`A Voice Crying in the Wilderness`: Joseph Martin Dawson`s Quest for Social Justice

By Bill Pitts

Part I: The Injustice of Poverty

Joseph Martin Dawson is remembered by members of First Baptist Church Waco as their longest-serving pastor, 1915-1946. By the larger Baptist community in the United States he is remembered as the founding executive of the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs in Washington D.C., an organization devoted to religious liberty. In this position, Dawson exerted significant influence on U.S. policy from 1946-1953. His vision was to deny legislation funding  Catholic parochial schools and to deny presidential appointment of an ambassador to the Vatican. Clarifying the meaning of separation of church and state and successfully advocating for it was his most notable achievement.

The present study focuses on another significant dimension of Dawson’s life—his deep commitment to social justice. Throughout his life ministry, Dawson spoke out on social issues confronting his community. In his autobiography, Dawson wrote: “I attribute continual involvement in lively encounters connected with espousal of social justice to a strong conviction that corporate sin was as culpable as individual sin. . . . Predisposed toward humane behavior, cruelty on individuals and groups . . . were particularly abhorrent to me.” 

This study of Dawson appears in three parts. In this first article, following a sketch of Dawson’s life, I explore Dawson’s experience of poverty and his analysis of economic injustice in America. In a second essay, I note his early Waco experience of observing a lynching (1916), which prompted a lifelong campaign against racial injustice. In a third and final essay, I will trace how Dawson became a passionate critic of war and an active campaigner for peace, even contributing to the formation of the United Nations in 1945.  

A Baptist Minister

Joseph Martin Dawson was born June 21, 1879, in his grandfather’s farm house, 12 miles west of Waxahachie, in Ellis County, Texas. He was the oldest of 13 children born to Martin Judy Dawson, Jr. and Laura Underwood Dawson. Dawson’s father was a farmer who worked as a sharecropper in cotton fields. The Dawsons lived on the edge of poverty. Dawson struggled in choosing his vocation, recording that he expected to be a journalist. While still a teenager, he submitted articles to the children’s section of The Dallas Morning News and, by the time he was 15, the paper engaged him to write regularly. He never lost his passion for journalism and continued to write throughout his life.

The other vocation attracting Dawson was the ministry. Dawson had been brought up in a Baptist church. He recalled his call to preach “in the ravine at the back of the cotton field.” Baylor President Samuel P. Brooks inspired Dawson to attend nearby Baylor University, which he entered in 1899 with meager resources. While he was a student at Baylor, he served as part-time minister to four small churches. He was also active in various literary organizations; he was also the founder and editor of The Lariat, the school newspaper, and editor of the school annual, The Round Up. He completed his degree and also read theological works under the direction of B.H. Carroll. Carroll introduced him to the practice of evangelism and denominational work; reading E.Y. Mullins was formative for his theology and reading Charles Reynolds Brown introduced him to social Christianity. Dawson did not have formal seminary training. But he read widely throughout the rest of his life. He served as full-time pastor of five Texas Baptist churches—briefly at Albany, Lampasas, Hillsboro and Temple, and then for a record 31-and- one-half years at the First Baptist Church of Waco (1915-1946).

Dawson was an effective evangelical preacher. He reported that early in his career he preached about six revivals per year. These meetings were successful, and he was persuasive in his own pulpit as well. His sermons are almost invariably constructed in three parts. They are well organized, easily understood, and focused on life situations. The statistics for First Baptist Church, Waco, show growth in conversions and membership throughout his 31 years of leadership. By 1926, the average weekly attendance at First Baptist Church exceeded one thousand. Dawson said that soul-winning is the “primal matter” for Baptists.  In this task Dawson was clearly successful. He had tremendous support from his wife, Willie Turner Dawson, an exceptionally gifted speaker who taught a huge class of female college students, as well as regularly addressing students at state conferences. When asked about Mrs. Dawson’s role in the church, a long-time FBC member declared, “O, she was the secret! Miss Willie loved everybody!”

A second major pastoral interest of Dawson was foreign missions. As a student he formed a prayer group with six other students who called themselves “the Covenanters”. Their purpose was to pray daily for each other and for the success of the foreign mission enterprise. A measure of the strength of Dawson’s missionary commitment was the financial support his church  offered to the enterprise. The report of the Association Year 1943-44 shows that FBC Waco received $80,741.30, of which $35, 379.70 went to local projects and $45,361.60 to all missions and benevolences. Through summer mission work, Dawson personally started Baptist work in Santa Fe and very soon the city had its own First Baptist Church. Dawson served on the Home Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention for 10 years, 1919-1928.  

