Foxed Paper and the Slight Smell of Mold: Reading, Browsing Actual Print Periodicals

Randall Stephens

Last week I visited the Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary Library in Gladstone, Mo, just north of Kansas City. The staff was terrific and a bonus was an enormous collection of discarded books for sale--$1 or 50 cents/ea. I picked up Tim LaHaye's Battle for the Mind, and, oddly enough, a copy of Gordon Wood's Empire of Liberty.

Ideally, I hoped to browse through some denominational magazines and periodicals from the 1950s and 1960s for my next project on Christianity and rock/anti-rock. I was pleasantly surprised. The library had loads of Baptist and SBC serials dating back to the early years of the Cold War. Some of the titles I browsed through: Baptist Quarterly Review; Home Life; Baptist Training Union Magazine; The Student (A Baptist-style Jesus People-ish magazine, which Sam Hill actually wrote in). In addition to all that there were extensive runs of Christianity Today and Christian Century, along with quite a few other gems.

The Southern Baptist Periodical Index was a real help. But blast the indexers for not cataloging what I wish they had! (Page after page after page on "Missions.") I have seldom used the Index to Religious Periodical Literature (Chicago : American Theological Library Association.) But it's a tremendous resource for work on post-war American religion. And it gives a pretty good indication of the more popular magazines and journals that circulated at the time. See below the first page of the edition for 1971, listing a range of publications. (Click to enlarge.)


So, here are a few questions for all the RiAH research nerds and archive troglodytes out there: What do you suppose were the largest circulating and/or most influential denominational periodicals of the 1950s and 1960s? Which ones are the best for getting a sense of what men, women, and children in the pews were thinking? Why?

Baptists and the Civil War

Paul Harvey

While we're on the subject of the religious history of the Civil War, here's a new resource of interest. I received an email today from Bruce Gourley, Executive Director of the Baptist History and Heritage Society, on a new site he has constructed on Baptists and the Civil War, featuring an abundance of essays, documents, daily journal entries, and other resources on that subject. He writes:

"Baptists and the American Civil War: In Their Own Words" is a day-by-day journal of the Baptist experience, North and South, during the Civil War. Each day a new journal entry is published, corresponding with that date 150 years earlier.

This digital project began as an outgrowth of research done for my dissertation-turned-upcoming book, Diverging Loyalties: Baptists in Middle Georgia During the Civil War (due in the fall from Mercer University Press).

A quick survey of this website shows it to be a terrific resource for scholars working on all sorts of subjects, as well as those interested in Baptist history of the religious history of the Civil War, in particular. The daily journal features short bits of information and analysis on the events of that day 150 years ago -- this entry from Jan. 2, 1861, for examples, describes the process of voting for secession in Georgia.

Congratulations to Bruce Gourley on making his research and interests available in this wonderfully accessible way, and in incorporating the best scholarship in doing so.

The Past is Never Dead . . . Religious Leaders in Virginia on Local Tribes

Randall Stephens

I was just thinking about a new idea for the blog. Maybe a series of posts? "The Past is Never Dead . . ." It could entail news items or books that deal with contemporaries who are wrestling with history. To paraphrase Carl Becker "everyman/woman his/her own religious historian." Many Americans come to grips with the nation's religious identity be resorting to the past. (Isn't this Glenn Beck's big campaign?) Perhaps history has a greater resonance right now. Some questions: How do believers and non-believers use history to describe what America is or has been? Who owns American religious history? Why is it so important for citizens to put religious history, or just American history in general, to use for the present?

Robert Dilday, "Baptist executives urge federal recognition of Virginia tribes," Associated Baptist Press, 19 August 2010.

RICHMOND, Va. (ABP) -- The top executives of two Virginia Baptist groups have joined other religious leaders in calling for federal recognition of six Native American tribes in the state.

In an open letter released Aug. 17, about 30 Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders asked Virginia’s Republican governor and two Democratic senators to support congressional legislation giving to Virginia’s tribes the same status held by more than 560 other Native American tribes across the United States.

Among the signers were John Upton, executive director of the predominantly white Baptist General Association of Virginia, who also was recently elected president of the Baptist World Alliance, and Cessar Scott, executive minister of the historically black Baptist General Convention of Virginia. . . .

