Southern Baptist Convention conservative resurgence

Conservative Resurgence/Fundamentalist Takeover are terms used to describe a major controversy within the Southern Baptist Convention — America's largest evangelical denomination. "Conservative Resurgence" is the term preferred by supporters; "Fundamentalist Takeover" is the descriptive used by detractors.

It was a struggle that began around 1960 for control of the resources and ideological direction of the convention. It was achieved by the systematic election, beginning in 1967, of conservatives to lead the Southern Baptist Convention, thus removing theologically moderate, or liberal leaning, leadership from control. All of the leaders of Southern Baptist seminaries, mission groups, and other convention-owned institutions have been replaced with conservative or fundamentalist leaders. The massive takeover has been described by one of its leaders as a "reformation…achieved at an incredibly high cost."

Earlier 20th century controversies

Throughout the 20th century, controversy has flared up sporadically among Southern Baptists over the nature of biblical authority and how to interpret the Bible. In the 1920s, Baptist pastor J. Frank Norris, described as "one of the most controversial and flamboyant figures in the history of fundamentalism," led a series of attacks upon the Southern Baptist Convention, particularly against Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth and Baylor University in Waco, Texas. In 1925 the SBC adopted its first formal confession of faith, the Baptist Faith and Message, largely in response to the Norris controversy. Prior to the formation of the SBC, Baptists in America had written two primary confessions of faith: The Philadelphia Confession of Faith (1742) and the New Hampshire Baptist Confession of Faith of 1833.

Events setting the stage for Conservative Resurgence

The "Genesis" controversy

In July 1961, Prof. Ralph Elliott, an Old Testament scholar at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, published a book entitled The Message of Genesis containing his interpretation of the first book of the Bible. Elliott has described the book as a "very moderate" volume. Some prominent Southern Baptists, however, saw the book in a different light and took issue with Elliot's use of historical-critical methodology, his portryal of Genesis 1-11 as mythological literature and his speculation that Melchizedek was, in fact, a priest of Baal and not, as generally believed, of Yahweh.

The "Genesis Controversy" quickly pervaded the entire SBC. In strong reaction to the controversy, the 1962 SBC meeting elected as its president Rev. K. Owen White, pastor of First Baptist Church Houston who had written a prominent criticism of Elliott’s views. This began what has become an ongoing trend for SBC presidents to be elected on the basis of their theology. Broadman Press, the publishing arm of the Baptist Sunday School Board in Nashville, was immediately criticized and their other materials, including Sunday School quarterlies, became suspect. Professor Elliott was fired from Midwestern Seminary, and his book was withdrawn from publication.

1963 Baptist Faith and Message revision

In 1963 the SBC adopted the first-ever revision of the Baptist Faith and Message, amending it to include confessional positions even more conservative than contained in the original. However, it was not without its critics. One of the takeover architects has described it as "having been infected with neo-orthodox theology."

Broadman Bible Commentary

Also in the 1960s the Sunday School Board, in its most ambitious publishing project, produced the 10-volume Broadman Bible Commentary. Its first volume, covering Genesis and Exodus, came out in 1969. In addition to providing further fuel for the controversy surrounding the Creation account in Genesis, a section written by G. Henton Davies, an English Baptist, questioned the reliability of the biblical episode in which God commands Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, on the grounds that such an event was morally troubling. This new publication immediately stirred a new phase of the ongoing controversy, seeming to exacerbate other forms of dissent.

Seminary issues

Conservative Southern Baptists of this time also bemoaned what arguably was the growing presence of liberal ideology within the SBC's own seminaries. By way of example, Clark H. Pinnock, an advocate of open theism, taught at the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary in the early 70s.

In 1976, a Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (SBTS) masters' degree student, Noel Wesley Hollyfield, Jr., presented survey results that claimed an inverse correlation between length of attendance at SBTS and Christian orthodoxy. While 87% of first year Master of Divinity students at SBTS reporting believing "Jesus is the Divine Son of God and I have no doubts about it," only 63% of final year graduate students made that claim, according to Hollyfield's analysis. In 1981, redacted information from Hollyfield's thesis was put into tract form and distributed by conservatives as evidence of the need for reform from apostasy within SBC agencies.

