Showdown in San Antonio

Who is on the Lord's side? Who will serve the King?
Who will be His helpers, other lives to bring?
Who will leave the world's side? Who will face the foe?
Who is on the Lord's side? Who for Him will go?

By Thy call of mercy, by Thy grace divine,
we are on the Lord's side, Saviour, we are Thine.
Fierce may be the conflict, strong may be the foe,
but the King's own army none can overthrow.
Round his standard ranging victory is secure;
for His truth unchanging makes the triumph sure.
Joyfully enlisting by Thy grace divine,
we are on the Lord's side, Saviour, we are Thine.

--"Who Is On the Lord's Side?" (19th-century traditional hymn)

Marching to War

THE IMAGE OF THE CHRISTIAN AS WARRIOR IS ALMOST as old as the church itself. From the metaphorical armor of God in Paul's letter to the Ephesians and the mortal armor of earthly empires in the Crusades, Christians have believed themselves divinely ordained and equipped to fight spiritual, military, and moral battles.

Through the Crusades, the Reformation, the Great Awakening, Manifest Destiny, and thousands of lesser-known revivals, missionary efforts, and evangelistic campaigns, countless legions have marched behind the Christian banner to conquer territories, vanquish enemies, secure material wealth, and promote political kingdoms, as well as to win converts to the faith.

Such classic hymns as "Onward, Christian Soldiers," "Soldiers of Christ, Arise," and "Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus" have nurtured this warrior impulse and inspired Christians to fight for everything from slavery to "blue laws," and against everything from evolution to dancing--all in the name of Jesus.

The sole motive, method, and weapon for most of these Christian soldiers was a well-worn, dog-eared Bible. The apostle Paul, after all, had admonished first-century Christians to take up "the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God." Sunday after Sunday, in country churches and city cathedrals, preachers and Sunday School teachers equipped the faithful with all the chapters and verses they needed to fight the good fight against "the evil one."

But sometimes the fight was over the Bible itself. Some folks would take it to mean one thing and some another. Most often they agreed to disagree, but sometimes their conflict could not be resolved. Churches splintered, friends parted ways, and new congregations and denominations were founded on small, sometimes petty, doctrinal differences.

It was a particular passion for slavery and states' rights that ruptured the Baptist denomination in the United States and led to the creation of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) in 1845. Putting that issue behind them and holding onto their heritage as a people of faith who had worked and died for their Baptist beliefs, Southern Baptists grew to become the largest Protestant denomination in this country.

The Southern Baptist Convention now claims 14.6 million members in some 37,000 congregations. In 1986 some $4.1 billion was collected in Southern Baptist coffers, funds that were used to support 7,000 missionaries, six seminaries with 14,000 students, 14 agencies, and 53 Baptist-affiliated colleges and universities.

The Southern Baptists achieved all this with no common creed, enforced orthodoxy, or central hierarchy. What held them together was a foundational belief in the Bible as the inspired Word of God, a zealous commitment to spreading the gospel through ministry and mission, and a firm insistence on the separation of church and state. "No Lord but Christ, no creed but the Bible," was how the preachers put it.

While other denominations experienced division and demise due to theological differences, social movements, and an increasingly pluralistic culture, the Southern Baptist Convention continued to grow. The convention's cooperative mission structure, its homogeneous geographic and cultural base, and its emphases on the "priesthood of the believer" and the autonomy of the local congregation largely protected it from such fractious controversy.

But all was not well within the huge denomination. Beginning in the early 1960s, there emerged a few signs of slight deviation from the narrow doctrinal norm. Then Southern culture, subjected to an influx of workers from the North, began to lose some of its classic qualities. And the beliefs and practices of Southern Baptists, some of them not even from the South anymore, became less distinctive and more ecumenical as they were influenced by televangelism.

Fear, insecurity, and counteraction often accompany change, and it was no different in the Southern Baptist Convention. In addition, some Southern Baptists were feeling slighted by the convention bureaucracy. Meanwhile, political forces had discovered in evangelical America a gold mine of potential support for the New Right. And if the evangelical community was the gold mine, then the huge Southern Baptist Convention, with its vast resources and dominant influence in the vote-rich South, was surely the mother lode.

Key figures, both within and outside of the denomination, set about to move the convention to the right, theologically and politically. They surmised the technical strategy needed to overtake the structures of the convention, and they had, or rather adopted--a key distinction that remains somewhat unclear--a theological cause with which to win Southern Baptist hearts.

BY THE LATE 1970s, the fight for the soul and for the votes of the Southern Baptist Convention was on. Once again Christian soldiers were marching, as to war.

It was a battle whose leaders said would take them 10 years to win. Victory meant ridding the convention of "liberals" and "turning it back" to its conservative ways. This year's annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention, to be held June 14-16 in San Antonio, marks the 10th year of the takeover campaign.