History erased by racist official

Walter Plecker, registrar of Virginia’s Bureau of Vital Statistics from 1912-1946, replaced “Indian” with “black” on every birth and death certificate in his office. Plecker, a white supremacist, said Native Americans had become a “mongrel” mixture. >>>

Baptist Bishops

Paul Harvey

Thanks to Jon Walton, "Evangelicals Embracing Ecclesial Elitism?", for calling my attention to this story, from the Boston Globe, about the crowning of the well-known black minister in Boston John M. Borders III as a Bishop. Nothing unusual there, except that Borders is a Baptist. I got a call from the reporter who did this story a while back, and had since forgotten about it, but she alerted me to the increasingly common practice of making well-known church leaders into Bishops. Borders was consecrated so by the International Bishops Conference USA, which I had not heard of before but appears to be a sort of support group for well-known and respected pastors of large congregations who have earned the honorific.

The story begins:

The Rev. John M. Borders III approached the pulpit at Morning Star Baptist Church on a recent Sunday wearing his usual suit and tie. He adjusted his glasses, as he often does, and proceeded to deliver to the packed sanctuary a thunderstorm of a sermon on a theme from Revelation: “No more delays!’’

In the pews, some sobbed. Some shouted, “Yes, Lord!’’ Some just breathed, until Borders concluded with a hushed prayer.

The only outward sign that something was different was the new ring on the pastor’s finger, a thick gold ring with a purple stone. It symbolized his recent elevation, in a ceremony in Memphis two weeks before, to the position of bishop.

The title of bishop, accompanied by such emblems of authority, was uncommon among hierarchy-spurning Baptists until recently, but it is being adopted by a growing number of Baptist pastors, most of them African-American. Borders and other new bishops have acquired some of the ceremonial garb — croziers (pastoral staffs), zucchettos (skullcaps) and chasubles (robes) — that their spiritual forefathers left behind when they broke from the Church of England in the 17th century. Some, including Borders, have even embraced the doctrine of apostolic succession — the belief in an unbroken line from Jesus’ apostles to today’s bishops.

Walton is skeptical, to say the least, of this move:

One has to wonder if the recent rise of Baptist bishops and evangelical charismatic authorities (think Joel Osteen and Rick Warren) represents a cultural reversal. Over the past three decades, aristocratic corporate cronyism, skyrocketing executive pay, and oligarchic elites have concretized the boundaries of American mobility and existence. It makes sense, then, that many “successful” religious leaders would embrace and spiritualize this power-grabbing culture.

I see his point, for sure, but given this is primarily an honorific, sort of like an ecclesiastical honorary doctorate, I worry less about Borders than the non-bishop megachurch icons who come closer to all-powerful CEOs than to guys like Borders who genuinely have put their bodies on the line in tough urban situations.

Or maybe it's just that all organizations bureaucratize over time. Sects become churches, and churches develop hierarchies, and hierarchies become more elaborate. Thank God that sort of thing never happens to universities.

Incidentally, I'm thinking about becoming a Blog Bishop. Can someone please loan me the headgear?

Bodies of Belief and Christian Nationists Revisited

Paul Harvey

Over at Juvenile Instructor, Jonathan Stapley has some interesting thoughts and important critiques on ritual healing among early American Baptists as covered in Janet Lindman's Bodies of Belief: Baptist Community in Early America, a book John Fea previously reviewed for us on this blog. As a researcher in early Mormon healing rituals, Stapley pays most attention to the coverage of healing rituals in Lindman's work, and finds some issues with some of the details provided there.

Meanwhile, and leaving the world of scholarship for the world of propaganda, for those following the Texas schoolbook controversy which we briefly covered last summer (in which various propagandists are trying to do to history what the creationists would like to do to science education), the Austin Statesman has a piece filling you in on the latest. Our contributor John Fea (who is quoted in the Austin Statesman, and is writing a primer on this subject which promises to be required reading) comments on the piece here, and Jon Rowe comments cogently here. John apologizes for saying (inadvertently and without remembering it later) that Peter Marshall et al are "out to lunch," but if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it ain't an ad hominem argument to suggest that it is a duck. The record of Marshall's public statements in particular (most recently about Katrina) suggests that ridicule is a perfectly legitimate response when a public figure makes ridiculous statements, but nonetheless exercises undue influence on important matters of history education.

Bodies and Baptists

John Fea

Baptists, according to Janet Moore Lindman in Bodies of Belief: Baptist Community in Early America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), believed in “a body-centered religion.” I must admit that I was initially confused by what she meant by this, but as I read through this compelling work of scholarship it became clear to me that Lindman is using the term “body” to describe both the individual human bodies of specific Baptist believers and the collective “body” of believers that made up the core of Baptist community in early America.

