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Baptist Battles: Social Change and Religious Conflict in the Southern Baptist Convention
Since 1979 Southern Baptists have been noisily struggling to agree on symbols, beliefs, and practices as they attempt to make sense of their changing social world. Nancy Ammerman has carefully documented their struggle. She tells the story of the Baptist reversal from a moderate to a fundamentalist outlook and speculates on the future of the denomination.
Ammerman places change among the Southern Baptists in the context of the cultural and economic changes that have transformed the South from its rural past into an urbanizing, culturally diverse region. Not only did the South change; Southern Baptists did as well. Reflecting this diversity, the Southern Baptist bureaucracy was relatively progressive. During the 1960s and 1970s, moderate sentiments prevailed, while fundamentalists remained on the margins. These two were, however, becoming increasingly divergent in what they considered important about being a Baptist, in their views about the Bible, in their attitudes on the origination of women, on Christian morals, and on national politics.
Late in the 1970s, a fundamentalist coalition emerged, followed by unsuccessful efforts by moderates to oppose it. The battles escalated until 1985, when 45,000 Baptists gathered in Dallas to decide between contending presidential candidates. That dramatic event illustrated the extent to which organized political resources were determining the course of the conflict. Ammerman studies these strategies and resources as well.
Examining how this tension affected Baptists, Ammerman begins with case studies of the change it is producing in Baptist agencies. But she also brings us back to the local churches and individual believers who are renegotiating their relationships within their denomination. She asks whether the denomination’s polity can accommodate an increasingly diverse group of Baptists, of whether the only way dissidents can have a voice is through schism.
Ammerman places change among the Southern Baptists in the context of the cultural and economic changes that have transformed the South from its rural past into an urbanizing, culturally diverse region. Not only did the South change; Southern Baptists did as well. Reflecting this diversity, the Southern Baptist bureaucracy was relatively progressive. During the 1960s and 1970s, moderate sentiments prevailed, while fundamentalists remained on the margins. These two were, however, becoming increasingly divergent in what they considered important about being a Baptist, in their views about the Bible, in their attitudes on the origination of women, on Christian morals, and on national politics.
Late in the 1970s, a fundamentalist coalition emerged, followed by unsuccessful efforts by moderates to oppose it. The battles escalated until 1985, when 45,000 Baptists gathered in Dallas to decide between contending presidential candidates. That dramatic event illustrated the extent to which organized political resources were determining the course of the conflict. Ammerman studies these strategies and resources as well.
Examining how this tension affected Baptists, Ammerman begins with case studies of the change it is producing in Baptist agencies. But she also brings us back to the local churches and individual believers who are renegotiating their relationships within their denomination. She asks whether the denomination’s polity can accommodate an increasingly diverse group of Baptists, of whether the only way dissidents can have a voice is through schism.
408 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 1990
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
February 3, 2024
Nancy Ammerman approaches the division of the SBC in the 1970s and 80s from a sociological standpoint. She shares upfront that she identified as a Southern Baptist moderate during the “Conservative Resurgence.” At times, her bias can be seen in how she views creeds in Baptist life. While I have some disagreements, I found the book fascinating. We are over a generation removed from the intense battles that rocked the SBC. Ammerman helpfully lays the context of a well-defined denominational bureaucracy and the battle to control it. The differences between the two sides were theological, cultural, geographical, and educational. Current debates raging in the GOP school how a populist vs establishment contest always lives on. As someone sympathetic to the conservative cause in the CR, this type of book is helpful in preventing people like me from only having a hagiographic account of the battles in the SBC.
February 10, 2024
Ammerman writes from a sociological perspective about the then-ongoing schism between the moderate and conservative factions of the Southern Baptist Convention. The book was published in 1990; it thus included survey data from 1985-1988, and a few late developments from 1989. Ammerman examines the controversy less from a theological perspective than from a lens of in-group/out-group dynamics, the sources of Fundamentalism and populism, and larger changes in Southern culture after WWII.
Her chapters on SBC history from 1945 to 1980 are very succinct and readable treatments all on their own. The major topics of slaveholding, the Civil War, Landmarkism, the establishment of the Sunday School Board, and the creation of the Cooperative Program manage to hit important events without lingering. Major players often-overlooked today receive attention they deserve (Tichenor, Mullins, and Norris, for instance). Might be my biases toward the past instead of the present, but I thought this portion was some of the strongest material in the book. One clearly sees the trajectories of conservative and moderate thought throughout the history and how both sides could legitimately claim the Southern Baptist tradition in the debates around women's ordination, inerrancy, denominational control, freedom of conscience, and (most importantly) authority.