For nine straight years, the fundamentalist, inerrantist, politically right-wing takeover faction has captured the presidency of the convention. Working through the president's appointive powers, the fundamentalist-inerrantists have gained control of 19 of the convention's 20 agencies. But in doing so, say their opponents,
they have violated every fundamental Southern Baptist principle, thereby damaging both the inner workings of the convention and its external, evangelistic mission.

Some Southern Baptists believe the primary takeover issue has been theological. Others hold to a more conspiratorial view, believing the takeover to be a marriage between right-wing politicians and ambitious preachers, designed to advance a right-wing political agenda and personal careers. Still others believe that a combination of factors is responsible for the takeover: some sincere theological concerns, the national resurgence of conservative politics, cultural pluralism, and the personal resentment and "outsider" feelings held by some key conservatives.

Interviews with 30 Southern Baptist leaders on both sides of the controversy, as well as extensive research into the SBC takeover, point to the "combination of factors" thesis. But even among Southern Baptists who accept the validity of certain theological concerns behind the takeover, many condemn the methods employed by takeover leaders. Some have charged the fundamentalist-inerrantist leaders with "McCarthyism," witch-hunting, spying, slander, and intimidation campaigns, and they fear such actions and attitudes will destroy their great denomination.

One more year, a 10th year, of inerrantist control could dramatically alter the nature of the Southern Baptist Convention for at least a generation. Denominational loyalists or moderates, called "liberals" by the inerrantists, might be forced out of the convention, or the SBC split into two or more separate denominations.

The stakes in San Antonio are extremely high. Some call the Southern Baptist fight a battle for the Bible. Others say it is a fight not only for the soul of the convention, but for the heart of the South and the future of evangelical Christianity. Some point to the successful political manipulation of the nation's largest Protestant denomination and see a formula for the wholesale co-optation of American Christianity by the New Right.

The last time a battle this big was fought in San Antonio, a small band of Anglo-American pioneers was crushed at the Alamo. Among those fighting for Texas' independence, Santa Anna's Mexican army left no survivors. Now another battle will be fought in the Alamo's shadow, and Southern Baptists fighting for their own theological and political independence will make what could be, for them and for the cherished Baptist traditions of "soul freedom" and church-state separation, a mighty last stand.

Whose Side are You On?

AS MANY AS 40,000 Southern Baptist "messengers" will be in San Antonio on June 14 to elect the SBC's next president. They will cast their votes for one of two men, Rev. Richard Jackson, the 49-year-old pastor of the 18,300-member North Phoenix Baptist Church in Arizona, or Rev. Jerry Vines, the 50-year-old pastor of the 20,000-member First Baptist Church in Jacksonville, Florida. But Southern Baptists will be voting for far more than the qualifications or the theological leanings of a single man.

Because both men nominated for the SBC presidency are scriptural inerrantists, this year, more so than any other, the outcome of the election will reflect the endorsement or the rejection of the message, methods, spirit, and direction of the inerrantists' takeover campaign. The difference between the two candidates is that Vines is a member of the takeover faction while Jackson is not. The question being put to Southern Baptists this year, more clearly than in any other, is, "Whose side are you on?"

It is a question that takeover leaders have been asking for years, but recently the question has been asked more bluntly, even as the qualifications for acceptance by the "takeover side" have become more strict. According to some reports, several persons nominated for the Southern Baptist Committee on Nominations, whose members nominate trustees for the boards of SBC agencies and institutions, were rejected this year because they had not participated in the takeover effort.

Raymond T. Boswell, a Shreveport, Louisiana layperson, said the committee applied a political litmus test to several potential nominees. "The decision was not whether you believe the whole Bible and whether you believe in the inspiration of scripture," he said. "The issue rests on whether or not you have been in the struggle with [the takeover leaders] since 1979." Its members chosen on the basis of those criteria, the committee then proceeded to nominate, in closed session, more than 200 people to serve on SBC boards.

For some Southern Baptists, this is just the latest example of how the takeover leaders have gone too far. While initial takeover goals may have been limited to the theological purification of the convention, they believe recent behavior indicates that its leaders also require a certain political allegiance. Another example they cite is the fundamentalist-inerrantist campaign against Richard Jackson, who shares the theological views of the takeover faction but has publicly rejected its methods.

Fundamentalist ringleader Judge Paul Pressler of Houston has been waging a speaking and letter-writing campaign against Jackson. Why? Because "I think Southern Baptists have a right to know that a person is running one way in one section of the country and another way in another section of the country," Pressler told Sojourners from Oklahoma, where he was campaigning against Jackson.