Lindman starts with two traditional chapters tracing the emergence of the Baptist movement in colonial Pennsylvania and Virginia. (Those interested in New England Baptists will find very little here. I would recommend going to works by Carla Pestana and Susan Juster). By focusing on early American Baptists in both places Lindman avoids the common temptation to paint all eighteenth-century Baptists as “stalwart believers” who “overcame persecution” and posed a radical threat to colonial religious establishments. This popular view, which was articulated best by Rhys Isaac in The Transformation of Virginia, fails to take into consideration the fact that the ecclesiastical nerve-center of early American Baptist life was Philadelphia and the surrounding mid-Atlantic. Here Baptists always enjoyed religious freedom. By giving mid-Atlantic Baptists a central place in her story, Lindman’s readers will get a much more balanced and accurate view of Baptist life in the period.

Frankly, I thought Lindman could have pushed this point even harder. Baptist historiography has been too Whig for too long. Eighteenth-century Baptists are only important to historians as revolutionary threats to establishment, models of the religious poor rising up against wealthy elites, evangelical egalitarians, or forerunners of American democracy. Mid-Atlantic Baptists, however, tended to be cautious egalitarians. They were of the middling sort in socio-economic status. And they were rather institutional and authoritative when it came to church governance. Some of them were staunch Old Sides during the First Great Awakening. Moreover, I have always wondered why no one is studying eighteenth-century Baptists as part of the Atlantic world. Were early American Baptists really so indigenous to the British colonial landscape?

Chapter One, “Little Tabernacles in the Wilderness,” is the best thing I have ever read on mid-Atlantic Baptist life. Lindman’s debt to Jon Butler is evident throughout this chapter. She concludes that the story of Baptists in Pennsylvania is the story of denominational order, particularly as it relates to the influence of the Philadelphia Baptist Association. But Lindman also argues that in the early years of Baptist life in the region Baptist identity was never entirely clear. Early Baptists, for example, were influenced by the followers of Quaker apostate George Keith. She writes: “The Keithian influence is evident in the adoption of Quaker practice by several Baptist churches, including bodily decorum in speech and dress.” Some early congregations “used numerals to denote days and months, authorized plain speaking and dressing, and prohibited sweating oaths or fighting.”

Lindman concentrates on the paradoxical nature of Baptist communities. Were they radical and egalitarian? Yes. But they were also quite conservative. Baptist views on race and gender contributed to this mixed identity. She writes:

Baptists adopted the spiritual equity of the New Testament but built an institutional structure based on racial and gender asymmetry; they supported the inclusion of blacks into church membership but created separatist policies and waffled over slavery; they recognized egalitarian notions among male and female members but limited the role of women in the institutional church; and finally they endorsed a circumscribed model of masculinity while white male members gained authority and dominance within church polity.

Lindman makes a successful attempt at analyzing Baptist conversion, ritual practice, and church discipline through the theoretical grid of gender and, to a lesser extent, race. These chapters make up the heart of the book. Baptist conversion was feminine in nature. It was emotional. It stirred the heart. It could lead to excessive bodily activity. It resulted in love and devotion between fellow believers. And it was similar to certain forms of African-American spirituality.

While Baptist conversion was an individual experience, it was also a communal one. Baptist clergy worked hard at creating a “body” of believers whose individual “bodies” had experienced conversion. This kind of community was fostered by rituals such as water baptism, the laying on of hands, and the practice of anointing with oil. Lindman writes: “The convert underwent a highly personalized experience of spiritual transformation and then willingly placed him-or herself and his or her body under the command of other believers in a specified religious community.”

Membership in the Baptist body required placing one’s individual body under the authority of church leadership. Baptist church discipline was conservative and masculine. “Through the process of defining and maintaining orderly conduct among their members,” Lindman notes, “Baptist churches infused a new religious authority into a social order based on gender and race. The Baptist religion repositioned the bodies of its believers for their successful entry into the godly community at the same time it marked them with secular conceptions of difference.” In the end, Baptists advocated a “theology of democratic religion that welcomes all true believers,” but disciplined individuals in ways that “coalesced with the dominant hierarchies of secular society.”