A hostile meeting

The 1970 SBC meeting in Denver, under the leadership of then-President W.A. Criswell, was marked by hostilities. The messengers refused to hear an explanation about the Broadman Bible Commentary from the head of the Sunday School Board. Messengers actually booed Herschel H. Hobbs, the respected elder statesman and former president of the SBC, when he urged restraint.

A strategy for takeover

In the early 1970s William Powell, at the time an SBC employee, developed a rather simple strategy to take control of the SBC: Elect the SBC president for ten consecutive years. The SBC president appoints the committees that name other committees that nominate trustees for the denomination's institutions, include the seminaries. Trustees of institutions served five years and were eligible for reelection once. Therefore, the process would take about ten years.

The takeover begins

W.A. Criswell and Adrian Rogers (both now deceased), along with Houston Judge Paul Pressler and Dallas theologian Paige Patterson, were chief among the architects of what was a well-planned effort to purge the Convention of what they considered "liberal" influences. In the fall of 1978, Patterson and Pressler met with a group of determined pastors and laymen at a hotel near the Atlanta airport to launch "the controversy." They understood William Powell's contention that electing the president of the Southern Baptist Convention was the key to redirecting the entirety of the denomination. The Atlanta group determined to elect Adrian Rogers, pastor of Bellevue Baptist Church in Memphis, Tennessee, as the first Conservative Resurgence president of the Convention.

The 1979 Houston convention

The 1979 SBC meeting in Houston, Texas, produced two important developments.

Inerrancy

First, Southern Baptists applied a new word, "inerrancy," to their understanding of Scripture. Historically, Baptist confessions proclaimed their conviction that the Bible is God’s true and inspired Word and that it is absolutely dependable. Since 1650 the adjective most used by Baptist to describe their view of the Bible was "infallible." Calvinists in Europe had come to use the word "inerrant," which means much the same thing. The term became a code word in this phase of the ongoing controversy was known as the "inerrancy controversy."

Orchestration from the sky boxes

Also coming out of the 1979 Houston Convention was a well organized political campaign, using precinct style politics, to wrest control of the SBC. Judge Pressler and revisionist theologian Patterson literally directed the affairs of the 1979 meeting from sky boxes high above the Astrodome where the SBC was meeting. Their political know-how and sophistication would have done credit to either of America’s national political conventions.

The election on the first ballot of strongly conservative pastor Adrian Rogers began the ten-year "takeover" process. Ever since that meeting, the right wing of the denomination has controlled the SBC elections. There has been an unbroken succession of highly conservative presidents. Each has appointed ultraconservatives, who in turn appointed other ultraconservatives, who nominated the trustees, who elected the agency heads and institutional presidents, including seminaries.

How it worked

Under the SBC bylaws, the President has sole authority to nominate the Committee on Committees. This committee, in turn, nominates the members of the Committee on Nominations to be approved by the messengers at the next annual meeting, which in turn nominates appointees for vacant positions (the SBC cannot remove anyone from an appointed position; only if the position is term-limited or the appointee dies, retires, or resigns does it become vacant) to be approved at the subsequent annual meeting (i.e., two years from the initial Committee on Committees appointments). The process overlaps (a new Committee on Committees is appointed every year); though lengthy, over time key appointments can (and did, in this case) shift the direction of the entire SBC.

Throughout the 1980s, Conservative Resurgence advocates gained control over the SBC leadership at every level from the administration to key faculty at their seminaries, and slowly turned the SBC towards more conservative positions on many social issues.

Moderate reaction

As the fundamentalist-conservative movement grew, many moderate congregations split away in 1987 to form the Alliance of Baptists and again in 1990 to form the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (CBF), organized as a "convention within the convention" to support causes not controlled by the fundamentalist majority. The change in control culminated in the adoption of significant changes to the Baptist Faith and Message at the 2000 SBC Annual Meeting.