The sociological angle in the contemporary sections divides SBC messengers into five categories (Self-Identified Moderates, Moderate Conservatives, Conservatives, Fundamentalist Conservatives, and Self-Identified Fundamentalists) and indicates each group's responses to a variety of survey responses both on their theological and political beliefs and their race/class/gender (though class takes center stage based on Ammerman's data as few distinctions were found among race and gender). Perhaps the most telling finding was the geographic distribution of respondents. Those who pastored mid- to large-sized urban churches (aside from megachurches that had their own in-house infrastructures and ministries aka FBC Atlanta under Charles Stanley), had moved away from small Southern towns to cities, or had white-collar parents were the most likely to be Moderate. Those whose parents worked blue collar or agricultural jobs—regardless of their own vocations—or had moved away from major cities (i.e. the suburbs) or otherwise rejected urban life were the most conservative theologically. Ammerman concludes from this that a rejection of pluralism or modernity (60s/70s counterculture) underlies the controversy. Those who saw Southern society evolve into a more pluralistic direction as positive were Moderate. Those ambivalent or hostile toward pluralism, thought the counterculture went too far, or considered aspects of the Great Society/Civil Rights Movement overreaching were more likely to be Fundamentalist. This happened regardless of geography (SBC churches beyond the South) or current employment (white collar people were no more or less likely to be in either camp).
However, I must quibble with Ammerman's nomenclature. She labels the right wing as "Fundamentalist" despite only a fraction embracing that label for self-identification. She justifies this by citing "The Fundamentals" of the 1910s and 1920s and explaining that Northern Baptists and Presbyterians embraced the name as indicative of their theological concerns. Thus, it's fair to do so again, she argued, because the issues are similar. In my judgment, this betrays her biases. The group was adamant at the time that they were not Fundamentalists. By the 1980s, the term had already taken on the negative stereotypes that Henry Emmerson Fosdick and H.L. Mencken had encouraged in the 1920s. The "Fundamentalist Conservatives" Ammerman writes of largely preferred to identify themselves as "Evangelicals", a term popularized in the 1940s and 50s for a less-pugilistic and more culturally-open group of conservative Protestants. Evangelical Southern Baptists identified closely with Billy Graham, Carl F.H. Henry, and other conservatives both within and without the SBC. To apply a negative label a sizable number actively avoided seems rather unfair.
A further indicator of bias is her charactization of "Self-Identified Moderates" and "Moderate Conservatives". Elsewhere she is comfortable to use adjectives like "left", "liberal", or "progressive" to describe the two left-most factions. She justifies this by saying that they are *personally* morally or (sometimes) politically conservative, but not at all theologically. She could have called them "Modernists" as the original Fundamentalists' opponents were, but she does not. One wonders if the goal is to paint the struggle as between a moderate (reasonable?) faction and a fundamentalist rabble.
Her predictions in the final chapter prove too optimistic for denominational unity. The SBC Alliance expanded soon after into the Alliance of Baptists, its churches largely severing all ties with the SBC. Ammerman does not predict the formation of the CBF at all, ending the book on a melancholy but hopeful note suggesting that schism is not inevitable. That was a rather rosy sentiment given that she had only just told the story of unhappy convention employees wrestling with the new normal and the conservative faction's indifference toward any accomodation. By 1990, anyone could have seen it coming.
I was born after the hottest part of the controversy, only being vaguely aware of the BFM 2000 revision as the culmination of the Conservative Resurgence/Fundamentalist Takeover (whichever you prefer). I was raised by the winners of that battle and educated by some of its front-line warriors. I also met some of its casualties in my graduate school days, aging old-guard activists whose churches had become openly progressive in the decades since. What explains this? Is this a vindication of the Conservatives dire warnings in the 1970s and 80s that this trajectory would continue to where it has? Did alienation and exile drive the Moderates to more progressive positions in response to Fundamentalism? Did the Moderate warnings of bullying politicians fulfill themselves in a cruel and indifferent bureaucracy wrestling with the fallout of its #churchtoo legacy in Paul Pressler and/or Paige Patterson's compromised legacies? And is the whole thing flairing up again with the Law Amendment, CRT, social justice, and the extent of the BFM2000?
I don't know. All above my pay grade. 3 stars for bias.
Her chapters on SBC history from 1945 to 1980 are very succinct and readable treatments all on their own. The major topics of slaveholding, the Civil War, Landmarkism, the establishment of the Sunday School Board, and the creation of the Cooperative Program manage to hit important events without lingering. Major players often-overlooked today receive attention they deserve (Tichenor, Mullins, and Norris, for instance). Might be my biases toward the past instead of the present, but I thought this portion was some of the strongest material in the book. One clearly sees the trajectories of conservative and moderate thought throughout the history and how both sides could legitimately claim the Southern Baptist tradition in the debates around women's ordination, inerrancy, denominational control, freedom of conscience, and (most importantly) authority.