In her last three chapters, Lindman continues her treatment of race and gender in the early Baptist community. Chapter Six, “Sisters in Christ,” focuses on spiritual kinship among Baptist women and the battle for women’s suffrage in Baptist meetings. Chapter Seven, “Free People in the Lord,” argues that Baptists—both in Virginia and Pennsylvania—did not fully embrace the abolitionist cause despite their egalitarian theology. My favorite chapter is Chapter Eight, “The Manly Christian.” Here Lindman argues that Baptist belief required a new form of masculinity that rejected the rational, Enlightenment, competitive, independent, camaraderie-driven masculinity of secular society. At the heart of this new Baptist masculinity was not only the embrace of a conversion experience informed by certain feminist qualities, but also the determination to do spiritual battle with the devil for one’s soul and the courage to face adversity through persecution.

The best thing about Lindman’s book is the way her theoretical reflections are grounded in meticulous research in Baptist church records, diaries, and other archival sources. If you have one book in your library on early American Baptists it should be Bodies of Belief. This is a major contribution to American religious and gender history.

American Denominational History

Paul Harvey

Is there anything more dreaded, or derided, in American religious studies than "denominational history." At one time, probably not, since such studies tended to the antiquarian or the hagiographical. In recent years that has changed; and while it still does not count as "hip," it is simply a fact that denominations remain the major institutional expression of American Christianity, at least, and arguably of other religious expressions as well.

American Denominational History: Perspectives on the Past, Prospects for the Future, edited by Keith Harper (University of Alabama Press, 2008), is a new essay collection that surveys the field and projects possibilities for study in the future. It should be of particular help to graduate students and others seeking contemporary scholarly overviews and historiographical syntheses. Here's the table of contents:

Introduction, by Keith Harper

Catholic Distinctiveness and the Challenge of American Denominationalism by Amy Koehlinger

New Directions on the Congregational Way by Margaret Bendroth

Presbyterians in America: Denominational History and the Quest for Identity by Sean Michael Lucas (you can read this essay here)

From the Margin to the Middle to Somewhere In Between: An Overview of American Baptist Historiography by Keith Harper

"Everything Arose Just as the Occasion Offered": Defining Methodist Identity through the History of Methodist Polity by Jennifer L. Woodruff Tait

Black Protestantism: A Historiographical Appraisal by Paul Harvey

Mormon Historiography by David J. Whittaker

Interpreting American Pentecostal Origins: Retrospect and Prospect by Randall J. Stephens

"We're All Evangelicals Now": The Existential and Backward Historiography of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism by Barry Hankins

Bodies of Belief

The Church Body
Paul Harvey

Note on a new book of interest -- we'll have a more extensive review of this just-published work up sometime in the very near future. The book's main thrust, based on the summary below, appears to go along well with a number of other recent studies of early Baptist bodies, including portions of Charles Irons's Origins of Proslavery Christianity, which we've discussed extensively on this blog before, as well as Jewell Spangler, Virginians Reborn: Anglican Monopoly, Evangelical Dissent, and the Rise of Baptists in the Eighteenth Century. Evangelical democracy is looking less democratic than it used to in the historiography, a healthy corrective I think, and one that accords better with how these early church bodies actually worked in practice, and how they fit into society. Anyway, here's a description of Lindman's new work; more to come on it later.
___________________________________________

Bodies of Belief: Baptist Community in Early America
Janet Moore Lindman

The American Baptist church originated in British North America as "little tabernacles in the wilderness," isolated seventeenth-century congregations that grew into a mainstream denomination by the early nineteenth century. The common view of this transition casts these evangelicals as radicals who were on society's fringe during the colonial period, only to become conservative by the nineteenth century after they had achieved social acceptance. In Bodies of Belief, Janet Moore Lindman challenges this accepted, if oversimplified, characterization of early American Baptists by arguing that they struggled with issues of equity and power within the church during the colonial period, and that evangelical religion was both radical and conservative from its beginning.

Bodies of Belief traces the paradoxical evolution of the Baptist religion, including the struggles of early settlement and church building, varieties of theology and worship, and the multivalent meaning of conversation, ritual, and godly community. Lindman demonstrates how the body—both individual bodies and the collective body of believers—was central to Baptist definition and maintenance of faith. The Baptist religion galvanized believers through a visceral transformation of religious conversion, which was then maintained through ritual. Yet the Baptist body was differentiated by race and gender. While all believers were spiritual equals, white men remained at the top of a rigid church hierarchy. Drawing on church books, associational records, diaries, letters, sermon notes, ministerial accounts, and early histories from the Mid-Atlantic and the Chesapeake as well as New England, this innovative study of early American religion asserts that the Baptist religion was predicated simultaneously on a radical spiritual ethos and a conservative social outlook.

