Southern Baptists Rotten Theology from Texas Regulars through the Bush era to Trump
I can't do the remedial reading for you but this blog will make the most sense if you are up to speed on Wuthnow's Rough Country, Molly Worthen's Apostles of Reason, Marie Griffith's Moral Combat, have a clue who George W. Truett was and can distinguish him from WA Criswell and Franklin Graham and understand what Bill Moyers was gettin at in his 1987 PBS documentary on how Paul Pressler of the TExas Regulars and Exxon Oil was trying to sabotage the Southern Baptist Convention for the Far Right.
For anybody paying attention, Harold Bloom got it right in the American Religion in 93. Rough quote: The Tragedy in the Southern Baptist Convention is the result of pure political machinations masquerading as religious conviction. JD Grear is only 45 but he ought to own where he comes from now that he is back to 79 when SBC was on the verge of a great Missions Initiative. But Adrian Rogers and Pressler had some scores to settle with Jimmy Carter and James Dunn and LBJ
Oh and google the religion dispatches piece on Rotten Theology. You can do that soon as you read this blog.
The national press in the hysteria over JD Grear's pronouncement the SBC does Missions, Not political platforms misses a lot. The last 40 years of Baptist history has seen a religious group Marshall Frady said in the 60s was groping toward an accomodation with modernity and the Civil Rights Movement was jacklegged back into Jesse Helms camp and the playground of leftovers from the John Birch Society and White Citizens County. Read my course readings above. Ellen Rosenberg wrote me as much in a letter you can find in Baptist history at the forum site Baptist life dot com.
Somebody has to do something with the stained glass windows of Paige Patterson and Paul Pressler at SWBTS. Will Grear let them stand. This happens as Dallas, hometown of Criswell and Jeffress. City council is trying to figure out what to do with the Stonewall Jackson and Jeff Davis Monutments there. Maybe they could move Criswell, Pressler and Patterson and get the sunlight right and have a helluva a museum. Wuthnow has great chapter in Rough Country Judge Lynch to Jim Crow. Pressler and Patterson Stained glass light would be proper ambience for the arts and history conundrums of Dealy Plaza etc.
Bill Friday told Cecil Sherman the most significant event in NC the decade of the 80s was the fundamentalist takeover of the Seminary at Wake Forest. My dad was a classmate there in the 50s with Randall Lolley. Friday told Sherman Jesse Helms and Pressler and the right wingers driving the SBC to the Far Right--Adrian Rogers political guru Ed McAteer, the Bircher Albert Lee Smith of Birmingham and his Eagle Forum Wife Eunie--they had some grievances to settle with Martin Luther King and his then SBC friends Carlyle Marney, Will Campbell, LD Johnson, Molly Marshall, James Dunn , Martin England and others.
Read Molly Worthen Carefully.
More later to cut to the chase for JD Grear. Congrats on leaning forward on immigration but the NRA will be the test case. As Atwater envisioned and Wuthnow reports, Racebaiting as a political strategy evolved into the mendacity of abortion politics, to the FLAG, Prayer in schools and now Kaerpernick and the NRA.
Grear if he is for read must set up some truth and reconciliation committee in our subculture. And historically Baptist efforts in higher education driven from the fold in the 90s should every three years offer courses in all the reverberations of this rotten theology that has whipsawwed and bamboozled my people these last 40 years.
It aint all reconciled with one forward looking resolution on immigration and mild flick on the wrist of Donald Trump
And here is an update June 22, when some friends come back from Italy and others leave South Georgia for Bar Harbor
I am hoping this all gets to be fodder for an hour long conversation on NPR One A program. Jonathan Merritt had a piece in the Atlantic but Alan Bean has a better blog that got picked up by Baptist Global News
tinyurl.com/y96eb2oh
Copy and paste the url. www.tinyurl.com/y96eb2oh
To Bean I would add Tom Edsall's report I think June 6, 1986 in the Wash Post after the Atlanta SBC in a headline New Right Now Controls Huge SBC, all the fundy SBC presidents to that date were founding members of Tim Lahaye's American Coalition for Traditional Values for which Joe Rodgers a former finance chair of the GOP raised a hundred thousand dollars.
Also see Ellen Rosenberg's letter to me in the History section of Baptist life dot com forums.
Garry Wills framed the bigger picture in reviews of EJ Dionne and Joe Scarborough's analysis of the Republican party in the NEw York Review of books, nybooks dot com.
Bean is on to it saying outright it was never about scripture but resentment of Brown V Board and the role of women in church. My references spell that out.
And Edsall's suggestion a Carter Windfall profits tax helped focus Pressler's Exxon world with the Leftover Bircher and marginal of the White citizens council in his inner circle of Jesse Helms, Ed mcAteer and Bham and Eagle Forum's Albert Lee Smith
Footnote. Ellen Rosenberg letter of 88, an excerpt. She wrote the seminal work that year SBaps, a Subculture in Transition
Quoting her: I really enjoyed talking to you, and receiving that wealth of material and food for thought. My back issues of SBC Today finally arrived and I feel much more up to date.
What I think now is this: The SBC is being mobilized to serve as the base for a New Right movement. Falwell's throwaway comment in Salt Lake to look to James Dobson for leadership after the demise of the Moral Majority was a red herring. When the SBC has been disciplined and intimidated and the necessary personnel substitutions have been made, they will move. All the other stuff is incidental. Each successive outrage is outrageous but not worth getting bothered about (except, of course for the individuals involved)--it is the pattern that is important. What I see going now is an erosion of board-staff boundaries, this constant interference by trustees in personnel and program responsibilities.
