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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 June 2018
In 1917, a Baptist minister in Henderson, North Carolina, wrote to a Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) worker of the frustrations pastors encountered in teaching their parishioners a “progressive” religious ethic appropriate for the age:
Nearly all of us are driven by the force of circumstances to be a bit more conservative than it is in our hearts to be. I am frank to say to you that I have found it out of the question to move people in the mass at all, unless you go with a slowness that sometimes seems painful; and I have settled down to the conviction that it is better to lead people slowly than not at all.
1. S. L. Morgan to Hight Moore, June 27, 1917, in Hight C. Moore papers, box 3, folder 20, Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives, Nashville, Tennessee (hereafter SBHLA); William Owen Carver, diary entry for January 1, 1893, in William Owen Carver papers, box 1, folder 10, SBHLA.
2. Terrill, Tom E. and Hirsch, Jerrold, eds., Such as Us: Southern Voices of the Thirties (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), 159.Google Scholar
3. For a look at the standardization of southern evangelical church life, summarized by the term “programmed piety,” see Leonard, Bill J., God's Last and Only Hope: The Fragmentation of the Southern Baptist Convention (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990).Google Scholar For an analysis of plain-folk white southern culture, see Gregory, James N., American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).Google Scholar For a look at the drive to rationalize rural church life in the North and the resistance that met this effort, see Madison, James, “Reformers and the Rural Church, 1900-1950,” Journal of American History 73 (1986): 645-98CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Crunden, Robert M., Ministers of Reform: the Progressives' Achievement in American Civilization (New York: Basic Books, 1982).Google Scholar For the Special conditions that faced southern progressives, and the paradox of how they attempted to reform and “democratize” their region through state-sponsored programs, see Grantham, Dewey W., Southern Progressivism: The Reconciliation of Progress and Tradition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983)Google Scholar; and Link, William A., The Paradox of Southern Progressivism, 1880-1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992).Google Scholar
4. The classic analysis of the rhetoric of the “New South” is Gaston, Paul M., The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970).Google Scholar See also Ayers, Edward L., The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).Google Scholar
5. The best detailed history of the Southern Baptist Convention remains Baker, Robert A., The Southern Baptist Convention and Its People, 1607-1972 (Nashville: Broadman, 1974).Google Scholar Southern Baptist Convention statistics are conveniently summarized in Allen, Clifton and others, eds., Encyclopedia of Southern Baptists, 2 vols. (Nashville: Broadman, 1958), 2:1255-62.Google Scholar The radical roots of Southern Baptists are explored in Isaac, Rhys, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982)Google Scholar, while the transformation of southern religion into a profoundly conservative force is summarized in Hill, Samuel S., Southern Churches in Crisis (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967)Google Scholar, and Boles, John, “Evangelical Protestantism in the Old South: From Dissent to Dominance,” in Religion in the South: Essays, ed. Wilson, Charles Reagan (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1985).Google Scholar For a similar analysis discussing the Southern Baptist Convention in particular, see Eighmy, John Lee, Churches in Cultural Captivity: A History of the Social Attitudes of Southern Baptists (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1972).Google Scholar
6. The best compilation of statistics on rural Southern Baptist churches can be found in Alldredge, E. P., ed., Southern Baptist Handbook, 1923, in Two Parts (Nashville: Sunday School Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, 1924)Google Scholar, copy available in Rare Book Room, SBHLA. Alldredge's survey was the SBC Version of the “country church” surveys and reports that appeared by the hundreds from 1900 to the 1930's.
7. Southern Baptist Convention Proceedings, 1885, Report of the Home Mission Board, Appendix A, xii-xiii.
8. The “gentleman theologians” of the antebellum South are explored in Holifield, E. Brooks, The Gentlemen Theologians: American Theology in Southern Culture, 1795-1860 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1978).Google Scholar The thrusts of democratic evangelicalism are explored in Hatch, Nathan O., The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).Google Scholar Throughout much of the South, but especially pronounced in the Kill country and the southwestern states, resistance to denominational missions organizing was widespread and immensely influential. For anti-missionism, see Wyatt-Brown, Bertram, “The Anti-Mission Movement in the Jacksonian South: A Study in Regional Folk Culture,” Journal of Southern History 36 (November 1970): 501-29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar On Landmarkism, the popular theology of the Southwest that excoriated elite denominational leaders of the southeastern states, the best available analysis is now Marty Beall, “James Robinson Graves and the Rhetoric of Demagogy: Primitivism and Democracy in Old Landmarkism” (Ph.D. diss., Vanderbilt University, 1990).
9. The dose relationship between postbellum white southern churches and the “Lost Cause” is portrayed in Wilson, Charles Reagan, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980).Google Scholar
10. Holt, A. J., Pioneering in the Southwest (Nashville: Sunday School Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, 1923), 45–47.Google Scholar
11. Ibid., 80-87, 89-120.
12. “Call to Ministry,” Religious Herald, October 6, 1910; [J. M. White], Biblical Recorder, February 1, 1892. The Religious Herald and the Biblical Recorder were the State Baptist denominational newspapers for Virginia and North Carolina, respectively. They were widely circulated and the most influential of the papers among region-wide denominational figures.