"[Judge Pressler] says that I am out campaigning, running for office," Jackson said from his church office in Phoenix. "I have spoken, I have answered questions three times in my life related to the Southern Baptist Convention. They were at places I was scheduled to preach, not for a political purpose....That constitutes the entirety of my political campaigning. But I am receiving mail from all across the country from people who have been informed that I'm out on the campaign trail. And they're absolutely accusing me, condemning me, judging me, telling me to stop it....

"When all this started, I was privy to that information because they assumed I was one of them. Because I was just as concerned about theological liberalism as anybody in the world....But I believed the system would take care of it....I don't believe good theology excuses bad manners...," Jackson said.

When Sojourners asked Jerry Vines about the inerrantists' methods, he responded, "I would take the position that any time un-Christian or unkind actions have occurred, they are deplorable. Sadly, those kinds of charges cannot be restricted to just one side of the controversy." Asked if he would continue the inerrantist takeover of SBC agencies and institutions if he is elected president in San Antonio, Vines replied, "I do not believe there has been any takeover. How can people take over something which is theirs?"

The Takeover

THE SOUTHERN BAPTIST Convention has always been, almost by definition, conservative. Southern Baptists, by nature and tradition, took the Bible seriously and interpreted it literally. If the Bible said it, that settled it for most Southern Baptists.

But as biblical scholarship and theological studies advanced, it was only natural that they would have some impact on Southern Baptists. A 1961 commentary written by a Southern Baptist seminary professor, which argued that Genesis 1:11 was not factual history, received a swift and overwhelmingly negative response from the convention. At its 1962 meeting, the convention adopted a resolution reaffirming Southern Baptist faith in "the entire Bible [as] the authoritative, infallible word of God."

The following year the Southern Baptists adopted the closest thing they had ever had to a creed, "The Baptist Faith and Message." It described the Bible as having "God for its author, salvation for its end, and"--the phrase that has become central to the inerrantist argument--"truth, without any mixture of error, for its matter."

But that statement, like the Bible itself, was subject to personal interpretation by individual Southern Baptists. And most of them accepted it, like the Bible, at face value. Those now known as the moderates assumed that it referred to matters of faith and practice. The inerrantists, however, insisted that the "Faith and Message" creed upheld their belief that the Bible is absolutely true in all areas, including science and history, and that the Bible contains no human errors or filters. To believe otherwise, according to the inerrantists, was to reject the authority and reliability of scripture.

Pressler and Paige Patterson, president of the Criswell Center for Biblical Studies in Dallas and co-architect of the takeover campaign, date their involvement in internal SBC politics and their drive to rid the convention of "liberals" to the late 1970s, and they insist that the sole motive behind their takeover campaign is theological. "The problem is theological, and anybody who tries to make it appear anything other than theological is not properly representing the truth," Pressler said.

Other evidence, however, points to an earlier conception and different motives. James L. Sullivan, a former president of the SBC and its Sunday School Board, first heard of a takeover plan in 1970. In a May 1986 address to employees of the Sunday School Board, the SBC's mammoth publishing house, Sullivan recalled a 1970 meeting he had with a man on the "Eastern Seaboard" who worked as the associate editor of a magazine that was "publishing things that weren't precisely true."

Sullivan said the man told him, "We're going to do whatever it takes to take over the state convention and the Southern Baptist Convention, and we intend to do it as quickly as it can be accomplished." According to Sullivan, the man expressed anger at the process that elects trustees to Southern Baptist institutions. Asked how he was going to achieve his goals, the man told Sullivan, "We're going to organize the losers of every election and cause of Southern Baptist history we can identify."

Paige Patterson, speaking with Sojourners, said he had also harbored such feelings against the SBC bureaucracy and institutions. "Regularly my most cherished convictions that I had been taught in my home and church were still subjected to ridicule," he said of his years as a college and seminary student. "The truth of the Bible was called into question; and the alternative possibilities were not provided.

"Those were the factors that made me resolve in my own heart that most Southern Baptists out there paying the bill were oblivious to what was happening and what was transpiring in our institutions....Then I ran into an enormous, insensitive bureaucracy that showed some signs of existing for its own sake. And that only increased my determination," Patterson said.

"We have had a group of folk who were highly suspicious of the institutional mechanisms of the convention at the point of leaving out their points of view," former SBC president Jimmy Allen told Sojourners. "The amazing thing about that is," he continued, "when you actually look at the offices held, boards occupied, and the inclusions that were done, that perception is totally inaccurate....We were not leaving these folks out at all....But when you have an agenda that has a political purpose to it, one of the ways you justify it is to say that you've been left out."

James Sullivan, speaking with the disgruntled Easterner in 1970, asked him, "'Under what special issue are you going to fly a flag?' He said, 'We haven't picked it yet, but when we pick it, it will be one that no one can give rebuttal to without hopelessly getting himself into controversy,'" Sullivan recalled.

