The Takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention: A Cautionary Tale
By Pat Anderson, editor
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,
It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness.
It was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity.
It was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness,
It was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair,
We had everything before us, we had nothing before us,
We were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.
—Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
The late Romanian Baptist pastor and theologian, Dr. Ioan Otniel Bunaciu, wrote a book, The History of Romanian Baptists: As I Lived It. It is a first-person account of the historical development of the strongest evangelical church movement in a Communist country. Romania was dominated by the despotic ruler, Nicolai Ceausescu, and supported by the official state church, the Romanian Orthodox Church; but even while under persecution, the church continued.
A colleague and friend took exception to some parts of the book and complained to the author about it. Dr. Bunaciu responded: “I wrote the Baptist history in Romania, as I lived it; If you lived it differently, write your own book!”
First person histories can be very contradictory, it seems. The assessment of historians as to whether events are best — wise and hopeful — or worst — foolish and despairing, as Dickens seems to imply, depends on the historian’s preference for one or the other set of conclusions.
For instance, the dramatic takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention, beginning in 1979 and culminating in 1990, is frequently positively referred to as “The Conservative Resurgence of the SBC.” In truth, those of us who lived through that time know that it is more accurately termed, “The Baptist War,” or more genteelly as “The Fundamentalist Takeover of the SBC.”
That history is often referenced by scholars and commentators when describing the rise of “Christian Nationalism” in America.
Labels matter, and even that term, “Christian Nationalism,” has been proudly appropriated by people like U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson and zealous fans of Donald Trump who conflate nationalism with patriotism.
My friend, Wendell Griffen, told me that the term is “wrong, wrong, wrong” (his words). Never mind the non-Christian use of the term and the non-historical understanding of American nationalism; he says it should more honestly be called “Christian fascism” or “Christian authoritarianism.”
Whatever it is called, what happened in the SBC in the 1980s was not a conservative resurgence by any means. Conservatism had nothing to do with it. It was a well-planned and executed total takeover of America’s largest and richest non-Catholic denomination by power-driven men who lied, cheated and used every means necessary to gain control of the whole operation. And, they did it.
Total control of the SBC was not all they wanted, as studies of the so-called Religious Right have only recently begun to document. They realized that the SBC with its riches, many morally pliable preachers, and easily-snookered laypeople who filled the pews and offering plates of 30,000 churches, could be appropriated for their own use. But the greater goal was to take over America, to make it a “Christian nation,” to champion their misunderstanding of the Bible to promote “biblical law,” a white, male-dominated authoritarian theocracy.
Right about now, if you have read this far, you may be scratching your head and thinking, “What is Pat saying now? Has he gone off his rocker and become a conspiracy theorist?”
The architects, enablers and advocates of the takeover of the SBC created a road map of tactics and strategies which have been adopted by far-right zealots. A few decades ago, they too represented a small minority of Americans; yet they have managed to take over the Republican Party in America and are relentlessly advancing their own unpopular and erroneous beliefs about the founding ideas of America, the Bible, the Constitution, and democracy. Today, that campaign appears far-too-likely to take over the entire American government in 2024.
In the SBC case, the fundamentalists devised an aggressive campaign to undermine church members’ faith in the agencies of their beloved denomination. They traveled the Bible Belt, preaching repeatedly to gatherings large and small, claiming that the SBC was led by “liberals” who did not believe the Bible was inerrant and verbally inspired to be totally accurate in matters of history and science. They claimed, primarily but not exclusively, to uninformed church members and preachers, that seminary professors were indoctrinating preachers with heresies. They claimed that SBC missionaries no longer sought to evangelize. They claimed that, inexplicably, some SBC churches had even called women pastors(!).
There was a small kernel of truth in some of those claims — as one might find a bit of corn or oats in horse manure. But the impact of the presentations was what we now understand to be gaslighting. That term was not widely known in the 1980s, but in 2022, Merriam-Webster named gaslighting as their “Word of the Year,” defining it in part as:
…to psychologically manipulate (a person) usually over an extended period of time so that the victim questions the validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality…
It is a technique to grossly mislead or deceive targeted people especially for one’s own advantage. Another form of the modern technique is Fake News. Psychology Today defines gaslighting as an insidious form of manipulation and psychological control which deliberately and systematically feeds false information that makes it increasingly difficult for the victim to see the truth.
The SBC Takeover strategists understood that only a very small number of SBC church members participated in the governing processes of the denomination which took place at annual meetings of the SBC in various cities. A denomination that claimed 14,000,000 members normally saw 12-20,000 persons attend the annual meetings. If even a small number of gullible and frightened church members and pastors could be herded to the annual SBC Convention meetings each year and vote as directed by the fundamentalist leaders, they could remove the existing officers and executives, change the traditional statements of Baptist beliefs about the separation of church and state, diminish women’s roles in the church, and refute local church autonomy, They could replace the existing type of administrative leadership that so far had thwarted the ambitions of the fundamentalists with zealots who would follow the dictates of fundamentalism. When I attended the annual SBC Convention meeting for the first time in 1985, there were 45,000 registered voters in attendance.
By the time the final break in the denomination occurred at the annual meeting of the SBC in New Orleans in 1990, the SBC was totally and publicly dominated by fundamentalists who had already made much progress in removing agency executives, seminary presidents and professors, unsupportive board members, and anyone associated with the resistance to the Fundamentalist Takeover.
Today, the SBC has been ravaged by financial and sexual abuse scandals, sagging seminary enrollment, deficits, declining membership, and political relevancy only for the MAGA-world. The public has increasingly and correctly understood the SBC to be a pliable and reliable tool of the extremist faction of the Republican Party.
Even as the SBC Takeover was unfolding in the 1980s, most of us who fought hard to “save” the SBC from the disaster that resulted from the Takeover, did not fully appreciate the broader implications of what was happening.
One late layman, named John F. Baugh, was an exception. I first became aware of John Baugh at the SBC Annual Meeting in Dallas, Texas, in 1985, well after the struggle had been engaged. The next year in Atlanta, I met him personally. I had learned that he was the founding president and CEO of the giant food distribution corporation, Sysco. Every time I see a Sysco truck, I think of John Baugh. Mr. Baugh was a well-known Texas Baptist layman, a gentleman and a devout and honorable man. He was also an astute churchman and denominational leader who understood what was at stake in the SBC Takeover better than anyone else I had met. He knew the fundamentalists who led the scheme to take over the SBC, calling them phonies, and explaining that they were motivated by visions of power, greed and control.
In 1996, John Baugh published his first and only book, The Battle for Baptist Integrity, in which he told the story of the takeover as he lived it. He warned Southern Baptists about the dangers of the fundamentalist mindset and the motives and tactics of authoritarians. He saw that the final goal, beyond the takeover of the SBC, was to capture, reconstruct and dominate the United States of America.
Not many Baptists or other Christians saw what John Baugh saw. He was prescient, ahead of his time. But now, just a few decades later, we see that he was correct. The same tactics of the SBC Takeover have been employed by unscrupulous men and women to successfully capture and control more than half of America’s state legislatures and governorships, and a super-majority of justices on the U.S. Supreme Court They have entrenched a large number of far right appellate and federal judges, enabled a minority of representatives to dominate the leadership of the U.S. House of Representatives, and much more. They work night and day to install Donald J. Trump into a second term as president of the U.S. to further the reconstruction and domination of America.
That is how I continue “to live it.” What happened to the Southern Baptist Convention is a cautionary tale, indeed.
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