He Fought For Racial Equality
By Sam Hodges
Foy Valentine was a white Texan who, during the 1960s and ‘70s, forced fellow Southern Baptists to confront their denomination’s racist past and move toward integration.
Dr. Valentine, who died this weekend at 82, led the Southern Baptist Convention’s Christian Life Commission—the denomination’s public policy arm—for nearly 30 years.
He was a moderate often at odds with Southern Baptist conservatives. He stirred the pot not just on race, but on church-state separation, abortion and other controversial issues.
A pioneering Baptist ethicist, Dr. Valentine kept on his desk an engraved copy of his motto for half a century—“Helping changed people to change the world.”
Dr. Valentine died at an area hospital after suffering a heart attack in his North Dallas home.
“Foy Valentine was one of the most influential Baptists of the 20th century,” said Phil Strickland, director of the Baptist General Convention of Texas’ Christian Life Commission. “He was always long on insight and long on courage.”
Richard Land is a Baptist conservative who succeeded Dr. Valentine. (The agency has been renamed the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission.) Dr. Land has led the denomination to a stronger anti-abortion position and what moderate critics say is a less-strict position on the separation of church and state.
But Dr. Land, too, paid tribute to Dr. Valentine in a written statement released Monday.
“While Dr. Valentine and I had significant differences of opinion on many issues, all Southern Baptists will be forever in his debt for his courageous and prophetic stance on racial reconciliation and racial equality in the turbulent middle third of the century,” Dr. Land said.
Dr. Valentine grew up in the East Texas town of Edgewood, in Van Zandt County. In the 1940s, he earned an undergraduate degree at Baylor University and a master’s and doctorate at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. There he studied with the renowned Baptist ethicist T.B. Maston, whom he acknowledged as a key influence.
Also in the ‘40s, Dr. Valentine spent a summer at Koinonia, a pioneering interracial farming community in south Georgia run by Clarence Jordan, a white Baptist theologian.
“We worked in the peanut patches,” Dr. Valentine recalled in an essay: “We cut some wood, We gathered wild grapes. We visited with the neighbors. We made ice cream. We studied the Greek New Testament. We took an occasional sashay into town. We worked at improving race relations. We had some kind of a wonderful, rip-roaring, rousing, delightful time.”
After seminary, Dr. Valentine served as a Baptist pastor in Texas. Then in 1953, he was named executive director of the Christian Life Commission of the Baptist General Convention of Texas, the largest state group within the Southern Baptist Convention. Seven years later, he moved to Nashville to lead the SBC’s Christian Life Commission.
Through much of that time, he endured criticism within the denomination and the threat of budget cuts for his agency for his writing, speaking and organizing on behalf of improved race relations.
Toby Druin, editor emeritus of the Texas Baptist Standard newspaper, recalled as a young Baptist journalist attending a 1968 conference on race organized by Dr. Valentine. There, Mr Druin heard from black civil rights leaders, including Bayard Rustin.
“It made me a better person and a better Baptist,” Mr. Druin said.
Dr. Valentine was just as forceful on church-state separation issues and served as president of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. He also took what Baptist historian Barry Hankins called a moderate position on abortion rights in the 1970s.
“He’s a hero to the moderates and progressive types because of his taking stands against segregation, long before it was in vogue to do so,” said Dr. Hankins, a Baylor professor and author of Uneasy in Babylon: Southern Baptist Conservatives and American Culture. “He was one of the villains of the conservatives because of the abortion issue.”
Dr. Valentine returned to Texas after retiring from the SBC in 1987 and continued to write prolifically on applied ethics. The author of several books, he also founded a Christian ethics center, now housed at Baylor and Christian Ethics Today, a bimonthly magazine that has grown to more than 4,000 subscribers.
With folksy lyricism, he wrote often for that journal, quoting Shakespeare and Willie Nelson, and opining on everything from ethics to the joys of grandparenthood to the age-prolonging power of banana pudding topped by nutmeg and Blue Bell ice cream. He wrote nostalgically about his rural East Texas upbringing and about the solace he felt in his cabin retreat in New Mexico.
Dr. Valentine paid to have a collection of his columns published, with copies going to subscribers and other supporters of Christian Ethics Today. But the book—Whatsoever Things Are Lovely—proved to be a surprise hit, with readers gladly paying for extras, said Joe Trull, editor of the magazine.
“I just had an e-mail from someone wanting 25 copies,” he said.
Dr. Valentine is survived by Mary Louise Valentine, his wife of 58 years; his daughters Jean Valentine, Carol Valentine and Susan Brown; and five grandchildren.
A memorial service will be at 2 p.m. Wednesday at Park Cities Baptist Church, near Northwest Highway and Preston Road. Burial will be in Edgefield.
Note: This article is printed by permission of the Dallas Morning News where it appeared on January 10, 2006.
