Let's make one thing perfectly clear. Jerry Falwell is not a Southern Baptist. He is an unaffiliated, independent Baptist from the South. That distinction is often lost in national perceptions of the denomination known as the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC).
This month the Southern Baptist Convention will be meeting in Dallas, Texas. And if its last few conventions are any indication, at Dallas the distinction between the SBC as a denomination and Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority may be further obscured within the SBC itself.
With 14 million members, the Southern Baptist Convention is the largest Protestant denomination in the United States. As the name indicates, the vast majority of its members are in the South. In fact, the SBC is a sort of de facto established church in much of the South. That means it generally reflects the "broad center" mainstream of white Southern opinion.
As that Southern mainstream has moved away from the plantation system and Jim Crow segregation, and toward economic and cultural accommodation with the rest of the country, the SBC has moved with it. The SBC would never join the National Council of Churches, but within its regional context, it has been very much a mainline church.
Part of the role of a mainline church is to serve as an umbrella organization sheltering, and containing, dissident tendencies on the Left and Right. Like the Democratic Party, the SBC has served that function in the South. The denomination always had its fervent, ultra-conservative fundamentalists and its less numerous, but equally fervent, social activists. But the center always held, strengthened as it was by the traditional Baptist commitment to congregational autonomy and individual freedom in interpreting scripture.
However, since 1979 the Southern Baptist "center" has been sliding drastically to the Right. That was the year fundamentalist forces affiliated with the Christian New Right began what one of their leaders called a "10-year plan" to take over the institutions of the Southern Baptist Convention.
Before 1979 the New Right had been a relatively marginal phenomenon in traditionally apolitical SBC circles. But since then four successive New Right candidates have been elected to the presidency of the convention, including the current president, Charles Stanley, who also serves on the board of the Christian New Right's American Coalition for Traditional Values, formed during the 1984 elections.
If the New Right takeover of the SBC simply reflected a fundamentalist groundswell from the grassroots of the denomination, that would in itself be cause for concern. But there is little evidence that the New Right forces actually represent a real majority of rank-and-file Southern Baptists. That makes their triumph even more disturbing.
THE BAPTIST NEW Rightists have been successful largely because they have brought the hard-nosed politics of computerized mailing lists, "precinct" organizing, and caucus discipline into the SBC's internal affairs for the first time. They have carefully and effectively organized to get "their" people selected as congregational messengers (voting delegates) to the annual conventions, then covered the convention with floor captains to make sure the messengers were in line for each upcoming vote.
By controlling the conventions, they have been able to control the SBC presidency and exercise veto power over the membership of the various boards and commissions that govern church institutions. They have also, with some success, pushed for resolutions backing the by-now familiar New Right social agenda.
In taking over the SBC, the New Right forces have applied the same tactics and standards that their counterparts used to seize power in the Republican Party. Many Southern Baptists quite rightly don't consider such tactics appropriate to the internal affairs of the Christian community. Secular politics are, by definition, about the manipulation of power; but, in the conduct of church affairs, Christians have a right to expect that Machiavellian principles will be at least tempered by the contrary counsel of Jesus and the apostles.
In the mainstream media, the battle within the Southern Baptist Convention has often been perceived as one over the doctrine of biblical inerrancy. "Inerrancy" is a fairly amorphous concept—more of a slogan than a coherent doctrine. But it is a tried-and-true slogan within the SBC.
Ever since the turn-of-the-century eruption of the "fundamentalist-modernist" debate, inerrancy has periodically bubbled to the surface as an issue in Baptist circles. Usually the fundamentalist aim was to purge a few seminary professors. Mindful of this history, most Southern Baptist "moderates" thought the self-proclaimed fundamentalist takeover of the early 1980s would blow over with time.
Like almost everyone else in America, the SBC mainliners were caught off guard by the New Right's intense and supremely effective politicization of previously apolitical religious impulses. The fundamentalist drive to take over the Southern Baptist Convention commenced at about the same time that secular New Right political operatives Paul Weyrich and Terry Dolan were recruiting television evangelists, most notably Falwell and Pat Robertson, into the ecumenical Christian Right.
The results of that union are well-known. The fundamentalist electronic church, which formed the organizational backbone of the Christian Right, always had a considerable following within the SBC. In retrospect it is no surprise that some of its adherents would apply their newfound political skill and muscle to the politics of their home denomination.
In addition to waving the inerrancy banner, the New Right forces in the SBC have brought along a social agenda that looks a great deal like the Republican Party platform of 1984. They champion school prayer, militantly oppose abortion, offer wholly uncritical support for Israeli actions in Lebanon and the West Bank, and set strict limits on the proper role of women in church and society.
Many of the Baptist New Right's social positions, especially those regarding women, go against the grain of the most minimal biblical standards of justice. And many within the SBC are alarmed that, in the name of traditional values, the fundamentalists are trampling over some of the most fundamental principles of the Baptist tradition.
Baptists have never had creeds. The threat of inerrancy inquisitions is an obvious assault on that tradition. In Baptist tradition local congregations have had the sole authority to ordain ministers, including women if they so chose. The fundamentalist attempts to prohibit the ordination of women would remove one of the most essential aspects of congregational autonomy.
Perhaps the most fundamental principle of the Baptist tradition is a strict belief in the separation of church and state. That is why the SBC had, against all apparent cultural inclination, always opposed a return to state-sanctioned prayers in the public schools. The new fundamentalists have successfully reversed that long-standing position.
IF THE NEW RIGHT'S SBC takeover is disturbing to those who value the witness of the Baptist tradition, it is also becoming a serious cause for concern in the churches at large. For one thing, the tactics and policies of the Baptist New Right mirror those of its Republican counterpart in its lack of toleration for dissenters. If its 10-year plan continues on course, important voices of Christian conscience, voices that ironically enough are today stronger than ever in the Southern Baptist churches, could be effectively stifled in the denomination that dominates the religious life of an entire region.
And obviously, the institutional machinery of the Southern Baptist Convention offers a significant power base for the New Right forces in their battle to remake America in the image of Jesse Helms. That power base is all the more useful when it comes with all the legal protections, institutional prerogatives, and presumed neutrality of a church.
The battle within the Southern Baptist Convention also serves as a chilling potential precedent for other denominations. The New Right is a well-funded and politically sophisticated movement. Its operatives, whatever their religious label, are ultimately more committed to nationalism, anti-communism, and hierarchical social values than they are to the traditions and beliefs of any church. And, as we are learning every day of the Reagan era, the ambition of their leaders knows no bounds.
Danny Collum was an associate editor of Sojourners magazine when this article appeared.
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