What interests me now is why the moderates took so long to see what was happening. I found a piece by Glenn Hinson in Rev-Exp, Spring 1982. p 229, they...."have linked arms with the American political right and thus articulate positions more social and political than theologgical in nature." He saw what was happening...was anybody listening? Was he too gentle, too reluctant to be more explicit? Too Afraid?
For anybody paying attention, Harold Bloom got it right in the American Religion in 93. Rough quote: The Tragedy in the Southern Baptist Convention is the result of pure political machinations masquerading as religious conviction. JD Grear is only 45 but he ought to own where he comes from now that he is back to 79 when SBC was on the verge of a great Missions Initiative. But Adrian Rogers and Pressler had some scores to settle with Jimmy Carter and James Dunn and LBJ
Oh and google the religion dispatches piece on Rotten Theology. You can do that soon as you read this blog.
The national press in the hysteria over JD Grear's pronouncement the SBC does Missions, Not political platforms misses a lot. The last 40 years of Baptist history has seen a religious group Marshall Frady said in the 60s was groping toward an accomodation with modernity and the Civil Rights Movement was jacklegged back into Jesse Helms camp and the playground of leftovers from the John Birch Society and White Citizens County. Read my course readings above. Ellen Rosenberg wrote me as much in a letter you can find in Baptist history at the forum site Baptist life dot com.
Somebody has to do something with the stained glass windows of Paige Patterson and Paul Pressler at SWBTS. Will Grear let them stand. This happens as Dallas, hometown of Criswell and Jeffress. City council is trying to figure out what to do with the Stonewall Jackson and Jeff Davis Monutments there. Maybe they could move Criswell, Pressler and Patterson and get the sunlight right and have a helluva a museum. Wuthnow has great chapter in Rough Country Judge Lynch to Jim Crow. Pressler and Patterson Stained glass light would be proper ambience for the arts and history conundrums of Dealy Plaza etc.
Bill Friday told Cecil Sherman the most significant event in NC the decade of the 80s was the fundamentalist takeover of the Seminary at Wake Forest. My dad was a classmate there in the 50s with Randall Lolley. Friday told Sherman Jesse Helms and Pressler and the right wingers driving the SBC to the Far Right--Adrian Rogers political guru Ed McAteer, the Bircher Albert Lee Smith of Birmingham and his Eagle Forum Wife Eunie--they had some grievances to settle with Martin Luther King and his then SBC friends Carlyle Marney, Will Campbell, LD Johnson, Molly Marshall, James Dunn , Martin England and others.
Read Molly Worthen Carefully.
More later to cut to the chase for JD Grear. Congrats on leaning forward on immigration but the NRA will be the test case. As Atwater envisioned and Wuthnow reports, Racebaiting as a political strategy evolved into the mendacity of abortion politics, to the FLAG, Prayer in schools and now Kaerpernick and the NRA.
Grear if he is for read must set up some truth and reconciliation committee in our subculture. And historically Baptist efforts in higher education driven from the fold in the 90s should every three years offer courses in all the reverberations of this rotten theology that has whipsawwed and bamboozled my people these last 40 years.
It aint all reconciled with one forward looking resolution on immigration and mild flick on the wrist of Donald Trump
And here is an update June 22, when some friends come back from Italy and others leave South Georgia for Bar Harbor
I am hoping this all gets to be fodder for an hour long conversation on NPR One A program. Jonathan Merritt had a piece in the Atlantic but Alan Bean has a better blog that got picked up by Baptist Global News
tinyurl.com/y96eb2oh
Copy and paste the url. www.tinyurl.com/y96eb2oh
To Bean I would add Tom Edsall's report I think June 6, 1986 in the Wash Post after the Atlanta SBC in a headline New Right Now Controls Huge SBC, all the fundy SBC presidents to that date were founding members of Tim Lahaye's American Coalition for Traditional Values for which Joe Rodgers a former finance chair of the GOP raised a hundred thousand dollars.
Also see Ellen Rosenberg's letter to me in the History section of Baptist life dot com forums.
Garry Wills framed the bigger picture in reviews of EJ Dionne and Joe Scarborough's analysis of the Republican party in the NEw York Review of books, nybooks dot com.
Bean is on to it saying outright it was never about scripture but resentment of Brown V Board and the role of women in church. My references spell that out.
And Edsall's suggestion a Carter Windfall profits tax helped focus Pressler's Exxon world with the Leftover Bircher and marginal of the White citizens council in his inner circle of Jesse Helms, Ed mcAteer and Bham and Eagle Forum's Albert Lee Smith
Footnote. Ellen Rosenberg letter of 88, an excerpt. She wrote the seminal work that year SBaps, a Subculture in Transition
Quoting her: I really enjoyed talking to you, and receiving that wealth of material and food for thought. My back issues of SBC Today finally arrived and I feel much more up to date.
What I think now is this: The SBC is being mobilized to serve as the base for a New Right movement. Falwell's throwaway comment in Salt Lake to look to James Dobson for leadership after the demise of the Moral Majority was a red herring. When the SBC has been disciplined and intimidated and the necessary personnel substitutions have been made, they will move. All the other stuff is incidental. Each successive outrage is outrageous but not worth getting bothered about (except, of course for the individuals involved)--it is the pattern that is important. What I see going now is an erosion of board-staff boundaries, this constant interference by trustees in personnel and program responsibilities.
What interests me now is why the moderates took so long to see what was happening. I found a piece by Glenn Hinson in Rev-Exp, Spring 1982. p 229, they...."have linked arms with the American political right and thus articulate positions more social and political than theologgical in nature." He saw what was happening...was anybody listening? Was he too gentle, too reluctant to be more explicit? Too Afraid?
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