More on Steven Waldman, Founding Faith

PAUL HARVEY

John Fea gave our blog an extensive and thoughtful review of STeven Waldman's Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America here (or just scroll down).

Terry Gross's interview on Fresh Air with Waldman is linked here. An introductory blurb:

Fresh Air from WHYY, March 11, 2008 · Was America meant to be a Christian nation? Author Steven Waldman attempts to answer this and other questions related to America's religious history in his new book, Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America.

Waldman is the co-founder of Beliefnet.com, a website devoted to spirituality and faith issues. In tandem with his book, Beliefnet has opened an online archive of historical documents related to the separation of church and state, and religious freedom in America.

There's also a short excerpt from the volume linked to the Fresh Air site.

Review: Steven Waldman's "Founding Faith"

BY JOHN FEA

Just when I thought that there was nothing left to say about religion and the founding of the United States, Steven Waldman has come along with Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America. I realize that some readers of this blog might whine and moan about another book on this subject, but if we have to deal with a new biography of Abraham Lincoln every year, then what’s wrong with another book about faith and the founding, especially when it is framed as carefully as this one.

Waldman, the co-founder, CEO, and editor-in-chief of Beliefnet.Com, has written a useful book. Founding Faith is not a work of original scholarship, but Waldman relies upon the very best studies in the field to craft his compelling narrative. His research in primary sources—mostly the writings of the Founding Fathers—is also impressive. The defenders of Christian America will have a hard time arguing with him or accusing him of being too reliant on secondary material.

Founding Faith is unlike any other popular trade book on religion and the founding era. It is actually quite balanced. (In terms of thesis and style, Jon Meacham’s American Gospel is its closest competitor. Meacham organizes his book around the idea of civil religion. Waldman’s focus is on religious freedom). The book presents a clear argument against the Christian America view, but Waldman has no axe to grind. In other words, his study is quite different from books with titles such as Moral Minority, The Godless Constitution, Liars for Jesus, and American Fascists. Neither is it as polemical as Randall Balmer’s Thy Kingdom Come. Founding Faith comes with ringing endorsements from Joseph Ellis, Mark Noll, Bill Bennett, Jim Wallis, Walter Isaacson, and George Stephanopoulos. This is certainly a diverse bunch!

Waldman sets the record straight on several issues that have been debated fiercely by those engaged in what he calls the “custody battle” over the American founding. Seventeenth-century America, he rightly argues, was not founded as a bastion of religious freedom, but as a place where religious establishments prevailed. Scholars will already know this, but it is still nice to see such a clean and direct hit on the Whiggish interpretations of the British colonies promoted by many of the so-called Christian America writers. Waldman also makes it clear that most of the Founders were not deists, especially if we define a “deist” as a person who rejects the idea that God acts in human history. Nearly all the Founders believed in providence. I am sure that Susan Jacoby and others and still others may have something to say about this, but Waldman is correct here.

It is now common for those on the right and the left to try to prove that America is or isn’t a Christian nation based on the religious beliefs of the Founders. Waldman reminds us of the logical problems with this argument. Just because one of the Founders was a Christian—or even an evangelical Christian—doesn’t mean that he was an opponent of the separation of church and state. The opposite is also true. Just because one of the Founders did not believe all the tenets of orthodox Christianity does not always mean that he rejected the idea that Christianity was good for the republic. This argument seems obvious, but it is often missing from the popular religious histories of the founding era.

Waldman offers some interesting historical nuggets that are definitely worth pondering. For example, was Thomas Jefferson an early proponent of “intelligent design?” Waldman thinks so. Do the conservatives have the best argument in the debate over whether or not the natural rights described in the Declaration of Independence can be traced to historic Christianity? Waldman believes they do. Did James Madison’s pessimistic view of human nature, as seen in Federalist #10 and elsewhere, stem from his Calvinist training as a student of John Witherspoon at Princeton? Perhaps, says Waldman.

The heroes in this book are Madison and the Baptists. Waldman advocates strongly for the application of Madison’s views on the separation of church and state to our contemporary religious debates. Unlike founders such as Washington, Adams, or even Franklin, Madison believed that religion and government should never mix. He proposed a wall between separation of church and state (though he did not use the term “wall”) well before the passing of the First Amendment, the writing of Thomas Jefferson’s 1809 letter to the Danbury Baptists, and the twentieth-century affirmations of the Supreme Court on the subject. For Madison, when government stays out of religion, religion thrives. Waldman agrees.