THE FIRST CLEAR SIGNS that biblical inerrancy would be the takeover cause came at the SBC's 1977 meeting. "From beginning to ending there is not a word or syllable or revelation in the Word of God that has contradicted or ever will contradict any true, substantiated fact," said Rev. W.A. Criswell, pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, a former SBC president, and the leading inerrancy proponent.

For the moderates such arguments represented little more than irrelevant and misdirected theological hairsplitting. But a commitment to biblical inerrancy, which included use of the word "inerrancy" and the adoption of key theological, social, and political positions, soon became the litmus test that inerrantist leaders still apply to Southern Baptist trustees, seminary professors, newspaper editors, and pastors.

"There is no logician anywhere, upon reading 'The Baptist Faith and Message' statement, that would not say that it means inerrancy," Patterson told Sojourners. "We're just saying, 'Let's stick to our statement of faith.' The denominations that have not done that have put themselves in reverse....Every single one of them that [has] lost their confidence in the Bible has begun to shrivel up."

But many believe the inerrantists were either misreading or rewriting Southern Baptist history. "We coalesced around a common loyalty to the Bible, but not around a creed about the Bible, not around any particular theory about the Bible, and not around any shopping list of doctrinal statements," said Jim Slatton, pastor of River Road Baptist Church in Richmond, Virginia.

"That's the great irony of this fuss. It's not a struggle between people who believe and don't believe the Bible. It's a struggle between those who want to impose a certain creed about the Bible as the test of fellowship, the rule of faith," Slatton said.

Some also believe that inerrancy is a faulty doctrine. Clark Pinnock was one of Paige Patterson's professors at New Orleans Theological Seminary in the 1960s. At the time, Pinnock taught and emphasized scriptural inerrancy. He has since modified his position. "After a while you just come to feel that [the inerrancy theory] doesn't deliver what its promises were," Pinnock said from Hamilton, Ontario, where he teaches at McMaster Divinity College.

"The Bible itself creates difficulties for an inerrancy theory. I began by thinking it was something very important, and that it symbolized something very important. But over time of trying to fit the biblical data with it, I became less enthusiastic of it as the most helpful way to say what we want to say.

"But inerrancy doesn't wear out rhetorically. So all those big Baptist preachers...use it as a weapon. They've made it the article of a standing and a falling church....But they don't really look very closely at the Bible they're describing as inerrant, and so they're not very good at explaining things in it....Inerrancy doesn't mean the Bible is perfect," Pinnock said. "It means, 'Our interpretation of the Bible is perfect.'"

But Patterson and Pressler had both the message and the method needed to accomplish their takeover. Bill Leonard, a professor at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, believes that as many Southern Baptists felt their identity breaking down, they were attracted to the takeover leaders, who came along and popularly redefined what it meant to be Southern Baptist in terms of one central doctrine: inerrancy.

Then through careful study of the SBC's constitution and bylaws, Pressler and Patterson learned that the SBC president appoints the Committee on Committees, which in turn determines the membership of the SBC boards that run the denomination's 14 agencies and six seminaries. They figured that by consistently winning the presidency, which would guarantee the appointment of inerrantists to SBC boards, they could rid the convention of "liberals" in 10 years.

The 1979 meeting, held in Houston, proved to be their inauguration. They had conducted caucuses in several states, organized prayer groups by precinct, and urged Southern Baptists to attend the convention and vote by bloc. Finally, from a VIP skybox above the convention floor, Pressler even communicated instructions to his lieutenants by walkie-talkie. The Pressler-Patterson candidate, Rev. Adrian Rogers of Bellevue Baptist Church in Memphis, was elected president, and the fundamentalist reign had begun.

In 1980 Pressler and Patterson formed several state groups to further their agenda. Since then their campaign has operated like a steamroller, winning the presidency every year and gaining greater control of SBC agencies and institutions. They have been sophisticated and thorough in their methods.

Pressler, whose job as an appellate judge freed him to travel six days a week, spoke as often as 50 times in six days; from January to June 1985, Pressler spoke more than 200 times in 16 states. Also in 1985, Patterson's Criswell Center sent out some 35,000 letters, approximately one for every Southern Baptist congregation, pressing for the re-election of fundamentalist candidate Charles F. Stanley of Atlanta. It worked.

Religion and Politics

WITH THE FUNDAMENTALISTS' theological campaign came also a new and uncharacteristic Southern Baptist involvement in things political. Again the key year was 1979, and again the all-consuming goal was the election of a conservative presidential candidate, Ronald Reagan.

