The Blue Voice

Sunday, January 22, 2006

Fundamentalism and the Southern Baptist Convention

My sister-in-law last week mentioned to me that an old family friend, Fisher Humphreys, now a professor at Samford University in Alabama, has published a number of books on religious topics. He is a Baptist who distinguishes his outlook from the fundamentalists who currently dominate the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC).

In terms of the present-day SBC, he would count as a "liberal". I don't know if he would use that term for himself. And in the context of today's SBC, it's hard to know what that means. Jimmy Carter, who is a conservative Southern Baptist in his theological views, when he was President had a leading SBC cleric inform him that he didn't even consider Carter a Christian.

This 04/19/05 lecture by Humphreys is about Fundamentalism:

Scholars are troubled by the vagueness of this use of the word "fundamentalists." In the largest study we have of fundamentalism, the five-volume set called The Fundamentalism Project, Martin Marty and Scott Appleby wrote that they decided to retain the word because a word is needed, this one is in use, and no other one seems better. A word is needed because fundamentalisms in the various religions have family resemblances. Here are nine of the family traits. Fundamentalist movements originate in religion. They make a selective use of their religious traditions. They react against aspects of the modern world. They feel they are under siege and in a time of crisis. They fight modernity. They follow authoritarian male leaders. They see the past as better than the present and the future as a time when their views will prevail. They create definite boundaries between themselves and outsiders. They work toward control of their society, not toward coexistence with their enemies. (my emphasis)

He gives us this interesting historical note:

In America, many Protestants responded to the challenges by setting aside their denominational differences in order to organize a common front to oppose the challenges, which they called "liberalism" and which they understood to be the thin edge of the wedge of secularism and therefore a grave threat to the faith and life of the church. This was the original Fundamentalism, and in 1920 one of its proponents, Curtis Lee Laws, coined the word "Fundamentalists" to refer to himself and his friends who intended "to do battle royal for the fundamentals." Fundamentalism is a loose coalition of co-belligerents in a struggle against liberalism.

It is widely assumed that Fundamentalism was Southern, rural, and anti-intellectual, but, in fact, it was stronger in the North than in the South, it was stronger in urban than in rural areas, and some of its original leaders such as J. Gresham Machen were intellectuals.

He doesn't describe the basis for the latter argument. But I do know that Christian fundamentalism in the period he describes was not restricted to the Deep South.

Humphreys' lecture also talks about the pamphlet series The Fundamentals and the "five fundamentals" that the General Assembly of the Northern Presbyterian Church adopted in 1910. And this observation is an important one:

It has often been observed that the attitudes of Fundamentalism are even more distinguishing than their doctrines. These include suspicion, fear, anger, and divisiveness, and they are not ideal attitudes for Christians who are called to have trust in God and to love one another.

A key point in the lecture is to describe why he regards the current SBC as fundamentalist, a description the leadership embrances. This is not only significant with the SBC itself. The SBC is the largest Protestant denomination in the US. (The Catholics still outnumber the Southern Baptists.) And its broader influence, particularly in the South and in the national Republican Party, is very large, if often indirect. The US hasn't become so theocratic yet that churches can overtly engage in partisan politics as religious institutions without endangering their nonprofit status. But "indirect" influence is not the same as "ineffective".

He writes this about the fundamentalism of today's SBC leadership:

A review of the characteristics of generic fundamentalism suggests that they are descriptive of the new directions in the [Southern Baptist] Convention. The origins of these directions is religious. The new leaders make selective use of their tradition. The new directions are reactions to aspects of modernity. The new leaders felt that the faith of the Convention was at risk and acted militantly against the threat. The new directions are being implemented by authoritarian male leaders. The new leaders felt that the past was better than the present and that in the future their views would prevail. The new leaders have set definite boundaries between insiders and outsiders, and they worked for control of the Convention rather than for coexistence with their opponents.

The "new directions" to which he refers are those embraced by the SBC since the takeover of the national organization by fundamentalists in 1979. The SBC tended to the conservative in political and social outlook well before that. But hardline fundamentalists gained the upper hand in the denomination at that time.

His lecture certainly doesn't hold out the hope of an earlier moderation of fundamentalist zeal in the US. But he does end on an ecumenical note:

Traditional and progressive Baptists share with Fundamentalists a determination to resist secularism, but we do not feel as threatened by the Enlightenment, historical-critical biblical criticism, evolution, and liberal theology as Fundamentalists, because we do not see these as intractably secular. There are things in the Enlightenment to be welcomed, such as the emphasis on freedom, and things to be resisted, such as excessive individualism. The same thing is true of the historical-critical study of the Bible, of evolution, and of liberal theology.

In one of my first posts here at The Blue Voice, I talked about the complex political-social characteristics of the early fundamentalist movement in the US (Still persecuted after all these years? 01/26/05), a topic Humphreys' lecture touches on.

A recent article on William Jennings Bryan also deals with that aspect of early fundamentalism: The Other Bryan by Michael Kazin American Prospect 01/05/06. Kazin writes:

Bryan was the first major-party politician to advocate what became the core of modern liberalism: expanding the powers of the federal government to serve the welfare of ordinary Americans. He preached that the national state should counter the overweening power of banks and industrial corporations by legalizing strikes, subsidizing farmers, taxing the rich, banning private campaign spending, and outlawing the "liquor trust." "The power of the government to protect the people is as complete in time of peace as in time of war," Bryan declared in 1922. "The only question to be decided is whether it is necessary to exercise that power." Bryan did as much as any politician to transform his party from a bulwark of laissez-faire into the citadel of liberalism we identify with FDR and his ideological descendants. (Herbert Hoover once snapped that the New Deal was "Bryanism under new words and methods.")

Bryan did want the power of the state to extend into the moral realm. He believed that liquor companies robbed workers of their wages and corrupted family life. His opposition to evolutionary theory stemmed from a similar impulse. In 1925, Bryan joined the legal team prosecuting John Scopes because, like many Americans at the time who were not scientists, he equated Darwinism with social Darwinism, particularly with a belief in eugenics. He feared that the result of replacing belief in a merciful God with the doctrine of survival of the fittest would be "a system under which a few supposedly superior intellects, self-appointed, would direct the mating and the movements of the mass of mankind." Bryan burned only to see religion heal the world.

I think Kazin is stretching a bit to make a point about religion and what today are regarded as liberal political goals. He's not wrong about Bryan identifying "Darwinism" with Social Darwinism.

But Bryan was wrong in making that identification. There were plenty of sensible people around at the time who could appreciate the signficance of Darwin's discoveries, not only for biology but for science in general, without imagining that Social Darwinism was a necessary conclusion from the biological theory of natural selection. In fact, Herbert Spencer, the British scholar who developed the sociological theory, was said to have been appalled at the extremes to which Social Darwinism had been carried in defending reactionary social policies in the United States.

The Bryan who defended creationism at the Scopes trial had very different priorities than the Great Commoner who vowed his people would not be crucified on that Cross of Gold. And from the Secretary of State who seriously hoped to abolish war forever. In his last round on the national stage at the Scopes trial, he was pandering more to the fears and prejudicies of his admirers, promoting as he did an attitude and mindset which would be more receptive to rigid conservatism than to Populist-style reform. And some policies like Prohibition of alchohol turned out to be impractical and fraught with negative implications, whether they were based on resistance to the "liquor trust" or not.

posted at 1:00:00 AM by Bruce Miller

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