Let the Church Stand Up

They call themselves messengers, and they like to denounce the wicked world with the rhetoric of doom. "We are suffering from the corrosive breath of materialism, secularism, commercialism and godlessness," cries the Rev. Jaroy Weber of Lubbock, Texas, outgoing president of the Southern Baptist Convention, and this leads to "hunger, inflation, credibility gaps, loose morals, bad government, divorce, drunkenness." But as some 16,000 Southern Baptist messengers gather this week in Norfolk for the 119th convention of the largest Protestant group in the U.S., their spirits are as ebullient as their slogan: LET THE CHURCH STAND UP. As keynote speaker, they corralled the 38th President, Gerald Ford, and more than a few of them expect that the 39th President may be one of their own members, Jimmy Carter.

In an age of cool politicians, Carter acknowledges that he wept when he was "born again." He says without embarrassment that "Jesus is the most important thing in my life," and he often falls to his knees "to ask God to let me do the right thing." This fervent religiosity may have won Carter considerable SUPport; not only are the Southern Baptists, now 12.7 million in all 50 states, growing by some 250,000 a year, but the total of evangelical Americans is estimated at between 40 and 50 million*. But among skeptics, there remain lingering doubts about the political significance of Carter's religion and of the Southern Baptists themselves. Are they, as some fear, secretly prejudiced against blacks, Catholics, Jews, and indeed anyone unlike themselves? Are they likely to become an oppressive influence in a Carter Administration? Who exactly are the Southern Baptists and what do they stand for?

The first rule about Southern Baptists is that they make their own rules. Neither their president nor the convention as a whole has any authority to dictate policy to the 34,902 member churches, most of which have less than 300 members and all of which name their own ministers. "Southern Baptists are independent as hogs on ice," says Floyd Craig of the convention's Christian Life Commission. "Baptist churches range from authoritarian to permissive. But we do all share one common individual belief: If you're hungry and a man won't give you bread, then that man is no-account."

Baptist theology is somewhat more complicated than that, and the theology is inextricably intertwined with the movement's history. Its basic beliefs--a personal involvement with Christ, the supreme authority of the infallible Scripture, and voluntary baptism, usually by full immersion--grew out of the nonconformist Puritanism of the 17th century. John Bunyan was a Baptist and "preached what I felt and what I smartingly did feel, even under that which my poor soul did groan and tremble to astonishment." The first Baptist church in America was founded in Providence in 1639 by Roger Williams, who had been recently expelled from Massachusetts for his "new and dangerous opinions." But Williams himself decided that same year that no single church, not even his own, could express the true religion.

Bawling Nonsense? Despite these theological controversies, the Baptists grew together early in the 19th century only to be shattered by the fight over slavery. Church authorities declared in 1845 that no slave owner should be permitted to serve as a Baptist missionary, so the Southern Baptists seceded and organized their own convention. The Civil War brought ruin to many of them. Northern preachers demanded loyalty oaths from their defeated brethren, and many Southerners headed West, carrying Scriptures in their saddlebags and baptizing new converts in the creeks and cow ponds of the prairies. Out of the hellfire tradition of revival-tent meetings grew an uglier tradition of prejudice and violence. The burning crosses of the Ku Klux Klan were a grotesque perversion of Christian principles, but an image was formed. "It became dangerous in the South to be intelligent," as H.L. Mencken scolded during the heyday of Klan power in the 1920s. "Every Baptist pastor became a neighborhood Pope ... Every pastor was a chartered libertine, free to bawl nonsense without challenge ... What the poor whites heard from the outside world they heard from the lips of these pious ignoramuses."

The South of the 1920s is dead, of course, and so is the Southern Baptism of the '20s. Baptist leaders today protest with justifiable vehemence against stereotyped suspicions. "We're not a bunch of right-wing bigots," says Floyd Craig. "We're a pluralistic people. Every ethnic group is represented." Some 70,000 blacks now belong to the Southern Baptist churches, and several of the organization's key staffers are black. On the other hand, that 70,000 represents only one-half of 1 %--a minuscule figure that Baptist leaders ascribe partly to local autonomy, partly to black separatism (black Baptists, of whom the most celebrated was Martin Luther King Jr., now total more than 11 million, organized in four major conventions). Of the many Southern Baptist churches that still have no black members, one is Jimmy Carter's home church in Plains, Ga. Though the Carter family itself supported the admission of black members, Plains Pastor Bruce Edwards says: "There is still segregation, but the rule is no longer enforced. There are no blacks who attend regularly, although there are some who attend occasionally."

