Southern Baptist conservatives considered themselves the “silent majority” in their denomination. They were confident in a groundswell of support if they could mobilize laypeople for the cause. In 1969 Paul Pressler, a seventh-generation Texas Baptist, graduate of Princeton, and prominent Houston lawyer, complained to an ally, M. O. Owens: “We are in the majority but losing because we have not spent the time necessary to organize and assert ourselves. . . . With cohesive action by trained individuals who are committed to Biblical truth, we could move into influencing the Sunday School Board in the publication of their materials, in helping select editors for our state Baptist papers, and generally provide the type of sound Christian leadership which we should have in every phase of the Southern Baptist Convention and in our state and local conventions and associations.” While Pressler mobilized Baptists in Houston around the cause of Christian education, Owens was organizing the Fellowship of Conservative Baptists in his home state of North Carolina.

Years earlier, conservatives had begun to build an alternative system of higher education to compensate for the drift of the denomination’s seminaries away from biblical inerrancy. They wanted nothing more than to reverse the policy of careful accommodation that had brought so many conservative Bible schools and seminaries into line with the expectations of secular academia, and to root out those scholars who applied the term inerrancy to their own pliant interpretation of the Bible, rather than to scripture’s “literal” meaning. Pressler disdained accrediting agencies, which he believed were “controlled by the liberal northeastern schools.” He advocated firing tenured professors so that the agencies would withdraw accreditation, seeing as “the only reason our seminaries have their accredidation [sic] with the accreditting [sic] agency is so a few liberal graduate students could attend some northeast liberal Divinity Schools.”

If the mainstream intelligentsia, the guardians of intellectual authority, had abandoned the faith, then the true believers in the pews must wake up and redirect the church and surrounding culture. The new conservative schools reflected a populist backlash against the perceived elitism of the denomination’s main seminaries. A Jacksonville, Florida, pastor founded Luther Rice Seminary in 1962 specifically to aid local clergy who were unable to enroll in seminary full time. Conservatives seeking to build “a School of the Prophets” in the Deep South founded Mid-America Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisiana in 1971 (the school later moved to Little Rock, and eventually to the Memphis area). That same year Jerry Falwell founded Lynchburg Baptist College (now Liberty University) in Lynchburg, Virginia, and W. A. Criswell founded his eponymous Bible Institute. Criswell, a former SBC president, pastored First Baptist Church in Dallas, the largest Southern Baptist church in the country (where Billy Graham was nominally a member for fifty-five years). When he announced his “vision” for the school in 1969, Criswell emphasized the need to provide Bible training for Sunday school teachers and the “many Southern Baptist pastors who had not had the opportunity to finish college or even to begin.” His mission statement sounded like a noble call to democratize knowledge, but Criswell’s desire to exclude was just as strong as his inclusive spirit. He wanted to reclaim Southern Baptist education from the ivory-tower elites and wave the banner of “the common man” as cover for his capture of intellectual inquiry.

A string of smaller but crucial conservative organizations appeared throughout the 1970s. In 1973, a group of Baptists incensed at the liberal sentiments evident in some of the denomination’s agencies—particularly the socially concerned Christian Life Commission—organized as the Baptist Faith and Message Fellowship. They sponsored a Baptist Literature Board to offer curricula stressing biblical inerrancy as an alternative to the more moderate publications of the Sunday School Board. Despite the reports from moderate “spies” who attended these organizations’ early meetings, most moderates failed to foresee the conservative grab for power at the 1979 convention. Sociologist Nancy Ammerman has suggested that moderates failed to build a coalition because in the past, fundamentalist agitation within the convention was disorganized—a few fire-breathers shooting off empty threats against the evils of Darwinism and drink. Moreover, moderates did not move to protect their control of the convention’s agencies and boards because they were loath to admit that their denomination concentrated power in the hands of hierarchical leaders or bureaucrats. “They had lived for nearly 150 years with a myth of democracy….They assumed that consensus would emerge from their common efforts to discern the will of God.”