13. Basil Manly, Jr., to Charles Manly, October 8, 1869, in Manly family papers, reel 4, SBHLA; Allen, and others, eds., Encyclopedia of Southern Baptists, 2:817-18.Google Scholar
14. James Frost, Journal for 1872, in James Marion Frost papers, box 36, Library of the Sunday School Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, Nashville, Tennessee.
15. George Blount Diary, entry for July 26, 1868, in Blount papers, folder 4, SBHLA.
16. The seminary's history is summarized in Mueller, William, History of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1958).Google Scholar The Boyce quote is from his inaugural address, which is reprinted in full in Baker, Robert, A Baptist Source Book, with Particular Reference to Southern Baptists (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1966), 132-36.Google Scholar
17. E. Y. Mullins, “Our Seminary's Ideals,” Biblical Recorder, October 18, 1899. Mullins's career at the seminary is detailed in Ellis, William, “A Man of Books and a Man of the People”: E. Y. Mullins and the Crisis of Moderate Southern Baptist Leadership (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1985).Google Scholar
18. Bernard Spilman, Journal, Bernard Spilman papers, box 3, folder 1, SBHLA. A few of the better-known works by Southern Seminary professors of the time include Mullins, E. Y., The Axioms of Religion: A New Interpretation of the Baptist Faith (Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1908)Google Scholar; Carver, William Owen, The Course of Christian Missions: A History and an Interpretation (New York: Fleming Revell, 1932)Google Scholar; and Broadus, John, Treatise on the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons (1880; 17th ed., New York: Armstrong, 1891).Google Scholar
19. The Suggestion that, by 1920, congregations of over 250 members rarely considered untrained men for pulpit openings comes from an extensive survey of local church histories deposited in SBHLA. Most important for this study were the histories of churches in smaller towns. One good example is Hollis, Daniel, A History of the First Baptist Church, Jacksonville, Alabama, 1836-1986 (Jacksonville, Ala., 1987).Google Scholar It should be understood, however, that ministerial “training” often consisted of one or two Semesters at one of the seminaries or an extension course at a Baptist College. The continued tradition of the folk exhorter in Appalachia has been sensitively explored by Howard Dorgan in a number of works, including Giving Glory to God in Appalachia (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987).
20. For more information on Southwestern, see Paul Harvey, “Southern Baptists and Southern Culture, 1865-1920” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1992), chap. 3; and Allen and others, eds., Encyclopedia of Southern Baptists, 2:1275-84.
21. This discussion of the relationship between evangelicalism and public life in the nineteenth Century comes from wide reading in the subject, but it is based most directly on Mathews, Donald, “The Second Great Awakening as an Organizing Process,” American Quarterly 21 (1969): 23–43 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sizer, Sandra S., Gospel Hymns and Social Religion: The Rhetoric of Nineteenth-Century Revivalism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1978)Google Scholar; Sandeen, Ernest R., The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism, 1800-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970)Google Scholar; Marsden, George M., Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870-1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980)Google Scholar; Weber, Timothy, Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming: American Premillennialism, 1875-1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979)Google Scholar; and Beth Barton Schweiger, “Religious Life in the New South: Baptist and Methodist Ministers in Virginia, 1865-1910” (paper presented at the Southern Historical Association, New Orleans, Louisiana, November 1990, copy in author's possession).
22. For a sample of Boyce's theology, see Boyce, James Petigru, James Petigru Boyce: Selected Writings, ed. George, Timothy (Nashville: Broadman, 1989).Google Scholar Recollections of Boyce's effect on students came from professors at Louisville in the 1890's (shortly after Boyce had died), who related stories of Boyce's teaching in order to demonstrate what kinds of theological changes had affected the thinking of seminary professors since his heyday For the recollections, see the diary of 1893 of Wesley W. Lawton in Lawton papers, box 1, SBHLA; see also Sampey, John, Memoirs of John Sampey (Nashville: Broadman, 1947)Google Scholar, who was a seminary Student from 1882 to 1885 and later went on to teach at the Institution for over forty years.
23. E. Y. Mullins, “The Meaning of Religion,” Religious Herald, May 1, 1919, an article that summarized much of what he published in Why Is Christianity True: Christian Evidences (Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1905).
24. The warning to the prospective ministerial Student comes from Mullins to Charles R. Shepherd, September 8, 1917, in Mullins, letterpress books, Boyce Library, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky (hereafter SBTS). Mullins's later views, after his position as a “moderate” had been blown apart by the rise of militant fundamentalism, can be found in Christianity at the Crossroads (Nashville: Sunday School Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, 1924). For his attempt to stake his position as a moderate evangelical, see Ellis, “A Man of Books and Man of the People”.
