal integrity of the denomination. Both sides claim to be doing the Baptist thing in the Baptist way. And both may be right. But their problem may not be theological. It may be that the idea of Southern-ness is no longer a sufficient glue to hold them together. (It may be significant that many moderates trained in major Northern universities.)