The conservative leaders had no illusions about how power worked in the SBC. Their strategy was simple: elect one of their own as president of the convention for ten consecutive years, during which time all crucial denominational positions would come due for renomination, allowing conservatives to gradually populate all SBC boards, agencies, and trusteeships with their allies. They borrowed tactics from secular political parties, occupying skyboxes at the 1979 convention in Houston’s Astrodome where their leaders could coordinate backroom dealings and voting procedures. That year they elected Adrian Rogers, pastor of Bellevue Baptist Church in Memphis, as president of the SBC—the first in an unbroken series of conservative presidents that continues today. The conservative plan extended beyond theology and church life to national politics. Ed McAteer, a Southern Baptist layman and wealthy sales executive who helped found the Moral Majority, used his experience as a former field director for the Conservative Caucus, a nominally secular organization founded in 1974, to ally the SBC with the emerging New Right coalition. Rogers, who prior to his election was known as a captivating preacher rather than a political activist, signaled his new ambitions in a high-profile sermon at the April 1980 “Washington for Jesus” rally on the National Mall. “The scream of the great American eagle has become but the twitter of a frightened sparrow,” he warned the crowd of 200,000. “America must be born again or join the graveyard of nations.”

Political spectacles were not a practical way to reach the average lay-person, but print media could do the job. For many evangelicals—especially Southern Baptists, who considered themselves set apart from the rest of American Protestantism and delighted in the cocoon of SBC institutions that sustained them from cradle to grave—the church newspaper remained a pillar of enlightenment and counsel. “Editors carry weight in SBC life,” James Walker, who worked for the Arkansas convention, wrote to Don Harbuck, a prominent moderate in the state. “They speak to the issue before it hits the floor [at the national convention] and some people accept editorials as the ‘voice of God.’” Their writers were more mission-minded now than ever before. The founding of Christianity Today presaged the rise of a conscious school of evangelical journalism grounded in the idea that a Christian journalist should not only report news of concern to his church, but discern the truth of all world events through an all-encompassing Christian worldview. Baylor University, the oldest Southern Baptist university (and one of the few that escaped conservative control), offered a dedicated program in Christian journalism as early as the 1960s. Similar curricula sprouted at other schools. Pat Robertson, who had built his own television empire, founded Regent University in 1978 out of an express desire to boost evangelical influence in the media. From its earliest years, the university’s curriculum stressed television and print journalism.

When conservatives began purging the SBC’s agencies and boards of all opposition, the Baptist Press editors did their best to cover every stratagem— much to their subjects’ displeasure. “SBC Journalism: Besieged!” long-time Baptist Press director Wilmer C. Fields titled his account of the “brazen, shameless attempt by fundamentalists to intimidate, bully and undermine Southern Baptist journalists and their publications.” Fields argued that the campaign to co-opt church media was not merely another political tactic, but a threat to the core of Baptist identity. “Our forefathers wisely protected and cherished free access to full information,” he wrote. “That structural freedom is linked to freedom of access to God, to an open Bible, to a divine right to private judgment in spiritual matters. . . . The state newspapers have been major channels for this ebb and flow of the Baptist mind and spirit. They are a vital part of the ‘jugular’ system [that Paul] Pressler and his political party set out to take over and dominate a decade ago.” Fields’s conservative opponents would have most likely agreed. Their primary aim was, after all, to reclaim the Baptist mind and spirit for their cause, to refashion Southern Baptist identity around inerrancy and the culture wars. Obstreperous editors were only a mild inconvenience. Conservative leaders forced many—including Fields himself—to resign or retire.

History Is Written by the Victors

This battle over denominational identity and heritage was not unique to the Southern Baptist Convention. Nazarene scholar Timothy Smith, responding in the Christian Century to Harold Lindsell’s accusations, argued that Wesleyans, Lutherans, and Calvinists who questioned inerrancy were not caving in to modern biblical scholarship but drawing “upon the writings of the Reformers themselves to affirm our conviction that the meanings, not the words, of biblical passages are authoritative, and that understanding these meanings requires close and critical study of the texts, rather than incantation of supposedly inerrant words.” A young Assemblies of God scholar, observing “the tentacles of inerrancy” that strangled faculty at his church’s educational institutions, noted “that the inerrancy position has never been officially adopted by the General Council and made part of the ‘Statement of Fundamental Truths’”—but this had not stopped church leaders from insisting on inerrancy as a litmus test for true servants of the Assemblies of God. When Concordia Seminary faculty were forced to submit to questioning about their beliefs during the controversy in the Lutheran Church (Missouri Synod), both conservatives and their opponents described the interrogation as a chance to show “how Lutheran we really are and what it means to be Lutheran.” In churches riven by the debate over biblical authority in the 1970s and 1980s, both sides claimed authority through a selective reading of their shared tradition.