A powerful group of New Right operatives--Richard Viguerie, publisher of the Conservative Digest; Howard Phillips, founder and executive director of the Conservative Caucus; Robert J. Billings, head of the National Christian Action Coalition; Paul Weyrich, founder of the Free Congress Foundation; and Edward E. McAteer, a former sales manager for Colgate-Palmolive Co. then working as the national field director for the Conservative Caucus--devised a plan to bring evangelical and fundamentalist Christians into the Republican Party fold.

McAteer, who had established relationships with key fundamentalist leaders in his travels for Colgate, was designated the "point man" for the plan. McAteer would enlist the support of key fundamentalist leaders who, in turn, would organize their church members and television viewers. Among those McAteer "sold" on Republican politics were Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Jimmy Swaggart.

Speaking to Sojourners about his pivotal role in the formation of the Religious Right, McAteer said, "I'm the chief architect, you know that." McAteer's comment was not idle boasting. "I'm the guy that introduced Falwell to the New Right people--Viguerie, Howard Phillips, Paul Weyrich, and those fellows....So I was in the meeting when the name Moral Majority was first mentioned by one of the New Right leaders. I made mention of the fact that it would be a wonderful name. Falwell agreed."

With the Moral Majority in place to enlist popular fundamentalist support for the New Right agenda, Weyrich and other New Right leaders created the Religious Roundtable to further coordinate their outreach to fundamentalist ministers and Zionist Jews. With McAteer as executive director, the Roundtable sponsored the National Affairs Briefing in Dallas in August 1980, a gathering that drew some 20,000 Christians and consolidated evangelical support for Ronald Reagan. The Roundtable also sponsors an annual prayer breakfast for Israel.

Among those pastors whom McAteer courted along with other Southern Baptists was current SBC president Adrian Rogers. In 1982, McAteer and White House aide Morton C. Blackwell, working through the SBC's resolutions committee, conceived, engineered, and achieved passage of a convention resolution supporting a constitutional amendment on school prayer. The SBC had consistently opposed school prayer efforts, but McAteer, working with the White House, turned the huge denomination around.

ALMOST ALL OF THE five fundamentalist SBC presidents elected since 1979 have been associated with right-wing political causes. Rogers, Bailey Smith, and Stanley supported the school prayer amendment; Stanley was a founding member of the Moral Majority; and James T. Draper was an extremely active supporter of Pat Robertson's presidential campaign. Stanley and Paige Patterson serve on the Religious Roundtable's board of directors, and W.A. Criswell sits on its advisory board. Stanley and Draper refused to be interviewed about their political involvements for this article; Rogers and Criswell did not return phone calls.

Asked if the involvement of SBC leaders in right-wing politics is "coincidental," McAteer replied: "They just happen to be people who understand that what the Christians are doing in politics is what needs to be done in the country....So it's very predictable that they would be involved." Asked about his own involvement in the SBC takeover struggle, McAteer said, "One of the reasons I'm staying out of it is because I have been used as a proof that [politics] is really what it's about. But that's a smoke screen...."

But many Southern Baptist moderates see an intentional and dangerous alliance between SBC leaders and New Right politicians. "I've personally gone through the resolutions of the Southern Baptist Convention since 1979, when [the fundamentalist-inerrantists ] have been in office, and compared them to the agenda laid out by Jerry Falwell in Listen, America! in 1978," said Glenn Hinson, a professor at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. "And you can find every one of the major issues he laid out has been laid out in the resolutions of the convention since 1979.

"I think it's part of a strategic plan on their part," Hinson continued. "They see control of the Southern Baptist Convention as a way of achieving the broader vision that they have in mind....They want to get America back to God as they see it, so that it can stand as a bulwark against communism."

"The code word, the shibboleth, is the inerrancy of scriptures," said Alan Neely, acting executive director of the Southern Baptist Alliance, a moderate group. "But the agenda is the right-wing political agenda, and it includes aid for the contras, it includes unqualified support for Zionism and Israel, it includes such things as the submissiveness of women....These are part of the total package."

Glen H. Stassen, professor of Christian ethics at Southern, believes "the innerrantists should examine some of their alliances with right-wing politics that are seriously unbiblical. On concern for the poor, on peacemaking, on not putting our trust in horses and chariots and soldiers and military alliances, and on truth-telling, there are things for some folks to be repenting for that are tied in pretty closely with right-wing politics."

Former SBC president Jimmy Allen doesn't see the political connection so clearly, but he does believe that "secular politicians very cynically use the churches, whether it's on the Right or the Left. And I think we have been used over and over and over again under this regime."

The Battlefield

WITH ITS THEOLOGICAL and sociopolitical agendas becoming ever more inseparable, the takeover faction gained greater and greater control over the convention and its institutions. Whether acting on the political front--in public-affairs groups or social agencies--or on the theological front--in seminaries, colleges, or specific congregations--the takeover faction worked to impose its single acceptable position on the issues.

