Furman 20 years after Break with S.C. Baptists

   Remarkable piece in the current Furman Alumni Magazine on Furman 20 years after its historic transition. Historian AV Huff names the break in 90-92 as one of the three most momentous events in the schools 150 year history.
      In the larger context of Joe Crespino's recent bio of Strom Thurmond, how the regions Textile culture and race politics of the Dixiecrats transformed into the Sunbelt and became a template for Republican politics of the last quarter of the 20th Century morphing into the Tea Party standoff we have in the US House now; well Furman's Baptist break is a big piece of the puzzle indeed.

     From Charles Daniel's introduction of Roger Milliken to Strom Thurmond in the early 60's, to the playground S.C. became for Lee Atwater politics, Furman's Baptist history is nuanced indeed.

  Furman Chapel is named for Daniel; and Furman Religion proffs Robert Crapps and Jack Flanders became the Bane of Paul Pressler with their Higher critical look at the Old Testament People of the Covenant.

   Pressler became a nominee of Bush 41 for Ethics Czar and was key strategist with Harry Dent's pastor Ed young for Atwater, then Rove strategies.

    So lot goin on at Furman for sure, more than just Adam and Eve and whether the first eleven chapters of Genesis were Science or Faith Instruction.

   Then you place Chick Fil A's Dan Cathy in my religion class with Crapps in 71 and bring Dent's daughter  Dolly to campus the next year and it's Katie Bar the Door; or the stuff of grand fiction if you weave with biblical parable into our Country's narrative.

    I'm not makin this stuff up.

    It's a shame Marshall Frady is not still with us to go on panel this Spring at Furman for "the larger implications" as it were

http://www2.furman.edu/sites/fumag/Documents/FM12%20Fall.pdf