If an “evangelical center” emerges from the current shake-up in American politics, will moderate Baptists be part of it?
It depends on how comfortable moderate Baptists are with being considered “evangelicals” in the first place.
Moderate and progressive Baptists certainly share many beliefs and public-policy goals with the non-fundamentalist evangelicals making their presence felt on the public scene for the first time in three decades.
But Baptists aren't technically evangelicals at all, most historians say. They come from a different theological and denominational lineage.
However, some theologians counter, if you look simply at what Baptists believe and how they practice their faith, they look very much like evangelicals.
That debate might make for interesting table conversation when moderate or progressive Baptists get together with kin from other denominational traditions. But then there's that whole Religious Right thing. Its inflexible political agenda and conservative theology have turned off centrist Baptists and saddled evangelical centrists with a negative public image.
“Fundamentalists have hijacked the term ‘evangelical,' ” lamented Baptist theologian Roger Olson, a Northern evangelical who moved to the Southern Baptist-dominated South a few years ago to teach.
A professor of theology at Baylor University's George W. Truett Theological Seminary, Olson is more familiar with traditional evangelicalism than are the moderate Baptists with whom he associates in Waco, Texas.
Olson and others who embrace the “evangelical” label are trying hard to rehabilitate the definition to include non-fundamentalists. His latest book, How to Be Evangelical Without Being Conservative, is one attempt.
“If you define evangelicalism as core doctrinal beliefs, there's no reason why Baptists would not be evangelicals,” agreed ethicist David Gushee, a Southern Baptist moderate who moves easily in the broader evangelical world. Baptists and evangelicals share beliefs in “the inspired Word of God, the importance of personal experience, living out their faith in every area of life, and the obligation to share their faith,” he said.
“Most moderate, former-SBC Christians are evangelical Christians, and most are evangelical centrists,” added Gushee, a professor of ethics at Mercer University and a columnist for Associated Baptist Press. His recent book, The Future of Faith in American Politics, tracks the resurgence of the evangelical center as a significant political force.
Unlike Gushee, Olson prefers a definition of evangelicals based not on common doctrine but common Christian practices, which he describes as a “Jesus-centered piety.”
Seen in that light, Olson said, moderates in the South “are not as different as they think” from Northern evangelicals, who are far outnumbered in the North by Catholics, mainline Christians and those of other faiths.
Most historians date the evangelical movement to the early-and-mid-20th- century United States, when evangelicals offered an alternative to both mainline Protestant liberalism and reactionary fundamentalism. Baptists in America, who generally were not part of that struggle, grew out of European Anabaptist and British Baptist roots in the 16th century.
But Gushee contends the evangelical movement also has roots in an earlier era. “If you trace it back to the Protestant renewal movements all the way back to Luther, then I think Baptists are very much evangelicals,” he said.
“I have worked alongside evangelical Methodists, evangelical Pentecostals,” Gushee said. “They are brothers and sisters. There are distinctives about being Baptist, but there is also commonality with other Bible-believing Christians.”
But Gushee and Olson concede many moderate Baptists don't want to be linked to evangelicals today because of the group's perceived negative image. In recent decades, the popular definition of “evangelical” has become more akin to “social conservative” — particularly on the hot-button issues of abortion and gay rights.
Historian Bill Leonard, an expert on Baptist origins, said Baptists' discomfort with evangelicalism predates the Religious Right.
“Moderate Baptists certainly have affinity with classic evangelicalism, but they have also been concerned about several aspects of the movement,” said Leonard, dean of the Wake Forest University Divinity School in North Carolina.
He also cited the movement's penchant for a rationalistic approach to theology and its mostly regional appeal: “Some said evangelicalism was a ‘Northern phenomenon.' ”
Likewise, moderates' theological debates with Southern Baptist conservatives “often soured moderate Baptists toward identifying with any movement that seemed too doctrinaire,” Leonard said in an e-mail interview.
“On the other hand, there are indeed many moderate Baptists who are unashamedly evangelical in their approach to doctrine, faith and ethics, insisting that evangelicalism is the overarching movement that will unite Baptists around categories distinct from the old moderate-conservative debates that were present in the Southern Baptist Convention.”
The discomfort was also present on the other side of the fence, he said.
“Many traditional evangelicals, especially north of Baltimore, have been hesitant to include Baptists in the South in the evangelical camp, in part because [the Southern Baptists] seemed less interested in classical theology and more concerned about popular, pietistic religion, and in part because [the Northern evangelicals] did not fully understand the ethos of Southern Protestantism and its culture.”
On that point, Olson agreed.
“Minnesota and Texas are totally different,” he said. Even when they share many opinions and beliefs, evangelicals North and South “just don't understand each other.”
“The takeover of the SBC is so unique, people in the North just shake their heads,” he said. “Until I got here I couldn't even comprehend that.”
“The great tragedy,” Gushee added about the SBC, “is a great denomination came under control of a party that required leadership to be aligned with the evangelical right.”
Gushee recently left a teaching position at Union University, a conservative Baptist school in Tennessee closely tied to the SBC, and found a more tolerant academic climate at Mercer University in Georgia.
He said the welcome he has received is “the same spirit that welcomed me” when he left Catholicism as a teenager and ventured into a Baptist church. He said he is hopeful that one day “that natural diversity is allowed to surface again” among Southern Baptists.
He said he sees some “stirrings” indicating that is possible, but he added, “I'm just glad my future doesn't depend on it.”