WASHINGTON (ABP) — The lives of prominent Baptist public figures mighty and mediocre alike took center stage at the annual meeting of the Baptist History and Heritage Society June 1-3 in Washington.
The society — for professional Baptist historians and amateur Baptist history buffs — met in the nation's capital to highlight Baptists who played prominent roles in shaping American civic and religious life.
The meeting was held at Washington's First Baptist Church, spiritual home to two presidents. It featured society members presenting papers on prominent preachers like Billy Graham and Walter Rauschenbusch who had an effect beyond the Baptist world. Baptist elected officials like President Jimmy Carter, who taught Sunday school at First Baptist, and late Rep. Brooks Hays (D-Ark.), who was active at another Washington church while in Congress, were also highlighted.
Hays, arguably, sacrificed his political career to be that rarity of rarities in the civil rights movement-era South: a white believer in integration and racial equality. Participants heard a paper by Fred Williams, a historian at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, on Hays' fall from political grace even while he served as president of the Southern Baptist Convention.
Hays, who was born in 1898, watched as his native Southland descended from the relative racial progress of the Reconstruction era into ever-stricter patterns of racial segregation as Jim Crow laws took hold — and the Ku Klux Klan's influence and lynching increased. However, Williams said, Hays' understanding of the Bible's teachings about justice and his education and early career working with poor black farmers for the United States Department of Agriculture planted the seeds for his later stances during the height of the 1957-58 integration crisis at Little Rock Central High School.
Hays, who had served eight terms as a popular congressman representing the Little Rock area, also served as one of the Southern Baptist Convention's last lay presidents during the period of the crisis. Hays, an active member of Little Rock's Second Baptist Church, opposed Gov. Orval Faubus' decision to close the city's public schools rather than integrate them. Hays' church was one of several in the city to operate a private school for the students left without an educational outlet during the period — but the only one to do so on an integrated basis.
That year, Hays survived a challenge from a segregationist candidate in the Democratic primary — which, during that era in Central Arkansas, was tantamount to the general election. But just a week before the November election, a segregationist member of the Little Rock School announced he would be a write-in candidate in opposition to Hays, who ended up losing by less than 2,000 votes.
While the legitimacy of the election remains in doubt — a House inquest found Hays' opponent had committed election fraud, but did not remove him from office — Hays “gave up his political life over a matter of principle,” said Terry Carter, who delivered the paper in Williams' absence.
A factor in his loss was a widely-circulated newspaper photo of Hays that was taken at the 1958 National Baptist Convention meeting in Chicago. Hays, who was attending the meeting of the historically African-American denomination in his capacity as SBC president, was photographed with his arms around two black ministers.
“He lost while doing his duty as president of the SBC,” Carter, a Christian history professor at Arkansas' Ouachita Baptist University, said.
Hays “radiated….an almost kind of religious dedication and devotion that was very unusual” in Washington said Warren Cikins, a longtime aide to Hays who was present for the meeting.
Historians heard about a slightly less-noble Baptist politician as well. Samuel Creed, pastor of First Baptist Church in Ashland City, Tenn., detailed the career of the first Baptist to serve as president of the United States: Warren Harding.
He wasn't exactly the model Baptist, though. “Perhaps he is the least effective of the four Baptist presidents,” Creed said. “Jimmy Carter likely ranks first in applying his faith to national and global policies.”
Harding's brief administration — from 1921 until his untimely death in 1923 — was scandal-plagued, mainly thanks to several cronies from his early years in Ohio whom the Republican appointed to cabinet positions.
His father described Harding as an “atheist” in his early days, and he was known throughout his life for gambling, drinking — even stocking the White House with bootleg liquor during the height of Prohibition — and marital infidelity. Creed said one of his biographers noted that Harding would often steal glances at his longtime mistress while both were seated for worship at Washington's Calvary Baptist Church — she in the balcony, he on the floor.
However, Creed added, Harding was shaped by his Baptist history by promising Americans a “return to normalcy” for a public that “longed for the old days” during a period of rapid cultural change in the nation.
Brent Walker, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, detailed the public contributions of two of his predecessors — J.M. Dawson and James Dunn.
“The often cited credo, 'Bible in one hand, newspaper in the other,' may have been a tad over used, but it aptly describes Dawson's and Dunn's biblically grounded social ethic and policy activism,” Walker said. “As churchmen thoroughly steeped in Baptist heritage, they understood, as Dunn often has said, 'You don't speak for Baptists. You speak to Baptists.' Well, they spoke for many Baptists and to an entire culture in need of a prophetic witness as to the centrality of religious liberty and the indispensability of church-state separation.”
The 100-plus participants at the meeting also gave several awards for contributions to Baptist history, adopted a revised budget for 2006 reflecting increased contributions and approved a 2007 budget of $302,835 — an increase of 24 percent over the initial 2006 budget of $244,000.
Participants also re-elected Carol Crawford Holcomb, a religion professor at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor in Belton, Texas, as president of the society.
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