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The Rise of Baptist Republicanism

Author: Oran P Smith

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2000-05-01

Total Pages: 486

ISBN-13: 0814788963

A Choice Outstanding Academic Book By championing the ideals of independence, evangelism, and conservism, the Southern Baptist Covention (SBC) has grown into the largest Protestant denomination in the country. The Convention's mass democratic form of church government, its influential annual meetings, and its sheer size have made it a barometer for Southern political and cultural shift. Its most recent shift has been starboard-toward fundamentalism and Republicanism. While the Convention once ofered a happy home to Harry Truman, Jimmy Carter, and church-state separationists, in the past two decades the SBC has become an uncomfortable institution for Democrats, progressive theologians, and other moderate voices. Current SBC member-heroes include Senators Trent Lott and Jesse Helms. Despite this seeming marginalization, Southern Baptist politicians have grown from political obscurity to occupying the four highest positions in the constitutional order of succesion to the presidency. President Bill Clinton, Vice President Al Gore, Senate President pro-tempore Strom Thurmond, and House Speaker Newt Gingrich are all Southern Baptists. In its emerging Republicanism, the SBC has taken on characteristics of its more active fellow travelers in the Christian Right, forging alliances with former enemies (African Americans amd Roman Catholics), playing presidential politics, establishing a Washington lobbying presence, working the political grassroots, and declaring war on Walt Disney. Each of these missions has been accomplished with calculating political precision. The Rise of Baptist Republicanism traces the Republicanization of the SBC's Republicanism in the context of the rise of the Fundamentalist Right and the emergence of a Republican majority in the South. Describing the SBC's political roots, Oran P. Smith contrasts Baptist Republicans with the rest of the Christian Right while revealing the theological, cultural, and historical factors which have made Southern Baptists receptive to Republican/Fundamentalist Right influences. The book is a must read for anyone wishing to understand the intersection of religion and politics in America today.

Rise of Baptist Republicanism

Author: Oran P. Smith

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2000-05

Total Pages: 351

ISBN-13: 0814780741

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In its emerging Republicanism, the SBC has taken on characteristics of its more active fellow travelers in the Christian Right, forging alliances with former enemies (African Americans and Roman Catholics), playing presidential politics, establishing a Washington lobbying presence, working the political grassroots, and declaring war on Walt Disney. Each of these missions has been accomplished with calculating political precision.

Let Men Be Free

Author: Obbie Tyler Todd

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2022-11-11

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1666743763

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The assortment of political views held by Baptists was as diverse as any other denomination in the early United States, but they were bound together by a fundamental belief in the inviolability of the individual conscience in matters of faith. In a nation where civil government and religion were inextricable, and in states where citizens were still born into the local parish church, the doctrine of believer’s baptism was an inescapably political idea. As a result, historians have long acknowledged that Baptists in the early republic were driven by their pursuit of religious liberty, even partnering with those who did not share their beliefs. However, what has not been as well documented is the complexity and conflict with which Baptists carried out their Jeffersonian project. Just as they disagreed on seemingly everything else, Baptists did not always define religious liberty in quite the same way. Let Men Be Free offers the first comprehensive look into Baptist politics in the early United States, examining how different groups and different generations attempted to separate church from state and how this determined the future of the denomination and indeed the nation itself.

First to the Party

Author: Christopher Baylor

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 0812249631

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What determines the interests, ideologies, and alliances that make up political parties? In its entire history, the United States has had only a handful of party transformations. First to the Party concludes that groups like unions and churches, not voters or politicians, are the most consistent influences on party transformation.

Religion and Public Life in the Southern Crossroads

Author: William D. Lindsey

Publisher: Rowman Altamira

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 9780759106338

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An overview of public religion in Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas.

Who Shall Lead Them?

Author: Larry A. Witham

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2005-07-01

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 0190290439

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The clergy today faces mounting challenges in an increasingly secular world, where declining prestige makes it more difficult to attract the best and the brightest young Americans to the ministry. As Christian churches dramatically adapt to modern changes, some are asking whether there is a clergy crisis as well. Whatever the future of the clergy, the fate of millions of churchgoers also will be at stake. In Who Shall Lead Them?, prizewinning journalist Larry Witham takes the pulse of both the Protestant and Catholic ministry in America and provides a mixed diagnosis of the calling's health. Drawing on dozens of interviews with clergy, seminarians and laity, and using newly available survey data including the 2000 Census, Witham reveals the trends in a variety of traditions. While evangelicals are finding innovative paths to ministry, the Catholic priesthood faces a severe shortage. In mainline Protestantism, ministry as a second career has become a prominent feature. Ordination ages in the Episcopal and United Methodist churches average in the 40s today. The quest by female clergy to lead from the pulpit, meanwhile, has hit a "stained glass ceiling" as churches still prefer a man as the principal minister. While deeply motivated by the mystery of their "call" to ministry, America's priests, pastors, and ministers are reassessing their roles in a world of new debates on leadership, morality, and the powers of the mass media. Who Shall Lead Them? offers a valuable snapshot of this contemporary clergy drama. It will be required reading for everyone concerned about the rapidly shifting ground of our churches and the health of religion in America.

