By David Wilkinson
Another Baptist editor has been ushered out. And that thud you hear is another door to Baptist freedom slamming shut behind him.
Technically, Norman Jameson is still editor of the Biblical Recorder of North Carolina, one of Baptists’ historic newspapers, until the end of the year. Technically, Jameson was not fired; he chose to resign. He did so with characteristic grace. But the reality is that the Biblical Recorder’s board of directors also made a choice. Rather than stand behind the editor they hired just over three years ago and the outstanding work he has done by every measurable standard, they threw him under the bus of the so-called “Conservative Resurgence.” The Resurgents want their own man in the editor’s chair, and Jameson is not their man.
Rather than stand behind principle, the board caved in to pressure. Rather than serve the broader mission of the paper entrusted to them, the board chose to serve the narrow agenda of those who now control the state convention. So they patted their editor on the back, thanked him for a job well done, intimated that it was nothing personal, and showed him the door.
The precipitating incident was a letter to convention leaders from Sandy Beck, a disgruntled director of missions, warning that if Jameson were not removed as editor, there would be a motion from the floor of the upcoming convention meeting to eliminate the 45 percent of the Recorder’s income that comes from the state convention’s Cooperative Program budget. That was nothing new; Beck had made the same threat last year. However, when it became clear the Recorder’s directors would not rise to a rigorous defense of the paper and its editor, Jameson decided to step aside rather than put the paper at financial risk.
The defunding threat may well have succeeded. Why? Because Tar Heel Baptists who value the role of a free press as an indispensable corollary to the Baptist ideals of freedom of conscience and priesthood of believers wouldn’t have been there to defend the editor and to champion the principle. Excluded from any meaningful participation in the convention, most of them have moved on.
The paper will now be remade in the image of those in places of leadership and those who pull the strings behind the scenes. The 177-year-old paper has been snatched from the hands of women and men in the pews and delivered to the Baptist bishops who will decide what people need to know. For those in power, unquestioned allegiance trumps independent thinking and fair-mindedness (a narrow approach, by the way, that ultimately will not sit well with younger Baptist leaders, who have an unsettling penchant for thinking for themselves).
Norman Jameson
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This turn of events was bathed in irony. The announcement of Jameson’s resignation came on the same day the board of directors of Associated Baptist Press commemorated the organization’s 20th anniversary as a free and autonomous news service and also honored Charles Overby, the board’s inaugural chair. Overby, a former newspaper editor and now chairman and CEO of the Freedom Forum and Newseum, has been a stalwart advocate for a free press and the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment.
A few weeks earlier, the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee quietly disposed of a motion made at the SBC’s annual meeting that Baptist Press, the convention’s official news agency, become a separate entity with its own board of directors. Even in a politically monolithic convention that has evangelistically expurgated any not-conservative-enough voices from its ranks, some folks recognize that Southern Baptists may not be best served by a press service owned and controlled by the Executive Committee. In fact, the maker of the motion was a conservative Baptist state paper editor.
Finally, at the time the Rev. Beck was dashing off his threatening letter, the current edition of the Recorder featured a story about retired North Carolina pastor M.O. Owens, one of the forerunners of the “Conservative Resurgence.” Typically, Jameson’s story was well-written, fair and accurate. (I wonder how the board would have reacted if the editor had written a feature about one of the forerunners of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.)
Norman Jameson and I have been soul mates since our student days at Oklahoma Baptist University some 35 years ago. When he was elected editor of the Biblical Recorder, the reaction of mutual friends ranged from surprised to incredulous. Many of them asked me why Norman would accept the position since his commitment to fairness would inevitably lead to his undoing. My answer: “Because he was born to do this.” Norman possessed the training, experience, skills, intellect, spiritual maturity and Christian integrity to lead a Baptist paper during tumultuous times for Baptists and for print journalism. I knew that for two decades he had prayerfully nurtured a calling to be an editor of a Baptist state paper. When the invitation came, he was ready, even if the environment had changed dramatically.
And those same qualities will undergird and guide him now in this unanticipated detour on his vocational journey.