The sociological angle in the contemporary sections divides SBC messengers into five categories (Self-Identified Moderates, Moderate Conservatives, Conservatives, Fundamentalist Conservatives, and Self-Identified Fundamentalists) and indicates each group's responses to a variety of survey responses both on their theological and political beliefs and their race/class/gender (though class takes center stage based on Ammerman's data as few distinctions were found among race and gender). Perhaps the most telling finding was the geographic distribution of respondents. Those who pastored mid- to large-sized urban churches (aside from megachurches that had their own in-house infrastructures and ministries aka FBC Atlanta under Charles Stanley), had moved away from small Southern towns to cities, or had white-collar parents were the most likely to be Moderate. Those whose parents worked blue collar or agricultural jobs—regardless of their own vocations—or had moved away from major cities (i.e. the suburbs) or otherwise rejected urban life were the most conservative theologically. Ammerman concludes from this that a rejection of pluralism or modernity (60s/70s counterculture) underlies the controversy. Those who saw Southern society evolve into a more pluralistic direction as positive were Moderate. Those ambivalent or hostile toward pluralism, thought the counterculture went too far, or considered aspects of the Great Society/Civil Rights Movement overreaching were more likely to be Fundamentalist. This happened regardless of geography (SBC churches beyond the South) or current employment (white collar people were no more or less likely to be in either camp).
However, I must quibble with Ammerman's nomenclature. She labels the right wing as "Fundamentalist" despite only a fraction embracing that label for self-identification. She justifies this by citing "The Fundamentals" of the 1910s and 1920s and explaining that Northern Baptists and Presbyterians embraced the name as indicative of their theological concerns. Thus, it's fair to do so again, she argued, because the issues are similar. In my judgment, this betrays her biases. The group was adamant at the time that they were not Fundamentalists. By the 1980s, the term had already taken on the negative stereotypes that Henry Emmerson Fosdick and H.L. Mencken had encouraged in the 1920s. The "Fundamentalist Conservatives" Ammerman writes of largely preferred to identify themselves as "Evangelicals", a term popularized in the 1940s and 50s for a less-pugilistic and more culturally-open group of conservative Protestants. Evangelical Southern Baptists identified closely with Billy Graham, Carl F.H. Henry, and other conservatives both within and without the SBC. To apply a negative label a sizable number actively avoided seems rather unfair.
A further indicator of bias is her charactization of "Self-Identified Moderates" and "Moderate Conservatives". Elsewhere she is comfortable to use adjectives like "left", "liberal", or "progressive" to describe the two left-most factions. She justifies this by saying that they are *personally* morally or (sometimes) politically conservative, but not at all theologically. She could have called them "Modernists" as the original Fundamentalists' opponents were, but she does not. One wonders if the goal is to paint the struggle as between a moderate (reasonable?) faction and a fundamentalist rabble.
Her predictions in the final chapter prove too optimistic for denominational unity. The SBC Alliance expanded soon after into the Alliance of Baptists, its churches largely severing all ties with the SBC. Ammerman does not predict the formation of the CBF at all, ending the book on a melancholy but hopeful note suggesting that schism is not inevitable. That was a rather rosy sentiment given that she had only just told the story of unhappy convention employees wrestling with the new normal and the conservative faction's indifference toward any accomodation. By 1990, anyone could have seen it coming.
I was born after the hottest part of the controversy, only being vaguely aware of the BFM 2000 revision as the culmination of the Conservative Resurgence/Fundamentalist Takeover (whichever you prefer). I was raised by the winners of that battle and educated by some of its front-line warriors. I also met some of its casualties in my graduate school days, aging old-guard activists whose churches had become openly progressive in the decades since. What explains this? Is this a vindication of the Conservatives dire warnings in the 1970s and 80s that this trajectory would continue to where it has? Did alienation and exile drive the Moderates to more progressive positions in response to Fundamentalism? Did the Moderate warnings of bullying politicians fulfill themselves in a cruel and indifferent bureaucracy wrestling with the fallout of its #churchtoo legacy in Paul Pressler and/or Paige Patterson's compromised legacies? And is the whole thing flairing up again with the Law Amendment, CRT, social justice, and the extent of the BFM2000?
I don't know. All above my pay grade. 3 stars for bias.
