
          Culture-Bound Southern Baptists and Their Exiles.
          Reviewed by Hendricks, JosephJoseph Hendricks
          Vol. 11, No. 6, 1989, pp. 15-17
          
          Churches in Cultural Captivity, A History of the Social Attitudes of Southern
Baptists by John Lee Eighmy (Knoxville: The University of
Tennessee Press, 1972, revised 1987).
          When John Lee Eighmy suffered a fatal heart attack in 1970, he had
almost completed his important study on the influence of the social
gospel in the life and work of the Southern Baptist Convention. Eighmy
died at a time when the Convention seemed to be emerging from cultural
captivity, and he could hardly have anticipated its dramatic turn into
yet another era of cultural bondage. Fortunately, Samuel Hill has
provided for the revised edition an expanded conclusion that extends
the study to the present time.
          Eighmy contends that the Convention, born amidst the pre-Civil War
slavery debate, has conceived and pursued its mission in a manner that
embraces rather than criticizes Southern culture. He ably demonstrates
how this posture has been supported by Southern Baptist theology, a
perspective radically different from that of the American (Northern)
Baptist, Walter Rauschenbusch, who is often called the father of the'
social gospel in America. Eighmy cites a 1920 proclamation by the
Virginia Baptist Conven-

tion Social Service Committee that reflects
Southern Baptist antipathy toward the social gospel.
          
            
              The Baptist attitude toward all social reform,
work, and service is that unadulterated gospel preached and accepted
solves all social problems, rightly adjusts all industrial
inequalities, remoras domestic friction, adjourns divorce courts and
supplies adequate protection and uplift to the weaker part of
humanity.
            
          
          Such proclamations, however, can be misleading. As Eighmy points
out, Southern Baptists have consistently addressed some social
problems while ignoring others. They have vigorously fought alcohol
consumption, Sabbath desecration, gambling, and obscenity; and,
despite their subscription to a doctrine of separation of church and
state, they have consistently called upon government to prohibit such
practices. For the first half-century of its existence, however, the
Convention-made no effort to extend this social concern to such
problems as racial oppression, labor exploitation, and war which were
deeply rooted in the socio-political structures of Southern
culture--structures, notes Eighmy, that were perceived to be "divinely
ordered."
          In its second half-century, efforts were made to enlarge the
Southern Baptist social agenda. During this period, for example,
W.L. Poteat, president of Wake Forest College, and his nephew, Edwin
McNeill Poteat Jr., challenged the Convention's Social Service
Commission to expand its sphere of social concern. As the Convention
entered its] second century following world War II, the Social
Service' Commission (later named the Christian Life Commission) was
budgeted and staffed. Guided by such leaders as Hugh Brimm, Jesse
Burton Weatherspoon, Aker C. Miller, and Foy Valentine, the Commission
conducted educational programs designed to stretch the social
conscience of Southern Baptists.
          Such efforts required perennial sympathetic diplomacy by these
leaders, and the success of their work is reflected in a 196S
Convention resolution which confessed that Southern Baptists must
share responsibility for the racial strife then sweeping the
country.
          Given the resistance that the Commission encountered, its
accomplishments were impressive, but it must be noted that it pursued
its mission in the wake of dramatic action by civil rights groups,
other ecclesiastical organizations, and the federal government. For
the most part, the Convention followed rather than initiated change;
and, while it began to break with some outmoded traditions, it has
never gained sufficient detachment from the culture to mount a
sustained prophetic critique of it. Following Eighmy's death, as Hill
points out, the Convention leadership has turned to an alliance with
the New Right, purged the Christian Life Commission and other agencies
of progressive leadership, and replaced them with administrators who
have returned the agenda to personal rather than structural social
concerns.
          There is another part of the story, however, that does 

not fall
within the purview of Eighmy's book. As was often the case with Israel
and has been with the Church, the Southern Baptist prophetic social
mission has been pursued more by its exiles than within the Convention
itself. Innumerable Southern Baptists have departed from their
denomination to pursue vocations in other churches and secular
organizations. Two of the most formidable Southern prophets of social
justice, Clarence Jordan and Will Campbell, were reared and baptized
in rural Southern Baptist churches. Both were challenging Southern
culture long before the civil rights movement gained momentum, and
both were either nudged or driven out of the Southern Baptist fold.
          Jordan, founder of Koinonia Farm, preached unrelentingly against
the evils of war, wealth, and racism; and he devoted much of his later
life to translating portions of the New Testament from Greek into the
Southern vernacular. Campbell, who has been accurately called the
chaplain of the civil rights movement, has challenged both the
moderate and the fundamentalist factions of the Convention to learn
from the sixteenth century Anabaptists--who are their spiritual if not
their ecclesiastical ancestors--who found their identity in faith
rather than a culture that had captured the Church.
          These prophets and their lesser known sister and brother exiles
have been anchored in Scripture and a tradition that recognizes the
importance of not confusing culture and faith. Resisting seduction by
secular or ecclesiastical institutions, they have served both the
institutional church and the state by proclaiming the criticism they
so desperately need. Through the lives of such exiles the Convention
might catch a glimpse of how to be faithful in Southern culture
without being of it.
          
            JOSEPH HENDRICKS is chair of Interdisciplinary Studies at
Mercer University, a Southern Baptist, and a long-time active
challenger of injustice in Georgia and the South.
          
        