A number of new entities have come into existence to champion what moderates and old-line conservatives believe to be historic Baptist principles and cooperative spirit abandoned by SBC leaders. These include the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (CBF), the Baptist Center for Ethics, Baptist Women in Ministry (BWIM), the national news journal Baptists Today, the Associated Baptist Press, Smyth & Helwys Publishers, some fourteen new Baptist seminaries / divinity schools, and other entities.

State conventions react

Because each level of Baptist life is autonomous, changes at the national level do not require approval or endorsement by the state conventions or local associations. The majority of state conventions have continued to cooperate with the SBC. However, the state conventions in Texas and Virginia openly challenged the new directions, and announced a "dual affiliation" with contributions to both the SBC's Cooperative Program and the CBF.

The Baptist General Convention of Texas (BGCT), the largest of the Southern Baptist state conventions, voted in 1998 to also align itself with the CBF, stating as its reasons for doing so were its objections to proposed changes in the 2000 revision of the Baptist Faith and Message, which the BGCT said made the document sound like a "creed," in violation of historic Baptist tradition which opposed the use of creeds.

In a reversal from the national convention (where the moderates left and the conservatives stayed), many Texas fundamentalist-conservatives formed their own state convention, the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention. Local congregations either disassociated completely from BGCT or sought "dual alignment" with both groups. Yet, other congregations solely align themselves with the BGCT. The BGCT remains the larger of the two state conventions and universities such as Baylor only receive money from the BGCT. Similarly, fundamentalist-conservative Baptists in Virginia formed the Southern Baptist Conservatives of Virginia.

In Missouri, the exact opposite took place. The Missouri Baptist Convention (the existing state body) came under the control of the fundamentalist-conservative group, which subsequently attempted to take over the boards of the state's moderate and old-line conservative agencies and institutions and reshape them along the theological lines of the current SBC. In 2002, some congregations withdrew and affiliated with a new convention called Baptist General Convention of Missouri. The old state agencies are attempting to affiliate with the newly-formed state convention but are currently being taken to court by the old convention. Unlike Virginia and Texas, where the SBC Executive Committee receives and distributes funds from two conventions, one moderate and one conservative, the SBC declined to receive money from the new moderate Missouri group. They said it wasn't in Southern Baptists' best interest to cooperate with another group opposed to the conservative leadership of the Missouri Baptist Convention. Individual churches in the newer convention may, however, contribute to the SBC directly.

Assessments

Critics of the takeover faction assert that the "civil war" among Southern Baptists has been about power, lust and right-wing secular politics. Dr. Russell Dilday, president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary from 1978 to 1994, has analogized what he calls "the carnage of the past quarter century of denominational strife in our Baptist family" to "friendly fire" where casualties come as a result of the actions of fellow Baptists, not at the hands of the enemy. He writes that "Some of it has been accidental," but that “some has been intentional." He characterizes the struggle as being "far more serious than a controversy," but rather a "self-destructive, contentious, one-sided feud that at times took on combative characteristics."

A spokesman for the reigning leadership of the SBC, Dr. Morris Chapman, claims that the root of the controversy has been about theology. He maintains that the controversy has "returned the Southern Baptist Convention to its historic commitments." Speaking as president of the "new" SBC's Executive Committee, Chapman cites as examples the Conservative Resurgency's claims that

• Baptist colleges and seminaries were producing more and more liberalism in writing, proclamation, and publication
• The adoption of a hermeneutic of suspicion which elevates human reason above the clear statements of the Bible
• The continued influence of many teachers and leaders who did not hold to a high view of Scripture.

While takeover architect Paige Patterson believes the controversy has achieved its objective of returning the SBC from an alleged "leftward drift" to an ultraconservative stance, he admits to having some regrets. Patterson points to vocational disruption, hurt, sorrow, and disrupted friendships as evidence of the price that the controversy has exacted. "No one seriously confessing the name of Jesus can rejoice in these sorrows," Patterson acknowledges. "Friendships and sometimes family relationships have been marred. Churches have sometimes been damaged even though local church life has proceeded for the most part above the fray and often remains largely oblivious to it. No one seriously confessing the name of Jesus can rejoice in these sorrows," Patterson writes. "I confess that I often second guess my own actions and agonize over those who have suffered on both sides, including my own family."