The Baptist Headway
America’s Largest Protestant Denomination & the Culture War
by Russell D. Moore
Southern Baptist cultural engagement has been something like country musician Loretta Lynn’s first visit to the Nixon White House. Greeting the president in the reception line, Lynn reportedly blurted out, “Good morning, Richard.” When horrified White House personnel informed her later that she should not have referred to the president by his first name, Lynn is said to have replied, “Well, they called Jesus ‘Jesus,’ didn’t they?”
The counterculture celebrated her words as a feminist-populist protest against hierarchical distinctions. In fact, the coal miner’s daughter simply didn’t know what else to say. When confronted with American sexual libertarianism and public-square secularization, Southern Baptists committed to biblical orthodoxy have spoken reflexively from intuitions rooted in a biblically informed worldview. They were not pushing a “religious right” political program. They just didn’t know what else to say.
Baptist Reversal
For the past twenty-five years, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), has been at the front of the conservative activist response to the culture wars. On everything from abortion to creationism, from school vouchers to sexual differences, the SBC has been insistently opposed to the social policies of the American left.
This stems from the convention’s abrupt reversal in the late 1970s from a mainline Protestant denomination steeped at its upper levels in the “progressive” theology of the Protestant left to a conservative Evangelical denomination committed to a confessional identity rooted in the authority of Scripture and in the recovery of a centuries-long Baptist tradition. Baptist confessions of faith have differed very little since the beginning of the Baptist movement in the seventeenth century when it comes both to the “fundamentals of the faith” and to the ecclesial particularities of the Baptist faith.
Conservatives pointed out that the leaders of the denomination simply didn’t agree with the confessional stance of virtually all Baptists at all times on matters such as biblical inerrancy against contemporary notions such as the “documentary hypothesis” of the origins of the Pentateuch and the rejection of Pauline authorship of the Pastoral Epistles.
Pointing to the media hype about Southern Baptist culture warriors, Baptist liberals joined with secular observers to argue that the Southern Baptist controversies over biblical inerrancy and confessional orthodoxy were all along really about partisan politics rather than theological fidelity. After all, the “conservative resurgence” coincided in the late 1970s and early 1980s with Margaret Thatcher’s ascendancy in Great Britain, the Reagan revolution in the United States, and the mobilization of Evangelicals into a “Moral Majority” political force in every state of the union.
In his book Uneasy in Babylon, Baylor University scholar Barry Hankins asserts that Southern Baptist conservatives fought the inerrancy controversy in a political quest to “save America,” as they were threatened by the secularization of American society. In the New York Review of Books and in speeches across the country, commentator Bill Moyers, a one-time SBC seminary student, links conservative Southern Baptists to the fringe theonomist movements that seek to establish an American theocracy based on Mosaic Law.
Others whisper that Southern Baptist resolutions on the right to life, voluntary school prayer, and a strong national defense were coordinated by conservative White House operatives in the shadows of the skyboxes above the annual convention meetings. Indeed, the opponents of SBC conservatism have so consistently charged the SBC leadership with having a partisan political motive that when the convention briefly mulled over changing its name a couple of years ago, one wag suggested “the Republican Baptist Convention.”
Russell D. Moore is president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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