Against the Wind

Author: Carl L. Kell

Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 1572336749

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The struggle for control of the Southern Baptist Convention, which was publicly launched in 1979 and concluded in the 1990s, marked an unprecedented turning point in the history of the denomination. Just as a new millennium was dawning, everything in the denomination was different: its priorities, its policies, and its personalities. The conservatives had come decisively to the fore, and those Baptists labeled as moderates found themselves largely exiled from the religious communities that had formed them and to which they had given their lives. Using rhetorical and historical analysis to illuminate the role of the Baptist moderates and the schisms that led to their banishment, Carl Kell argues that the twenty-first-century Baptist diaspora originated, in an unintended fashion, after World War II. Birthed in a postwar revival movement at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, young men and women with little or no training in preaching and religious organization became the progenitors of a distinctive community of moderate believers. Armed with a spirit of evangelism and missions, fueled by a "rhetoric of freedom," these men and women would be among the first exiles and martyrs of the fundamentalist takeover that occurred years later. As he probes the rhetoric that defined the moderate voice in Southern Baptist life, Kell also shows how the rise of a conservative counter-rhetoric associated with biblical inerrancy and related doctrines came into play to exclude and divide members of the convention. Complementing Kell's text are contributions by several other prominent observers of the Southern Baptist "holy wars," among them William Hull, Bill Leonard, and Duke McCall. The end result is a unique and penetrating examination of not only where the Baptist moderates came from, but where they are headed and how they will get there. Carl Kell is professor of communication at Western Kentucky University. He is the editor of Exiled: Voices of the Southern Baptist Convention Holy War and coauthor, with Raymond Camp, of In the Name of the Father: The Rhetoric of the New Southern Baptist Convention.

American Denominational History

Author: Keith Harper

Publisher: University of Alabama Press

Published: 2008-09-24

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 081735512X

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This work brings various important topics and groups in American religious history the rigor of scholarly assessment of the current literature. The fruitful questions that are posed by the positions and experiences of the various groups are carefully examined. American Denominational History points the way for the next decade of scholarly effort. Contents Roman Catholics by Amy Koehlinger Congregationalists by Margaret Bendroth Presbyterians by Sean Michael Lucas American Baptists by Keith Harper Methodists by Jennifer L. Woodruff Tait Black Protestants by Paul Harvey Mormons by David J. Whittaker Pentecostals by Randall J. Stephens Evangelicals by Barry Hankins

Uneasy in Babylon

Author: Barry Hankins

Publisher: University of Alabama Press

Published: 2002-04-24

Total Pages: 357

ISBN-13: 0817311424

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The definitive account of how conservative Southern Baptists came to dominate the nation's largest Protestant denomination In 1979 a group of conservative members of the Southern Baptists Convention (SBC) initiated a campaign to reshape the denomination’s seminaries and organizations by installing new conservative leaders who made belief in the inerrancy of the Bible a condition of service. They succeeded. This book is a definitive account of that takeover. Barry Hankins argues that the conservatives sought control of the SBC not or not only to secure the denomination's orthodoxy but to mobilize Southern Baptists for a war against secular culture. The best explanation of the beliefs and behavior of Southern Baptist conservatives, Hankins concludes, lies in their adoption of the culture war model of American society. Believing that "American culture has turned hostile to traditional forms of faith,” they sought to deploy the Southern Baptist Convention in a "full-scale culture war" against secularism in the United States. Hankins traces the roots of this movement to the ideas of such post-WWII northern evangelicals as Carl F. H. Henry and Francis Schaeffer. Henry and Schaeffer viewed America's secular culture as hostile to Christianity and called on evangelicals to develop a robust Christian opposition to secular culture. As the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, SBC positions on divisive cultural issues like abortion have remade the American political landscape, most notably in the reversal of Roe v. Wade. Hankins also argues, however, that Southern Baptist conservatives sought more than orthodox adherence to Biblical inerrancy. They also sought an identity that was authentically Baptist and Southern. Hankin’s excellent and prescient work will fascinate readers interested in contemporary American religion, culture, and public policy, as well as in the American South.

Baptists in America

Author: Bill J. Leonard

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0231127022

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Baptist churches and their members have encompassed a range of theological interpretations and a variety of social and political viewpoints. At first glance, Baptist theology seems classically Protestant in its emphasis on the Trinity, the incarnation of Jesus Christ, the authority of Scripture, salvation by faith alone, and baptism by immersion. Yet the interpretation and implementation of these beliefs have made Baptists one of the most fragmented denominations in the United States, often characterized as a people who "multiply by dividing." In Baptists in America, Bill J. Leonard traces the history of Baptists, beginning with their origins in seventeenth-century Holland and England. He examines the development of Baptist beliefs and practices, offering an overview of the various denominations and fellowships within Baptism, and considers the disputes surrounding the question of biblical authority, the ordinances (baptism and the Lord's Supper), congregational forms of church governance, and religious liberty. Leonard also examines the role of Baptists in the Fundamentalist and Social Gospel movements of the early twentieth century, the Civil Rights movement, and the growth of the Religious Right. Leonard explores the social and religious issues currently dividing Baptists, including race, the ordination of women, the separation of church and state, and sexuality. He concludes with a discussion of the future of Baptist identity in America.