The laundry list of issues and the fundamentalist-inerrantist positions included being for scriptural inerrancy, against women's ordination, and for school prayer and an anti-abortion constitutional amendment. As Southern Baptists were considered for membership on boards and agencies, for tenure on seminary faculties, or as editors of Baptist publications, their positions on these and other issues, as well as "whose side" they were on in the takeover, were taken into account by those with final say in their appointments.

"They've changed their tune several times," said Jim Slatton. "They started out saying that they felt under-represented--all they wanted was a share. Now what they're saying is that nobody is to be appointed to denominational posts who doesn't pass the litmus test."

Jimmy Allen agrees. "A takeover is a takeover. Being included is one thing. Running the thing and not including the rest of them is another."

Some moderates fear that it is a smaller and smaller group determining convention policy and personnel. "There has been a great deal of obvious effort...of a small group of people to have control over the minds and decisions of others," said Richard Jackson. "Now that's what I'm against....Baptists can be trusted when they're informed....I oppose theological liberalism, but I also oppose ecclesiastical legalism. And I'm just as afraid of one as the other."

Patterson and Pressler deny that they're trying to purge anyone from the convention. "We've said for all 10 years that that wasn't our purpose," Patterson said. "And the truth is that we don't have to do that. Sixty-five percent of all denominational executives and professors will retire within the next five years....We're simply trying to guarantee the future. We're not trying to deal with the past; we're not attempting to give people a hard time in the present."

Pressler said: "I do not want to eliminate anybody from the Southern Baptist Convention, but I also do not want to hire people who will seek to undermine what the vast majority of Southern Baptists believe."

Asked to respond to the allegation that he has the last word on every person appointed as a trustee, Pressler said, "That is absolutely ridiculous." Still, many are convinced and troubled as they watch a small number of people hierarchically enforcing conformity, which is itself anti-Baptist, on issues or positions that seem to go against every Southern Baptist tradition.

Some members of the takeover faction, for example, have been working to withdraw Southern Baptist support from or replace the staff of the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs because its executive director, James M. Dunn, has refused to conduct lobbying campaigns on abortion, school prayer, federal aid to parochial schools, and other political issues. Yet Dunn believes such activity would violate the very purpose of his organization, which was established to defend religious liberty by working to maintain the separation of church and state.

Meanwhile, the Southern Baptist Political Action Committee (SBPAC), dominated by the Religious Right, has recently taken strong political positions, endorsing Judge Robert H. Bork for the Supreme Court and supporting President Reagan's veto of the Civil Rights Restoration Act. "Our contention is that on [those matters] they were way out of line...." Dunn told Sojourners. "They were trying to represent their position as the Southern Baptist Convention's position....The vote on the Bork thing was 7 to 5. And the vote on the Civil Rights Restoration Act was 14 humans--14 to speak for 14 million Baptists...."

According to Dunn, the SBPAC was authorized to make its own political statements only last year, and even then its authorization was very limited. The SBC resolution passed last year "encourages the [SBPAC] to coordinate its work through the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs [BJCPA] and to take action on motions and resolutions of the Southern Baptist Convention upon which the [BJCPA] cannot agree and/or does not support," according to the written record of the 1987 meeting.

"They've taken that as a mandate to speak for Southern Baptists," Dunn said. "And we take it as an intrusion and a violation of what the [SBC] asks them to do." The only time the convention acted on political endorsements, for example, was in 1976, when it passed a resolution "calling on agencies and entities of the convention to refrain from endorsing individuals." Yet the committee endorsed Bork and strongly criticized the BJCPA for its refusal to do so. Sam Currin, head of the SBPAC and a former aide to Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), did not return telephone calls.

Many Southern Baptists oppose the ordination of women, but takeover leaders have enforced their opposition. The SBC's Home Missions Board, which supports some 3,000 missionaries in the United States, has voted to withdraw its funding from any congregation that employs a woman as pastor. And when Prescott Memorial Baptist Church in Memphis called Rev. Nancy Hastings Sehested as its pastor last fall, it was kicked out of its local Southern Baptist association (see "Faithful to the Call," February 1988). Of some 450 Southern Baptist women ordained for the ministry, only 11 serve as pastors or co-pastors of SBC congregations.

"My position is that I believe the Bible to be the inerrant word of the Lord, and until such time as somebody can explain to me to my satisfaction the prohibition in 1 Timothy [3:2, "the overseer must be...the husband of one wife..."] as to putting women in a ruling position of the church, then I have no choice about my position there," Paige Patterson explained. "For whatever reason, God said no."