May 20, 2012
If you're a sociologist like the author, you might love this book. Anything else, and you're likely to have a lessor opinion.
Ammerman is not only a sociologist writing about a theological split in the SBC, but she's not enough of a theologian to understand the issues well enough to be writing about them. The biggest problem, at least for me, is that she is confused about hermeneutics and inerrancy, and attributes the split to a division about hermeneutics. She fails to grasp that the problem was heresy over the inerrancy of the Bible in the SBC, started in the SBC colleges like Baylor and Mercer, and seminaries like SEBTS, SBTS and MBTS. She wanted academic freedom for heretics to teach whatever they wanted in their institutions, and freedom for SBC staff to hold whatever values, even to the support of abortion.
If you're looking for a balanced book on the Conservative Resurgence in the SBC, this isn't it. You would be better off buying Sutton's Baptist Reformation.
Ammerman is not only a sociologist writing about a theological split in the SBC, but she's not enough of a theologian to understand the issues well enough to be writing about them. The biggest problem, at least for me, is that she is confused about hermeneutics and inerrancy, and attributes the split to a division about hermeneutics. She fails to grasp that the problem was heresy over the inerrancy of the Bible in the SBC, started in the SBC colleges like Baylor and Mercer, and seminaries like SEBTS, SBTS and MBTS. She wanted academic freedom for heretics to teach whatever they wanted in their institutions, and freedom for SBC staff to hold whatever values, even to the support of abortion.
If you're looking for a balanced book on the Conservative Resurgence in the SBC, this isn't it. You would be better off buying Sutton's Baptist Reformation.
June 3, 2017
I enjoyed the frank and detailed history. I did not like the interpretation of the conflicts, their motivations, and the like. It was difficult to get a clear picture of the opposing sides without running into the author's sympathies.
December 20, 2024
Depressing.
September 3, 2025
Helpful book, though I find the subject matter frustrating and sometimes soul-stifling haha. Still, a good source (not always objective, but who is?) for researching this historical moment.
September 27, 2012
This is a socialogy text examining the split in the Southern Baptist denomination in the 1980's. It was given to me by a friend in response to my interest and mild puzzlement over how evangelical Christians have become closely tied to conservative Republicans.
The book is more a sociological text than an ideological one. Since academics can sometimes be condescending towards religious issues, it was refreshing that the author, a (former?) Southern Baptist, treated the subject with respect and gravity without pronouncing judgement on either side of the issues discussed.
Personally, I found it fascinating and amusing that arguments for/against issues that I thought were "current," like the inerrancy of the Bible, have been hashed out for at least 30 years, if not longer. There really isn't much new under the sun...
Overall, I wished there were more conclusions and commentary drawn. Hats off to the author for being a thorough sociologist and stick with what was observable from the data.
The book is more a sociological text than an ideological one. Since academics can sometimes be condescending towards religious issues, it was refreshing that the author, a (former?) Southern Baptist, treated the subject with respect and gravity without pronouncing judgement on either side of the issues discussed.
Personally, I found it fascinating and amusing that arguments for/against issues that I thought were "current," like the inerrancy of the Bible, have been hashed out for at least 30 years, if not longer. There really isn't much new under the sun...
Overall, I wished there were more conclusions and commentary drawn. Hats off to the author for being a thorough sociologist and stick with what was observable from the data.
November 20, 2011
In many ways, the culture wars that have dominated the headlines for the last 20 years started here, with the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention in the 1980s. The same tactics that Ms. Ammerman describes in clinical detail would be used again and again, to rally the grassroots even while ensuring doctrinal purity. This is one of the only books I've ever seen that attempts to document these events in a neutral, non-partisan tone; the author neither celebrates the fundamentalist success, nor decries it as a sign that the country is irrevocably damaged.
November 4, 2013
Excellent review of the purging of Southern Baptist Convention moderates by fundamentalists in the 1980's. Ammerman was on the scene studying the SBC and was able to capture history, documents, on-the-scene interviews, and in-depth surveys. I general she presents an unbiased account.
Only fanatical interest in the SBC takeover would allow someone to read the book, it's very dry. On the other hand it is one of the few accounts that presents facts in an unbiased way.
Only fanatical interest in the SBC takeover would allow someone to read the book, it's very dry. On the other hand it is one of the few accounts that presents facts in an unbiased way.
July 9, 2015
I read this a long time ago and just today, while reading a profile on Nancy Ammerman, realized that I'd never logged it on Goodreads. (I actually accidentally stole it from the church library of the CBF church I went to in college and had to *mail* it back to them when I realized I still had it after I graduated and moved away.) So here's my belated record of having read it for fun as an undergraduate.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews