Authentic Baptists as identified by Randall Balmer and the threat of the legacy of Charlie Kirk

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 In 1959 and I was baptized at the Truett memorial Baptist Church in Hayesville, North Carolina the birthplace of George W Truett.  my father was the pastor there and it registered with me early the historical marker on Highway 64 on the sidewalk right in front of the Baptist Church.  This  historical markers said something to the effect-- and you can find it online --George W Truett, great Baptist who was 40 years to pastor the first Baptist Church Dallas, Texas was born 3 miles west of here.  There is a camp in Haysville still there in Truett‘s honor and in fact, oh one of my daddy‘s good scrabble playing friends Hershey Miller was in the 10th grade in high school in those days. His father was the association of missionary and he slept in the room in George W Truett‘s bedroom at his house there at the camp in 1960. The  great Baptist Stewart a Newman Came through Haysville with the president of Southeastern seminary, Sid Stealey  and another fella on the way to Nashville in the early days of the Elliott controversy, mom made a good meal for them and when it was over Newman, who really wasn’t enthusiastic about what he knew he would face in Nashville told Olin Binkley said you fellas just go ahead. I think I’ll stay here with Billy. Newman I was later to find out was a mentor to James Dunn DUNN himself.Newman  taught at Southeastern seminary was a teacher, not only for my dad, but his classmates Randall, lolley and Bill Self.  

   1960 would’ve been about four years after he followed WA Criswell  while at the pastors conference in South Carolina after Criswell  would’ve given a race speeding speech. Newman said W Criswell doesn't speak for me.   See Duke's Curtis Freeman Dead from the Neck up on That  telling piece of American history.   The late 30s it turns out from a oral tradition interview with Newman in archives at Baylor,  Newman was on a Train with George Truett  from Fort Worth to Memphis and they talked a good four hours on that trip and Newman said it wasn’t long before Truett was talking about his entanglement with Jay Frank Norris.   Norris did everything he could to be little Truett and to diminish his great legacy at first Baptist Dallas. In  bigger context in what is to follow the great historian Jill  LEPORE missions in her grand history of America These Truths;, she smart enough to see how Norris and his way of thinking was to poison America’s politics in the 20th centurycom that through the fundamentals take over the southern Baptist convention and it’s part with Bushes the guy he called the third and then perfected in what became the MAGA movement of fundamentalism is the key role plays the key part so much so that when Lepore gets to the 70s, she emphasizes the role of the eagle forum played in slowing down America’s Grudging advanced towards progressive thought in the presidency of Clinton and Obama

  

This coincides with her October cover story in the Atlantic on the Constitution. There is a parallel to the the inerantist mindset on Scripture to Originalist version of the Constitution. That came together in the great Baptist of Alabama in the mid 20th Twentieth Century Judge Frank HJonson. He saw the Constitution as a living breathing document and was certainl inerrantist. About him Bill Moyers said had Lincoln lived in Alabama in the mid 1960s he wouldve been Frank Johnson and had Johnson lived during the Civil War he woulda been Abraham Lincoln.

  

   Jill Lepore in her recent history of America These Truths put the Truett Newman Conversation on the train ride in larger perspective. She has the savvy to make note of the legacy of J Frank Norris and the political evolution of his fundamentalism in her segment on the Scopes Monkey trial. By the end of the 20th Century Karl Rove was perfecting the strategy of molesting religious convictions that have given us the MAGA Base. Lepore doubles down on the Eagle Forum, a sister the John Birch Society and umbrella groups Paul Pressler, Patterson and Jesse Helms were energetic about. It is of some note that Tim Tebow's Mother, a member of Jerry Vines FBC Jacksonville Florida, was the Eagle Forum woman of the year in 2018  

   Harold Bloom in the 93 American Religiion asserts the tragedy in the Southern Baptist Convention is the reslut of purely political machinations masquerading as religious conviction.

    

     Balmer does not mention of the 1500's Edict of Torda in the Catholic Lutheran Calvinist tensions of the Transylvanion region of Europe where relative peace and religious toleration was established two hundred years before the creation of the United States. I could not find if the founders were aware of Torda or not as they founded the Second Amendmant which Balmer calls America's greatest idea.

      Little disjointed segueway here but this blog has good chance of publication in the upcoming quarterly winter issue of Dhristian Ethics Today . Balmer has fourteen or so chapters in this book featuring aspects of the the Second Amendment and its interpretation and development of the last 200 years. Baptist Joint Committee's Holly Hollman says  this book is an "antidote to the persistent threat of christian nationalism". Balmer conver the Blaine's amendment, the case of the Mormons, Kennedy and School Prayer and LBJ as well as several insightful chapters on the origin of the second.  In his Chapter on Roy Moore and the Ten Commandments in Alabama twenty years ago he doulbed down on the great Baptist George W. Truett to make a distinction of just how far astray Roy had gone.