Asked to respond to Patterson's scriptural interpretation, Nancy Sehested said, "That scripture was talking about polygamy, and it was speaking to a particular situation. I don't think that that one scripture is enough to keep women from being pastors." Many Southern Baptist moderates describe the takeover leaders as "sexist" men who are "trying to preserve their masculinity."

"I think it's [about] power and control," Sehested said. "They like to keep women in a subservient role. It serves their purposes quite well....They keep bringing up the Bible. Actually I would like us to take the Bible more seriously....I want us to take Jesus more seriously. I just think that they're taking a few scripture passages out of context and using [them] for their own abusive power plays. That's not taking the Bible seriously, that's taking their own prejudice seriously."

Libby Bellinger, president of the 800-member SBC Women in Ministry, said the morale of Southern Baptist women has taken a real beating from the takeover leaders. Many ordained women are considering leaving the convention, she said.

Meanwhile, the 1.2 million-member Woman's Missionary Union (WMU), which celebrated its centennial in May, continues to be the biggest fundraiser for the convention. Its annual Lottie Moon Christmas offering and Annie Armstrong Easter offering, both named after famed Southern Baptist missionaries, raise some $112 million each year to support Southern Baptist missionaries. The takeover leaders could eventually withhold those funds from women missionaries if they are ordained, but the union has yet to get involved in the issue.

"We are totally a missions organization, which happens to be for women and girls," said spokesperson Karen Benson. "We are not a women's and girls' organization that happens to do missions....WMU has not felt it is its business to get involved in 'women's issues,'" she said.

ANOTHER PRIMARY TAKEOVER target has been the convention's six seminaries. From Patterson's personal experiences in college and seminary to the rare theological writings of seminary professors who challenged traditional Southern Baptist views, the takeover leaders were convinced that seminary faculties had to be cleansed.

"I have known of only six or eight examples of liberals in Southern Baptist seminaries, out of 450 to 500 teachers," Russell H. Dilday Jr., president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, told Sojourners. "And none of those are classical liberals," he added. "To find a real, honest-to-goodness liberal in Southern Baptist life is a rare, rare thing," said Jimmy Allen. "That's an interesting hunt."

But for Pressler and Patterson, the hunt was on. Some of Dilday's phone conversations were taped without his knowledge, and he attended meetings where "evidence"--tape recordings and literature--against "liberals" was collected, discussed, and disseminated. "Having made this claim that the denomination was falling to liberals, they frantically had to come up with evidence to support it. Some of it was absolutely ridiculous," Dilday said.

Some students may have been acting for financial gain. In 1982 the Southern Baptist Journal, a publication of the takeover faction, published a notice advising students at an SBC seminary that they could win $1,000 by writing essays about "liberalism" being taught in their classrooms. "Students should give quotations with sources from the liberal statements of professors," the notice read. "Students are encouraged to write in the first person ("I heard Dr. -------- say...")....The prize-winning essays will be printed in the Southern Baptist Journal and will be sent to all Southern Baptist churches. The names of the winning students will not be printed...."

Alan Neely, who has taught missions at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina, for 12 years, recently was questioned by an official SBC watchdog group about statements he had made in class. "There were charges that I had said in class, for example, that I did not believe Jesus was the only way of salvation," Neely told Sojourners. "My response to that was, and I put it in writing, that I categorically deny ever having said anything like this or implied it....

"They quoted a student as having said that I said that," Neely continued. "Of course, there were 60 people in the class. It's strange that they talked to only one. There were 59 others with whom they could have talked....

"It has now become open season on seminary professors....We have been disenfranchised. We have been marginalized and, in many respects, slandered."

Paul Pressler denies using un-Christian methods or slandering anybody. "I don't know what they could be talking about," he said. "All we've done is encourage individuals to work within the system, to vote their own personal convictions....What have I ever done to slander anybody? All I've ever done is read what they've written and published."

At last year's SBC meeting, the convention's 22-member Peace Committee, which had been formed two years earlier to heal the denominational rift, said that all newly hired professors and administrators at Southern Baptist seminaries should hold a literal, "authoritative" view of the Bible. The Peace Committee then extended its life for three more years "to encourage compliance" with its recommendations. This led Glenn Hinson to call the Peace Committee "the Baptist equivalent of the Holy Office of the Inquisition."

Four months later, the six seminary presidents tried to ease fundamentalists' concern about the seminaries by signing what was called the "Glorieta Statement." The presidents, in what some seminary professors viewed as a capitulation to fundamentalist control, agreed to hire faculty and to invite campus lecturers holding fundamentalist-inerrantist views. They also agreed to enforce professors' adherence to each institution's doctrinal statements. The Peace Committee agreed, in turn, to suspend its investigations at three of the seminaries.