Theologically, too, the Southern Baptists have changed since the days of the Scopes trial. Baptist theological students now study Kierkegaard and Tillich at six major seminaries (the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth is the world's largest denominationally affiliated institution of its kind, with a student body of 3,470). While Baptist theology remains conservative, and the "inerrancy" of the Bible remains a common article of faith, the Baptists frown on the emotional phenomena known as the charismatic movement. In the past year, six churches in Texas, Ohio and Louisiana were "disfellowshipped" by their local associations for supporting faith healing and glossolalia (speaking in tongues). "The mainstream of Baptist belief is not in sympathy with the tongues movement," growls President Weber, but true to Baptist principles of local autonomy, the disfellowshipping had no practical effect on the offending churches.

The one nonreligious field in which Southern Baptists take an almost theological interest is that of public morals. They oppose, by and large, all drinking, smoking and blasphemy. Also gambling. Sometimes even dancing. "Chastity is still an issue," said one Baptist leader as he surveyed the motions and petitions submitted to this week's convention. The Rev. Robert Holbrook of Halletsville, Texas, has sent out 15,000 letters asking support for a resolution against abortion. Yet another petitioner calls for the abolition of rock music on the church's "powerline" radio program because all such music is aswarm with "adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, heresies and revelings."

On such questions, the Southern Baptists have undeniably exerted an influence. Prohibition still prevails in some of the most hard-drinking areas of the South, and there are even widespread restrictions on such mild forms of gambling as church bingo. But when it comes to political interference, Baptists point to a long tradition of fighting for separation of church and state. Indeed it was their fear of a Roman Catholic President that led a group of Southern Baptist ministers to join in interrogating John F. Kennedy about his religious views in 1960, the last time that religion played a major role in U.S. presidential politics. Even today, says Foy Valentine, executive secretary of the Baptists' Christian Life Commission, "Roman Catholics who want tax money for their parochial schools and so forth will catch it from the Southern Baptists." But Carter says: "I've never tried to use my position as a public official to promote my beliefs, and I never would."

Despite such controversies, the thousands of messengers did not go to the dome-topped Scope Convention Hall in Norfolk to argue. They went for song and sermons and uplift. They went for the "Joggers Jubilee" and a concert by the Anita Bryant Singers. The back-slapping men in plaid jackets, the women in bouffant hairdos and red-white-and-blue dresses, feel good--feel almost evangelical--about a church that is strong and successful and middleclass. For all its hierarchical looseness, the Southern Baptist empire extends to scores of colleges, newspapers and other holdings. The budget to be voted on this week calls for a record $55 million for missionary work and social welfare. "There is a new sense of mission," Executive Committee Secretary Porter Routh said as he oversaw final preparations in Norfolk, "and a full sense that God is blessing this ministry."

Pep Talk Quality. Baptists have long claimed that sense of mission, one that transcends secular organization. Their ministers are as varied as former Georgia Governor Lester Maddox and former White House Press Secretary Bill Moyers, but no one conveys the Southern Baptist spirit more powerfully than Billy Graham, the Baptists' premier evangelist. His message is often one of sin and hellfire, but there is also a pep-talk quality that has encouraged millions. In his best-selling book, Angels, Graham conveys that quality when he writes: "Because our [spiritual] resources are unlimited, Christians will be winners. Millions of angels are at God's command and at our service. The hosts of heaven stand at attention as we make our way from earth to glory ... So don't be afraid. God is for you."

It is a message that Jimmy Carter --who still reads a chapter of the Bible every night, in Spanish--may have heard echoing through the long dark nights of the past few years.

* The terms evangelical and fundamentalist are sometimes used interchangeably, but they have different connotations. Evangelicalism derives from Martin Luther's emphasis on the gospels and salvation through faith. Fundamentalism as a movement emerged shortly after 1900 and put renewed stress on miraculous aspects of the life of Christ. The groups may overlap since both fundamentalists and evangelicals emphasize the authority of the Bible rather than the church, but fundamentalists tend to be more conservative, both theologically and politically.

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