A third mark of Dawson’s highly successful ministry was his deep devotion to his denomination. He served as assistant secretary for the Texas Baptist Education Commission, which supported Baptist colleges. He also served on the boards of the new Hillcrest Baptist Hospital in Waco, the Baptist Standard, and the executive board of the Baptist General Convention of Texas. He was asked to lead the Texas division of the Seventy-five  Million Campaign to fund projects for the Southern Baptist Convention; FBC Waco pledged $200,000. He served on the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1945-46, chaired the Convention’s Peace Committee in 1944 and was founding director of the Baptist Joint Committee (1946). Throughout his pastoral ministry, Dawson kept up a steady stream of writing—books (12 in all), chapters, articles in newspapers, religious journals and magazines, pamphlets and book reviews. 

By any standard, Dawson succeeded as a Southern Baptist minister. But Dawson added to pastoral ministry a social activism uncharacteristic of his Southern Baptist culture. Acknowledging that few Southern Baptist ministers addressed issues of the social order, he described himself as a voice crying in the wilderness. Dawson readily conceded that his social activism drew criticism. This commitment could have, in fact, jeopardized his ministry. Baptist fundamentalist leader, J Frank Norris, attacked him for his views, but failed to spoil Dawson’s ministry or undermine his commitment to social activism. Dawson was not only a successful minister in the traditional sense. According to historian John Story, he was also Texas Baptists’ “foremost exponent of applied religion.” Storey argues that Dawson was able to maintain engagement in social activism because he always combined his social message with a conservative rather than a liberal theology.

Poverty and the Social Gospel

Crusading for social justice became part of Dawson’s theology in 1912, while he was a pastor in Temple. The Baptist Standard’s new editor—E. C. Routh—asked him to write “a series of articles on the social application of the gospel.” Dawson recalled that his research for these articles set him “on my subsequent crusading for social justice.” He became conversant with the work of many social gospelers, including his extensive reading of Walter Rauschenbusch in preparation for the series.  The social message articulated by Rauschenbusch challenged injustice and was widely adopted by ministers in the North; most Southern Baptist ministers accepted prevailing Southern culture, remaining silent on social issues. However, they too eventually began to confront social issues, forming the Christian Life Commission for this task in 1950. But long before the appearance of the Christian Life Commission, Dawson, according to James Dunn, “fearlessly engaged in struggles in the South.”  Throughout his writings, Dawson refers to the social gospel, observing that it “was Rauschenbusch from whom I received my concept of a full gospel.” He declared that Rauschenbusch’s contribution to American society was nothing less than “immense.”

Dawson’s personal experience of poverty helps explain his commitment to the social gospel. He addresses the question extensively in his autobiography. Significantly, his father had many grievances with the sharecropper system:

Father mistrusted the tenant system, [and] resolved to achieve independence speedily. He     heartily disliked landlordism, called it a curse, a dreadful tyranny. He recoiled at the exactions imposed upon renters—the requirement that they furnish teams and tools, frequently that they buy supplies from owner constabularies, mortgage their crops for living expenses, and add ten percent on deferred payment of high-priced items of ordinary food and clothing. . . . He pointed in bitter revolt to the fact that with all these impositions the poor sharecroppers seldom came out clear at the end of the year. 

Sharecropping left his father distraught. Dawson suffered from threats of poverty during his childhood; he was exposed to the common trials of farm families—little time for schooling, too many children to feed, and fear of the future. He recalled that at age 14 he had …a sense of encircling doom . . . a terrible apprehension of imminent calamity hovering over my family. I seethed in anger that a wise God would permit so many children, fiercely rebelled at grinding poverty and the persistent irritation in the home. . . . Yet I did not try to “run away”—I admired my brave idealist father, and I would not think of the practical heroine, my mother, without tears.

Americans did not have to live in an industrialized northern city (where the social gospel was initiated) to suffer the sheer agony brought on by poverty.

Dawson’s most important discussion of social Christianity appears in his book, Christ and Social Change, written during the Depression. The first half of the book loosely approaches the question as Rauschenbusch did in Christianity and the Social Crisis. In a memorable statement, Dawson declares the doctrine of the future life is firmly fixed in Jesus’ teaching, but it is not as central as the doctrine of the Kingdom of Heaven. He reminds readers of Kagawa’s current application of Christian faith to slums of Japan. He cites the Biblical example of Acts 2, explaining that Christians today avoid giving it current applications, fearing it would be used as a warrant for communism. He of course rejects communism, noting to readers that the difference is that the Jerusalem experience was voluntary where Christians practiced service to others, expressing the love of Christ. Dawson cites the modern example of Denmark to show the kind of society that can emerge if the fundamental concept of economy is based on cooperation rather than competition. He is highly critical of the current American economic order because it is based on profit-making and consequently is selfish and thus anti-Christian. Moreover, the economic system also engages in exploitation, which sets one class against another, and finally, it creates poverty and crime, as well as a divided society. 

By contrast, Dawson believed that the ideal of a Christian economy is based on cooperation and sharing. He writes, “If it is God’s will to give us our daily bread, then creation and distribution of wealth is one of the surest ways of cooperating with the purpose of God.”  “Common,” he exclaims, “is a good New Testament word!” Dawson writes that in Jesus’ teaching the Kingdom of God is the rule of God in the heart, the will of God done on earth as well as in heaven. And again he declares, “The Kingdom is a society with God as father and men as brothers.” 

