Some of my former fellow seminarians reminded me on social media at the beginning of this week that 31 years ago on March 9, 1994, Russell Dilday was fired by trustees as president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary after ultraconservatives had gained control of the Southern Baptist Convention.
I was a doctoral student there at the time and remember well the events of the day, which began when someone opened the door to the classroom where I was teaching an 8 a.m. theology course to tell us what was happening in the trustee meeting.
Steven Harmon
Thirty-one years later, before our worship service at St. John’s Baptist Church in Charlotte, N.C., on this March 9, I was assisting with a culling project in our church library. As I perused the shelves of books devoted to Baptist studies, I was struck by the number of books in the collection published in the 1970s by Broadman Press, the official publishing agency of the SBC, that directly addressed then-controversial matters of race, gender, poverty and peacemaking in a thoughtful manner, asking readers to consider perspectives on these issues that in the midst of today’s controversies would be considered “woke.”
Here are some of the Broadman Press titles from that decade that caught my eye:
- J.T. Ford, The Truth About War (1970)
- Emmanuel L. McCall, The Black Christian Experience (1972)
- Welton Gaddy, Profile of a Christian Citizen (1974)
- William M. Pinson, Applying the Gospel: Suggestions for Christian Social Action in a Local Church (1975)
- Harry N. Hollis, editor, Christian Freedom for Women and Other Human Beings (1975)
- Sarah Frances Anders, Woman Alone: Confident and Creative (1976)
- James Edward Wood, Nationhood and the Kingdom (1977)
- Dick Brogan, Not Our Kind of Folks? (1978)
- Leon MacBeth, Women in Baptist Life (1979)
- Bob E. Patterson and Eric C. Rust, Science, Faith, and Revelation: An Approach to Christian Philosophy, (1979)
There once was a genuinely progressive trajectory within the SBC, not on a fringe periphery but with some representation within the official institutions and agencies of the SBC.
But there also was a genuinely conservative trajectory in the SBC that ultimately gained control, leading to the events of March 9, 1994, and many other things besides.
While in the 1920s there were skirmishes over evolution and other issues related to the fundamentalist-modernist controversies then raging in other North American denominations, the institutional structures of the SBC managed at that time to keep an ultraconservative fringe from gaining control, making space for the co-existence of the conservative and progressive trajectories within the SBC for the next several decades.
“Things could have been otherwise than they are now in the SBC.”
But as I worked in the church library this past Sunday, I came across a book published by the Baptist Sunday School Board of the SBC in 1923 that attributed the 1845 split of the SBC from the Triennial Convention, which in the 19th century had united Baptists North and South, to the Triennial Convention’s “assumption of undue authority” as “it undertook to pass judgment on a debated point that related to politics rather than to missions.” The author was referring to the Triennial Convention’s decision not to send missionaries who had owned slaves.
For the curious, the full bibliographical reference is Gaines S. Dobbins, The Efficient Church: A Study of Polity and Methods in the Light of New Testament Principles and Modern Conditions and Needs. Gaines served on the faculty of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., from 1920 to 1956, having been invited to join the faculty by President E.Y. Mullins.
This ongoing resentment of the Triennial Convention’s proper moral clarity on an inescapably political issue, even in 1923 within the more mainstream (not ultraconservative fringe) institutions of the SBC, presaged a now solidly ultraconservative SBC in which its seminary presidents issue a statement declaring Critical Race Theory to be incompatible with the Baptist Faith and Message, the confessional statement of Southern Baptists.
In other words, things could have been otherwise than they are now in the SBC. There’s an argument to be made that the ultraconservative takeover of the SBC made substantial contributions to our current American political predicament. But the genuinely progressive trajectory that once was present within the SBC still lives among the Baptists formerly known as Southern: the Alliance of Baptists and the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, both of which are now the denominational affiliations of the congregation in which I had these church library musings before the worship service.
Perhaps one day a future writer for Baptist News Global will suggest there’s an argument to be made that these Baptists formerly known as Southern made their own substantial ecclesial contributions to transformative resistance to the powers that currently threaten the good health of the American civil order. May it be so.
Steven R. Harmon serves as professor of historical theology at Gardner-Webb University School of Divinity in Boiling Springs, N.C. His most recent books are Baptists, Catholics, and the Whole Church: Partners in the Pilgrimage to Unity and Seeds of the Church: Towards an Ecumenical Baptist Ecclesiology.