Baptists helped Madison shape his views on church and state. The persecution of these evangelicals in Virginia prompted him to write his now famous Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments (1785). Baptists also lobbied heavily (against the Episcopalian evangelical Patrick Henry, who favored a form of establishment) for Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, (1786). They were also a major force behind Jefferson’s election to the presidency in 1800. (The practice of courting the evangelical vote has a long history!). For Waldman, the irony in all of this is that religious descendants of these eighteenth-century evangelical Baptists are now, in the twenty-first century, leading the charge to challenge this view of the separation of church and state.

There is not a whole lot to quibble with in Founding Faith. Waldman does embrace the argument that the Great Awakening—with its rebellion against clerical authority and democratic ideals—set the American Revolution in motion. As many of our readers already know, some historians have questioned whether there is any relationship between the Awakening and the Revolution (myself included). Moreover, those who favor a greater place for religion in the public square will have problems with Waldman’s conclusion that Madison is the best model for dealing with our present-day controversies over the relationship between church and state.

Finally, I wonder if this book will get into the right hands. Some on the Christian Right will read it, and may even appreciate it, but few will be converted to Waldman's view of American history. If he is correct these defenders of Christian America will need to close shop. And don’t expect that to happen anytime soon. Founding Faith will make the members of the ACLU and other supporters of complete separation a bit uncomfortable because Waldman is not afraid to say that some of the Christian Right’s historical analysis may be correct. But in the end, liberals will breathe a sigh of relief after reading his strong defense of Madison.

If there was ever a book that might convince some readers—on both the left and the right-- to rethink or tweak their views on religion and the founding, Founding Faith may be it. This is now the best popular book on the subject. It will make a big and well-deserved splash when it is released next week.

Southern Baptists: Diversifying to Survive

PAUL HARVEY

The title of an interesting article in yesterday's Washington Post. A brief excerpt:

Faced with a crisis of aging and departing members, the nation's largest non-Catholic Christian bodies -- Southern Baptists, United Methodists, Lutherans and Presbyterians -- are reaching out to minorities in ways they never have before. . . . "You can almost calculate the time when we close the door and turn off the lights if we don't become a more diverse church," said Sherman Hicks, executive director of multicultural ministries for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, a 4.9 million-member denomination that is 97 percent white.

But of all the denominations seeking to diversify, many agree that the Southern Baptist Convention -- an association of about 40,000 congregations that make up the nation's largest Protestant denomination -- has the farthest to travel.

From its 1845 birth in Georgia as a haven for white Baptists who supported slavery, the SBC has had troubled relations with African Americans. For 150 years, by its own admission, it was hostile to black progress, often speaking in favor of Jim Crow laws. But in 1995, the Southern Baptists did an about-face, issuing a public apology for their history of bigotry and vowing to "eradicate racism in all its forms" from its ranks.

These days, the faith that was once proudly white now touts the fact that almost 20 percent of its congregations are predominantly black, Latino or Asian. Hundreds of minorities serve in leadership posts in its state conventions, seminaries and other organizations. The SBC Mission Board estimates that the number of black members has doubled to about 1 million since the 1995 apology.

Harvey on _Baptists in America_

KELLY BAKER

Our illustrious managing editor, Paul Harvey, reviewed Bill Leonard's Baptists in America for H-Amstdy. For this informative, if encyclopedic work, Harvey has praise for the breadth of coverage, but he turns a critical eye to the small presence of Southern Baptist history. According to Harvey, Leonard aptly presents the tension between "soul liberty" and "church purity." Here's an excerpt from the review:

The opening chapter quickly surveys the basics of Baptist history from its origins in the early seventeenth century and growth in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to a position of cultural dominance in the South in the twentieth century. Subsequent chapters provide summaries of Baptist beliefs and practices in all their bewildering variety, Baptist styles of theology, race and gender in Baptist life and history, and Baptist positions on various sides in the recent culture wars. Curiously underplayed, to my mind, is Southern Baptist history in particular. I say "curiously" given Leonard's preeminence as a cultural interpreter of Southern Baptists. I say "underplayed" given that Baptists reached a predominance in the South, among both whites and blacks, that they did not achieve elsewhere to the same degree. This is an encyclopedic and reference tool sort of book, not a strongly interpretive argument and analysis, but I expected a greater degree of focus on Baptists in the region of the United States where, unarguably, they have played a more significant role than anywhere else.