Dawson was always very clear that we must have changed men, not just a changed system. But he strongly insisted that one cannot be detached from his environment—his race, his family, and his associations. To him, it seemed “most unfortunate that we ever invented the terms personal and social salvation, for they are but complementary sides of the same thing.” Jesus’ concept of the Kingdom of God means working to redeem the individual and redeem the nation. This is “the whole gospel.” 

Dawson adopted a social gospel and a social ethic early in his ministry. The quest for economic justice was personal: it was a passion formed by his own experience of poverty’s detrimental influence on his entire family. To counter poverty and rectify the economy was, in his view, a mandate of the gospel of the Kingdom of God.

References:

Joseph Martin Dawson, A Thousand Months to Remember: An Autobiography (Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 1964), 162.

The substance of these three articles was delivered as a paper at the annual meeting of the Baptist History and Heritage Society in Raleigh, North Carolina, May 21, 2019.

Ibid., 42.

Dawson, “My Father Won Me,” The Teacher, LIX (September 1945), 41.

Dawson, A Thousand Months, 45.

Dunn, “The Ethical Thought,” 6. 

Dawson, A Thousand Months, 53.

Dunn, p. 10. The books which strongly influenced Dawson were Social Message of the Modern Pulpit by Charles Reynolds Brown and Axioms of Religion by E.Y. Mullins.

He said that books were his best friends, and he even preached an early sermon based on Paul’s brief comment “and bring the books” (II Tim. 4:13). See Joseph Martin Dawson, “Bring the Books,” handwritten sermon manuscript, Joseph Martin Dawson Papers, Accession #125, Box #36, Folder #10, The Texas Collection, Baylor University. This extensive collection of 90 boxes of Dawson papers was finally completed in 2013.

Dawson, A Thousand Months, 136.

The Dawson papers include numerous sermons. See Box #36 for examples.

See Frank E. Burkhalter, A World-Visioned Church: Story of the First Baptist Church, Waco, Texas (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1946), 199 and 202 for statistics at the end of 10 and 20 years of Dawson’s ministry.

James Leo Garrett, Jr., “Joseph Martin Dawson: Pastor, Author, Denominational Leader, Social Activist,” Baptist History and Heritage, Vol. 14 (October 1979), No. 4: 9.

J.M. Dawson, “Report of the Home Mission Board,” Southern Baptist Convention Annual, 1919, 78.

Dawson wrote, “I considered preaching to be my major task.” In “How I Prepare Sermons,” The Quarterly Journal of Speech (Feb. 24, 1954), 52-54.

Bill Pitts, oral interview with George Berry Graves, FBC Waco, Texas, April 28, 2019.

J.M. Dawson, “Romance of a Covenanter,” Baptist Standard (December 16, 1926), 3.

Burkhalter, 207.

Dunn, 20.

Dunn, 19.

Dunn, 21.

Ibid., 22

Dawson, A Thousand Months, 171.

James Dunn, “The Ethical Thought of Joseph Dawson,” (Th.D. diss., Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1966), 24.

John W. Storey, Texas Baptist Leadership and Social Christianity, 1900-1980 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1986), 31,60, 63, 66, 81.

Ibid., 4, 13, 55, 142, 223.

Dawson, A Thousand Months, 113. 

Dawson, A Thousand Months, 114.

These six articles, published in issues from July through October 1914, were based on manuscripts of sermons he had preached to his congregation at his churches in Hillsboro and Temple, 1911-1914. The articles were entitled “The Man in the Hole,” “Christ and the Laboring Man,” “Christ and Capital,” “A Child in the Midst,” “The Rise of Women,” and “Tomorrow.” See outlines of these sermons in The Dawson Papers, Box #36. Also see Marshall Johnston, “A Lone Star Social Gospel? The Influence of Walter Rauschenbusch on the Social Christianity of J.M. Dawson,” Texas Baptist History: The Journal of the Texas Baptist Historical Society, XXIV (2004), 19 and 27.

Joseph Martin Dawson, Baptists and the American Republic (Nashville: Broadman, 1956), 193. He was pleased to report that he had contributed to “this transformation. (Dawson, A Thousand Months to Remember, 166.)

Dunn, iv.

Dawson, A Thousand Months, 212.

Dawson, Baptists and the American Republic, 192.

Dawson, A Thousand Months, 6-7.

Ibid., 28.

Joseph Martin Dawson, Christ and Social Change  (Philadelphia: The Judson Press, 1937). He submitted the manuscript to Broadman Press of the Southern Baptist Convention, but they refused to publish it; Judson, the American Baptist press, accepted it.

Dawson, Christ and Social Change,  27.

Ibid., 26.

Ibid., 66-69.

Ibid., 77-83.

Ibid., 83-84.

Ibid., 88-89.

Ibid., 29.

Ibid., 28.

Ibid., 120-123.

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