But last fall the takeover faction succeeded in gaining a majority of seats on Southeastern's board of trustees. After the new fundamentalist majority took actions to further its agenda, which would involve the possible curtailment of academic freedom at the seminary, Southeastern's president and dean announced their resignations.

Former Southeastern president W. Randall Lolley told Sojourners he left the seminary because he "viscerally opposed" the agenda of the fundamentalist trustees.
The final straw came, Lolley said, when the new board commandeered the school's 14-year-old faculty appointment process and left the faculty, students, and student council with no voice in the hiring of new faculty.

Since the fundamentalist-inerrantists took control of the seminary, Southeastern professors have organized a chapter of the American Association of University Professors. All 34 full-time faculty members, as well as some part-time faculty and staff, are members of the group. According to chapter president Richard L. Hester, the group has already raised $25,000 for its legal defense fund.

"We have insisted that we will not permit ourselves to be investigated unless formal charges are brought and due process is followed," Hester said. "We have said we will not sign any other [confessional] document...and we will operate as a group....We are mounting a major effort to say no to this attempt by the New Right politics."

The Resistance

IN THE PAST YEAR, there have been some efforts to organize Southern Baptist moderates, as well as a few modest moderate victories. The Southern Baptist Alliance, whose seven-point covenant emphasizes church-state separation, women's ordination, ecumenical cooperation, social and economic justice, and "soul freedom" in biblical interpretation, now has some 2,500 individual members and 40 member churches, which represent about 25,000 Southern Baptists.

And Southern Baptists in Georgia, Virginia, and North Carolina defeated strong efforts by the fundamentalist-inerrantists last fall to control their state conventions. Prescott Memorial Baptist Church is thriving with Rev. Nancy Hastings Sehested as its pastor, despite being expelled by its local Southern Baptist association last fall. And at Southern Baptist Seminary, two women-one of them ordained-were elected in April as tenured faculty members, a first in the seminary's 129-year history.

"The mailed fist has torn through what a few people still insist on thinking is a velvet glove," said Jim Slatton. "The agenda behind the effort is beginning to become more transparent." Leon Smith, the new president of the North Carolina Baptist Convention, agrees. "The laypeople are now realizing that they are going to have to get involved to keep this denomination from being destroyed by this movement," he said.

But the battle has taken its toll on the convention, and others believe it may never recover. Seminary enrollment is down, baptisms were down 6.8 percent last year from the previous year, and church growth for the year registered only 0.7 percent, the smallest gain since 1936. "I think as a fellowship we are in bad shape," said Jimmy Allen.

"Unless cooler heads prevail," Slatton said, "I think [the takeover leaders] will take us to ruin because they won't know when to stop." Glenn Hinson says the "absolutist mentality" of the takeover leaders, reflected, he says, in their unwillingness to let Southern Baptists of different views coexist with them, will lead to a "divorce" between the two factions of the convention.

"If the moderates don't win in San Antonio, I think that the fundamentalists will have gained such complete control of the denomination that it will be a generation or longer before there is any moderation in the convention," said Stan Hastey, director of information services for the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs and the Washington, D.C. bureau chief for Baptist Press. "Even if the moderates do win in San Antonio, I think it will be the turn of the new century before the moderates regain the ascendancy.

"And I don't think the Southern Baptist Convention will ever be the same as it was before all of this started," Hastey continued. "Unless the fundamentalist crowd were to leave, I don't see any way that the SBC can regain the ground that it has lost in its social attitudes--attitudes toward women, toward world hunger, toward war and peace...."

Joe Edward Barnhart, a former Southern Baptist and a professor of philosophy and religion at North Texas State University who has written about the Southern Baptist holy war, thinks the Southern Baptist moderates need to play hardball. "The moderates just have to say to [the inerrantists], 'If you go too far, we won't give money.'...Call their bluff. Without the money all these institutions would collapse....

"That's going to be the bottom line, it seems to me....They're going to have to say, 'Money is the blood that keeps the thing going, we'll cut the blood off.' If they don't do that they're going to lose the ball game."

Richard Jackson takes a more spiritual, and hopeful, view. "If I didn't believe that God was sovereign, I'd be in a state of panic right now," he said. "I believe that God will overcome in the affairs of men and women who honestly seek his will. And I think that 90 percent or more of the people called Southern Baptists honestly want his will.

"And how he's going to sovereignly make that happen I don't know. But I do know it will have to be an act of sovereign intervention, where people begin to see themselves and sense the error of our ways, each one of us, rather than concentrating on what we believe to be the error of everybody else's ways. I think right now the greatest problem we have among us is that we are evaluating each other. We probably ought to spend a lot of time on our face before God, allowing him to evaluate us."

Vicki Kemper was news editor of Sojourners when this article appeared.