Baptists appear here as a kind of case study in miniature of some of the broader themes and paradoxes of American Protestant history. Baptist theology is a varied as could possibly be imagined within a generally evangelical framework--ranging from the nearly Universalist "No-Hellers" of Appalachia to the "Hell-for-Just-About-Everyone-ers"of the Primitive and "Two-Seed in the Spirit" varieties, to just about every position on the Calvinist-Arminian spectrum in between for the majority of American Baptists. On questions of social policy, politics, gender, and race, Baptists may be found everywhere on a continuum from, say, proslavery theorist Thornton Stringfellow and racist demagogue Strom Thurmond (misspelled in the book), to social gospel pioneer Walter Rauschenbusch, to civil rights activist Jesse Jackson, to black spiritual earth mother Maya Angelou. What defines Baptist history--and, arguably, all of Protestant history--is the constant tension between "conversionist particularlism and pluralistic libertarianism" (p. 253). Of American thought on ethnicity, the historian David Hollinger once asked, "How wide the circle of we?" Baptists constantly ask the same question and redefine their answers, contingent in part on nearly universal Baptist themes of congregational democracy and soul liberty but also on the threads of associationalism and evangelical standards of sin, redemption, and conversion.

For the full text, click here.

Exit Polls, Trees Falling in the Forest, and Southern Baptists

PAUL HARVEY

What if they didn't give an exit poll when everybody came? In today's New York Times, Peter Steinfels asks, "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? If a born-again Christian votes in a Democratic primary and no exit poll records it, does it matter?"
Meanwhile, moderate Baptists of all stripes are trying to get their groove back -- this time in the New Baptist Covenant. My college buddy Bill Underwood, current president of Mercer University, was there, along with notable recent Baptist presidents Clinton and Carter and representatives from a variety of black Baptist denominations and the North American Baptist fellowship. See also 30 Baptist Groups Build Bridge Toward Unity.

In recent years, moderate Baptists have been like the scrawny kid at school who keeps getting beaten up by the big boys. This one appears to have more promise, as "recovering" Southern Baptists seemed to have moved on from an obsession with "the controversy" and gotten on with the business of creating coalitions beyond the historic divisions:

Historian Walter Shurden, recently retired director of the Center for Baptist Studies at Mercer University and one of the early organizers of the convocation, said the event could become "a major step in racial reconciliation and gender recognition of Baptists in North America."

"It's the most significant Baptist meeting in my life, after playing in the Baptist yard 55 years or so," he said. "I've never been to a Baptist meeting where there was the equality as well as the presence" of multi-racial, multi-gender participation. "It bears the marks of the ministry of Jesus."

Gendered Baptists

Reading through Catherine Brekus, ed., The Religious History of American Women, discussed further below, reminded me of the case of Sheri Klouda, recently fired from her position as professor of Hebrew at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. The irony of it is that this may be the straw, or at least one straw, that broke the back of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) leadership; in a remarkable series of posts, Oklahoma conservative Baptist Wade Burleson blogged about this case and kept it in the news last winter and spring. The orthodox SBC conservatives (including Burleson, who remains proud of driving "liberalism"--his term for what religious historians would refer to as "moderately conservative and mainstream evangelicalism" -- out of the SBC over the last twenty years) appear to be splintering in a pattern remarkably parallel to the (possible) fracturing of the national conservative political coalition.

Paige Patterson, president of the seminary, apparently stirred up quite a storm on this one -- but a storm from his erstwhile allies in the so-called "conservative resurgence." They were quiet when Molly Marshall and others were purged from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, perhaps because the victims in this case could be tagged and and thus exiled as "liberals," but the combination of Klouda's orthodox views and the straitened circumstances of her family made this purge look especially Stalinist.

The story received widespread coverage last winter/spring (back in my halycon pre-blog days). This latest ideological purge in the SBC is out of the news now, but readers of the blog can pick back up on the story from the standpoint of an outraged insider conservative.

In the latter portion of my book Freedom's Coming, I suggested that "gender has supplanted race as a defining principle of god-ordained hierarchy." If I did not feel so badly for Professor Klouda, I might thank President Patterson for so nicely exemplifying my thesis.