25. W. R. L. Smith to William Owen Carver, September 14, 1899, in William Owen Carver papers, folder for 1899, SBHLA; Alabama Baptist July 1, 1880; Baptist Standard, August 5, 1912. For a recent analysis of this topic, see Robert Kendall, “The Rise and Demise of Calvinism in the Southern Baptist Convention” (M.A. thesis, University of Louisville, 1973). For doubts about schemes of premillennialism, see John Broadus to E. Y. Mullins, January 27, 1894, in Robertson, Archibald T., ed., Life and Letters of John Albert Broadus (Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1901), 417 Google Scholar; Alabama Baptist, August 6, 1878; B. H. Carroll, untitled sermon preached at East Waco Baptist Church, September 27, 1896, in B. H. Carroll papers, reel 12, SBHLA; Pamela Colbenson, “Millennial Thought among Southern Evangelicals, 1830-1885” (Ph.D. diss., Georgia State University, 1980); and Malcolm Hester, “Millennialism in Southern Baptist Thought since 1900” (Ph.D. diss., Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1981).
For a look at northern popular theology in the period, see Butler, Jonathan M., Softly and Tenderly Jesus Is Calling: Heaven and Hell in American Revivalism, 1870-1920 (Brooklyn: Carlson Publishing, 1991).Google Scholar
26. Graham, B. J. W., A Ministry of Fifty Years (Atlanta: Christian Index Press, 1938), 101-2.Google Scholar John William Jones, who carried the torch of the Lost Cause from the 1860's to the 1890's, also conducted numerous ministers' institutes and left accounts of them. See, for example, Alabama Baptist, May 15, 1889.
27. J. M. White, “Methods in Church Work,” Biblical Recorder, March 3, 1894.
28. George Gardner, “A Chronicle in the Life of a Young Baptist Pastor in the Early 1880s,” entry for February 4, 1883, typewritten MS of diary compiled and edited by John Kemp Durst, SBHLA; J. H. Spencer, “Autobiography,” 186, typewritten MS in J. H. Spencer papers, folder 14, SBHLA.
29. Figures for Alabama are from Hollis, A History of the First Baptist Church, Jacksonville, Alabama, 1836-1986; and Alldredge, ed., Southern Baptist Handbook, 1923, chap. 4.
30. Spencer, “Autobiography,” 136, folder 14, SBHLA. For accounts of similar difficulties with attempting to maintain a respectable image while receiving little or no pay and being termed a “money-grubber” when pay was mentioned, see [E. L. Compere], Home and Foreign Journal, June 1870; Biblical Recorder, April 25, 1877; and [G. T. Wilburn], Religious Herald, September 5, 1867.
31. George Blount, diary entries for March 31, 1875, and May 12, 1875, in Blount papers, folder 4, SBHLA.
32. W. H. Rich to E. Y. Mullins, July 4, 1901, Mullins letter files, SBTS.
33. Hight C. Moore, ‘Twigs of Balsam,” typed MS of autobiography in Hight C. Moore papers, box 1, folder 11, SBHLA. See also Gardner, “Life of a Young Baptist Pastor,” entry for May 7, 1883.
34. Minutes of the Clear Creek Baptist Church, Lafayette County, Mississippi, May 1891, microfilm copy consulted at Lafayette County Public Library, Oxford, Mississippi.
35. Terrill, and Hirsch, , eds., Such as Us, 165 Google Scholar; Tullos, Allan, Habits of Industry: White Culture and the Transformation of the Carolina Piedmont (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 211 Google Scholar; William Harrison Williams, “Charge of Ordination of Ministers,” handwritten notes in William Harrison Williams papers, North Carolina Baptist Historical Commission Library, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina. For folklore about ministers, see Levine, Lawrence, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 325-27.Google Scholar
36. Figures from Alldredge, ed., Southern Baptist Handbook, 1923, chap. 4.
37. Biblical Recorder, November 26, 1884; J. M. White, “Methods in Church Work,” Biblical Recorder, March 3, 1894; “Mannerisms in the Pulpit,” Biblical Recorder, February 2, 1867. The full range of criticisms of the annual call can be found in Alldredge, ed., Southern Baptist Handbook, 1923. The Handbook was, in fact, an extensive survey of churches and ministers affiliated with the SBC. It documented the rural dominance of the SBCs constituent churches, the low pay and education of the great majority of ministers, and the prevalence of folk customs such as the annual call.
38. W. L. A. Stranburg to E. Y. Mullins, May 1, 1903, Mullins letter files, SBTS; Johnson, John Lipscomb, Autobiographical Notes (n.p., 1938), 180.Google Scholar
39. For an analysis of the meaning of “manhood” in the older South, see Cash, W. J., The Mind of the South (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941)Google Scholar; and Ownby, Ted, Subduing Satan: Religion, Recreation, and Manhood in the Rural South, 1865-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990).Google Scholar
40. B. F. Riley, “Lectures to Ministerial Students,” Alabama Baptist, May 5, 1887; Wyatt-Brown, Bertram, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).Google Scholar
41. E. P. West, “The Blight of Modernism in Religion,” Baptist Standard, February 6, 1908; Q. B. Gambrell], Baptist Standard, August 1, 1912. Deberg, Betty, Ungodly Women: Gender and the First Wave of American Fundamentalism (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990)Google Scholar, suggests the centrality of fears about changing gender roles in the formation of popular fundamentalism.