A Genealogy of Dissent: Southern Baptist Protest in the Twentieth Century

Book Reviews A Genealogy of Dissent: Southern Baptist Protest in the Twentieth Century. By David Stricklin. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999. xviii, 229 pp. $36.00. ISBN 0-8131-2093-4.

A Genealogy of Dissent is a marvelous book that every Southern Baptist should read. Unfortunately, that will not happen. Present-day Southern Baptists who do read it, whether they come from the "fundamentalists" who now control the denomination or the "moderates" who used to control it, will be jolted by David Stricklin's insights. Neither side is likely to appreciate what he says, for all will smart from his carefully reasoned and judicious assessments. In all probability the few Southern Baptists who will appreciate the book are those on whom it focuses-namely, the liberals or, as Stricklin prefers to call them, the "progressives" who have consistently operated as a "subculture within Southern Baptist life" (p. 102) since the 1920s.

Stricklin's book demonstrates that a liberal element has long existed in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), but at the same time it confirms the assertion of one observer during the 1980s fundamentalist/ moderate controversy that "there aren't enough liberals in the Southern Baptist Convention to fill a telephone booth." Stricklin carefully traces the emergence and development of the progressive element back to the work and influence of a little-known "radical Baptist" named Walter Nathan Johnson, who, during the 1920s and 1930s, called for racial integration and "challenged the corporate 'captivity' of Christianity in the United States" (p. 20). A small group of Southern Baptists, including Carlyle Marney, Clarence Jordan, Martin England, W. W. Finlator, and Warren Carr, soon reflected views similar to Johnson's. These unusual Southern Baptists and their unusual churches were few and far between, voices who cried aloud for an end to materialism, racism, and sexism while the vast majority of Southern Baptists, both fundamentalists and moderates, ignored them for decades. Finally, however, the fundamentalists in the convention used the "liberalism" of these radical Baptists as their reason for restoring the SBC to what they considered its original "conservative" position. The fundamentalists imagined that there were far more liberals in the SBC than actually existed, tending to identify everybody who did not subscribe to the notion of biblical inerrancy as a liberal. Most moderates who were tarred by the fundamentalist brush as liberals were not liberals by anybody else's definition.

As Stricklin sees it (and correctly so), moderates controlled the SBC for most of the twentieth century and, for the sake of denominational harmony, deliberately kept the progressives and fundamentalists from leadership roles in the Convention. The progressives, who gloried in freedom and not "triumphalism," were either unwilling or unable to mount an attack and fight for control of the SBC. The "other dissenters," however-the fundamentalists-were like the predominant moderates in that they measured success by baptisms, membership numbers, and big buildings ("triumphalism"). But they could not tolerate doctrinal diversity, so they launched a crusade to take over the convention and make it doctrinally pure, insisting that the denomination must, above all, stand forthrightly for biblical inerrancy.

Stricklin concludes that, because there were three distinct groups of Baptists within the convention and none of them appreciated the views and objectives of the other two, "a split or some other form of dramatic reminder of what it meant to be Baptist was long overdue in Southern Baptist life" (p. 170). Thus, Stricklin sees the division of recent years as good, not bad, for it leaves all three groups "free to get back to being what they should have been in the first place: Baptists" (p. 170).

One could argue, of course, that Stricklin has oversimplified the matter and that various shades of fundamentalists, moderates, and even progressives exist. Yet in general terms he has provided a realistic picture of the SBC in the twentieth century, and he has done it quite impressively. He, his editor, and his publisher are to be congratulated on a book that is characterized by thorough research, brilliant analysis, and good writing.

DAVID T. MORGAN

University of Montevallo

Copyright University of Alabama Press Jul 2002
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