A week from tomorrow the Southern Baptist Convention Annual Meeting will be held in St. Louis, Missouri. The Southern Baptist Convention (or SBC) is the largest Baptist denomination in the world and the largest Protestant body in the United States.
But what is the relationship between the SBC and post-war evangelicalism?
Collin Hansen and I (both evangelical baptists, but neither of us Southern Baptists) were recently asked to look at this question in an essay for a new book edited by Jason Allen, president of Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.
We examined four pairs of Southern Baptists who, though they overlap in various ways, can be seen to stand for distinct emphases and postures when it comes to relating to this thing known as “evangelicalism”:
- Carl F. H. Henry and Billy Graham (Southern Baptist by Name, Evangelical by Reputation)
- David Dockery and Timothy George (Educational Pioneers Inside and Outside the SBC)
- Albert Mohler and Russell Moore (Southern Baptist Tried and True)
- Matt Chandler and David Platt (Baptists for World Evangelism)
Collin wrote the opening section:
My conversation with this Southern Baptist leader concerned evangelicals in elite private universities. Curiously, at least to me as a young journalist, he did not personally identify with the evangelicals. Those Yankee evangelicals adopted an adversarial posture toward the university administration, he said, as if students needed to choose between Christ and mainstream acceptance. But where he came from, Southern Baptists and the establishment were one and the same. You do not need to choose between Christ and culture when Christians are the culture.
This Southern Baptist leader and I spoke in 2005 in the wake of the “values voter” election when Southern Baptists and evangelicals helped propel President George W. Bush to re-election on a platform that included seeking a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. Neither of us knew it at the time, but this election marked the end of a remarkable era of Southern Baptist influence in presidential politics. In the previous quarter-century, Southern Baptists had elected two of their own in Jimmy Carter (1976-1980) and Bill Clinton (1992-2000). In part due to buyer’s remorse over the liberal social policies of these Democratic presidents, they supplied electoral muscle to candidates favored by the nascent Religious Right, including Ronald Reagan (1980-1988) and later George W. Bush (2000-2008). Even before then, the most famous Southern Baptist of them all—Billy Graham—became a closer adviser during turbulent times to Lyndon Johnson (1963-1968) and Richard Nixon (1968-1974).
But starting in 2006 with a mid-term electoral rebuke to George W. Bush, and continuing under the presidency of Barack Obama (2008-2016), Southern Baptists no longer play White House kingmaker. So long a fixture of mainstream America, Southern Baptists have been marginalized by the culture’s sharp liberal turn, especially in sexual morality.
Much like evangelicals.
Between the late 1970s and early 1990s, as the battles raged over theological direction in the Southern Baptist Convention, many leaders on both sides could still find agreement on one point: we are not evangelicals. Foy Valentine, who served on the eve of Carter’s election as executive secretary of the Southern Baptist Christian Life Commission (now the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission) talked to Newsweek magazine for its landmark “year of the evangelicals” cover story. The moderate Baptist leader, noted for his support of the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, told Kenneth Woodward, “We are not evangelicals. That’s a Yankee word. They want to claim us because we are big and successful and growing every year. But we have our own traditions, our own hymns and more students in our seminaries than they have in all of theirs put together.”
Adrian Rogers, an unlikely ally to Valentine as one the leaders of the conservative resurgence in the SBC, shared this perspective. Duane Litfin, who would later become president of evangelical Wheaton College, west of Chicago, recalls: “We lived for almost a decade in Memphis, and one of my good friends there was Adrian Rogers. Adrian would always make a point of it: ‘We are not evangelicals,’ he would say. ‘We are Baptists.'”
In 1979, the same year Rogers was elected SBC president for the first time—a watershed event in 20th-century American religion—the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, hosted the liberal World Council of Churches. By contrast, as Southern Baptist theologian and historian Timothy George observes, the flagship SBC seminary never hosted some of the most distinguished evangelical advocates for biblical inerrancy, the cause that propelled Rogers to denominational leadership. Such noted evangelical theologians as J. I. Packer, Kenneth Kantzer, and Carl F. H. Henry were not invited to Southern.
Had Southern Baptists at places like Southern always differentiated themselves from evangelicals? Not according to Southern Seminary historian and dean Gregory A. Wills. “The popularity and influence of the faculty went far beyond the borders of the Southern Baptist Convention.” Wills cites J. P. Boyce speaking at the New York Chautauqua in 1880 and 1881 as an example. John Broadus was in higher demand in the North than the South, even turning down consideration as president of the new University of Chicago, funded by John D. Rockefeller. He stayed at Southern and became president in 1889.
The relationship, then, between Southern Baptists and evangelicals has never been static.
Sometimes SBC moderates have distanced themselves from evangelical theology they regarded as too conservative.
And sometimes SBC conservatives have distanced themselves from evangelical theology they regarded as too moderate.Sometimes evangelicals have downplayed their Southern Baptist credentials.
And sometimes evangelicals have played up their Southern Baptist credentials as the very thing more evangelicals need.We will assess various approaches in four pairs of representative Southern Baptist evangelicals from the latter half of the twentieth century and the first couple decades of the twenty-first. Writing as evangelicals who are not Southern Baptists but who have greatly profited from our relationship with Southern Baptists, we aim to show why evangelicals need Southern Baptist conviction and why Southern Baptists need evangelical experience. The journey begins at Babylon Baptist Church and ends with Baptists in Babylon.
You can read the whole thing here: Collin Hansen and Justin Taylor, “From Babylon Baptist to Baptists in Babylon: The SBC and the Broader Evangelical Community,” in The SBC & the 21st Century: Reflections, Renewal, & Recommitments, ed. Jason K. Allen (Nashville: B&H, 2016), 33–49.