    Citing George Truett great speech on the separation of church and state May 16, 1920 Balmer,  an expert witness in the case,  concludes his chapter on Roy Moore thusly:  As for Roy Moore's Graven image, that was precisely Roger Williams point about protecting the faith from trivialization from too close an association from politics and the state. And Balmer suspects Williams would have something to say about parents screeching their piety at a school board meeting in Florida.

    Baptists have one consistent record theroughout their long and eventful history George W Truett declard from the Capitol Steps in 1920 "They have never been a party to the suppression of conscience"

     America needs more Baptists!

    End Balmer quote

      

       

    

 Thisd is the set up for review of Balmer new book on separation of church and state. Evey authentic Baptist church should have ten copies of this jewel of a reminder of just how significant Baptists are in a very distinctive part of the greatness of America now under threat of the legacy of Charlie Kirck and Christian nationalists forces.

    Balmer recently names Kirk and is compadre David Barton " charlatans" 

   

Charlie Kirk in perspective, Legacy, Stuckey and what not

 Check her next week for a review of Randall Balmer book on church state separation. On Tuesday Balmer one of the leading scholars on evangelical politics in America at Good Faith Media named Kirk a "Charlatan" . As it is also with Eric Metaxas and david Barton. Somebody please tell FBC Spartanburg and Trey Gowdy, his Mommo Ovalene and Nikkiei Haley on the Clemson Trustee board and her friend the Management Bien Milstead a wayward Wesleyan with the voice of Clemson athletics: The ROAR 

Saints in Newport Tenn and Bethany in Gaffney; Bethel and Bethany

   Come back to this next week as it will need some edits and refinement.

       Couple weeks ago I turned up the obituary for Paul Rufus James of Newport Tenn. Goodgle it up for background of this blog. He was a choir director for 70 years, four of thos at my dad's first church in the Baltimore community of Parrotsville and Newport Tennessee. I was born there in 1953 when Steve Spurrier was in the fourth grade on the Hill at Newport Grammar School. James was a lifelong friend of my dad coming to his birthday party in 1997. My Dad 's first baptism was his son Freddy who became principal of Cosby High School, made famous in Cormac McCarthy;;s last novel, the Passenger where the protagonist Bobby Western toys with going off the grid to Cosby. 

    INez Thompson,  served Kool-Aid for 10 years or more vacation Bible school at Bethany Baptist on Wilkinsville Road in Gaffney where my Dad was pastor from 1962 to 1978.   we had this two week 10 day vacation Bible school. This memory celebration of two saints   is provoked in part by the cook the goose  ecumenical conference in NE cranny of North Carolina of Virginia and Tenn in the New River vicinity annually for the last seven years  on a farm. Kevin Heffner, the Kidney doctor in Arkansas who has a pine forest and a nice home . His father of Plain Dealing LA father work for the Sunday school board is Todd‘s brother. They’re big fans of Justin Cox, a preacher who interned with Jack Causey in Statesville so there’s that connection to Gaffney though it’s a little bit of a reach 

    I went by the Thompson house last Friday on KNOT T St.. It’s hard to find it. It was closed off two different ways and you can’t get to Jackie Simmons and Chip Sheffield. Can’t get on that street anymore. It’s got a bit tough hill, but it was in that yard my fourth grade , a Sunday,  the fifth grade they invite us over for a very modest charitably, house on that street they invited us over for lunch and we get there and some of their extended families cause of such a big spread. We’re invited up from Pacolet. They hadn’t gone to church that morning when I one of their cousins in law  smoking his Marlboro with his cigarettes wrapped up it is His sleeve and his T-shirt. First time I heard the word politics registered with me as it was an earnest conversation. and then I became enamored with upstate politics with Roger Milliken and his Gaffney associate  John Hamrick and textile Mill workers 

   Paul James  came over to Newport from Warren Wilson school learned that in the obituary in . Later moved his letter from  Bethel Church to  English Creek, he was choir  director song leader for 70 some ideas. He was a good man. He got into local politics on the county commission and his obituary speaks for itself.   Carlyle Marney, the great Baptist Wiseman and intellect came down to Gaffney from Charlotte in 1978 two years two months before he died to speak to ministers and I crashed it and I think Mike Hammett was there but somebody was talking about integrity just a few years after Watergate and he was talking about all the scandals in church life in here and there and somebody ask him so where is integrity in America these days.   and he said he said you preachers see it every Sunday morning when you look out in the congregation, all your churches have five or six people, families that hold it together that tithe give 10% of their income they show up for the services. They have a prayer life. They read their Bible. He said that’s where it is And so it was with Paul James and Inez Thompson, James Broome and Esther Dawkins, and there’s all kinds of others in mom’s hometown I don’t know if he does his daily Bible reading or not but Thomas Barksdale is a good man in the mold of Paul James and Jeff Graves. is a good man and and my friend on the water board in Momma's Hometown of Collinsville Alabama where I lived for thirty years. Peggy Weaver the good Methodist wife of a high school All American quarterback is in the Lamb's Book of life as well