Southern Baptists have long been “outsiders” in the American religious and cultural hierarchy. But they’ve been proven right. They’ve won. Now what?
Editor’s Note: This article is a lightly edited transcript of Jackson Waters’ address at the recent “Fundamentals of Baptist Education” event hosted by the Howell E. Jackson Committee at Union University and sponsored by the Center for Baptist Leadership.
Good afternoon; it’s an honor to be here at my alma mater, Union University. My talk for this “Fundamentals of Baptist Education” conference has been titled “The Christian Future,” but it perhaps would be better titled “The Baptist Future.”
In my first semester freshman year, History chair Dr. Stephen Carls said that you can know what a civilization values by what it builds and by what lasts. Egypt built the pyramids because it valued the afterlife. Athens’ many temples and public spaces show the interlocking desire to worship and to govern.
This has long been an American dilemma. We build log cabins and liberate the world with mass-produced P-51 Mustangs. They’re nothing pretty, but they get the job done. You could almost say ruggedness is the American ethos.
And if it’s the American ethos, then it’s the Baptist’s DNA. The Southern Baptists aren’t here to look pretty; they’re here to get things done. That’s why they don’t have bishops. They’re the Toyota Tacoma of American Protestantism. They’re not much to look at, but they’re the best-selling products on the market; they just don’t break down.
Nonetheless, I found something most shocking on our honors trip to Baylor University during the fall semester of freshman year. Our utility-over-longevity approach to culture was becoming pathological: America has hardly built anything that would last. According to the Chicago 2109 project, which hosted a panel, most of Chicago’s skyline (and most American skylines) would not—indeed, could not—last until 2109 A.D. The buildings were simply too poorly constructed and would have to be torn down for another generation to place their mark, hopefully with greater longevity.
If American cities are building with cheap materials, I would posit, as Megan Basham has demonstrated in her recent bestseller, that American evangelical churches are increasingly building with cheap, even faulty, materials as well. In both cases, psychology and economics would suggest this means neither city planners nor pastors have trust in a stable future, and neither wants to take responsibility for generations yet unborn.
The Baptist Dilemma: Searching for Their Role in the American Order
This presentism, mixed with a growing hesitation about what it means to be a Baptist, is leading more and more Baptists to jump ship in search of firmer ground. This is a grave problem, and it disrupts America’s natural religious economy.
Reinhold Niebuhr came close to identifying it when he said you could determine a man’s church by looking at his pocketbook. While he meant this as a criticism, his statement also functioned descriptively as a sort of natural Protestant order. All Protestants—Restorationists, Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Episcopalians—shared the same Anglo-Protestant culture to different degrees. For better and worse, American Protestantism functioned more as the stories of a house than an apartment complex. Each denomination had its part to play in American society. That image still holds some weight today, with a glaring exception.
By the time of the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy, which led to the humiliation of the Fundamentalists by national media, the exiling of Presbyterian J. Gresham Machen and his colleagues from the Presbyterian Church and Princeton Theological Seminary, and then the communist infiltration of the mainlines, most of the Protestant order was dead. The Ivy League universities became national institutions of higher learning that were almost entirely unmoored from their Protestant past and worked hard to undermine the remaining Christian institutions in the country.
During this time, Wheaton graduate Dr. Carl F. H. Henry attempted to cobble together an Evangelical alternative to the mainlines, known as the National Association of Evangelicals, which admirably took up the mantle the mainlines had cast aside. But Evangelicals were a movement without a leadership class. It was an attempt for “the eye [to] say unto the hand, I have no need of thee:” and “again the head to the feet, I have no need of you.”
The problem was that the symbolic body parts that did resist liberalism, namely working and lower-class Protestants, could not simply go at the American project alone. To quote the apostle once more, “Nay, much more those members of the body, which seem to be more feeble, are necessary.” However, the upper class mainlines were so compromised that they left American Evangelicalism as a body without a head and with little means of growing a new one.
Despite several attempts to make a head, the low-church Evangelicals (which are mostly Baptists) never quite succeeded in replacing what was lost. I think this was for three reasons:
First, World War II only solidified the Ivy League as the leading universities in the U.S. They were the kingmakers. Most Evangelicals and Fundamentalists were working or middle class and were locked out of networks of power and influence. The head would carry on in defiance of its own body.
Second, when political and intellectual resistance did emerge to challenge liberal Protestants and the Ivies, it was led by Roman Catholics. First and most notable was William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale, a criticism of liberal Protestantism from an Irish Catholic perspective. The ethos of Romanism as the religious alternative to the mainlines only grew with Vatican II, which conceded almost all of Protestantism’s polemical points: they adopted an English worship service and modern English translation of the Bible, they ended the Index of Banned Books, they redefined the very meaning of anathema to include Protestants within their fold, and they endorsed political liberalism.
In the late 1970s and 1980s, John Paul II heroically opposed communism alongside Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. His chief theologian and Papal successor, Joseph Ratzinger, gave Rome their most intellectual and erudite Pope in hundreds of years. The late 20th century was the once-in-a-millium event for Roman Catholicism. If you wanted to be a smart conservative, you converted to Roman Catholicism once you climbed the ladder beyond the Church of Christ, the SBC, and the PCA. Just as conservative think tanks were the substitute for conservative Christian R-1 universities, so too was the Roman Catholic church the substitute for high-status, cultured Protestantism.
Third, American Evangelicals didn’t develop a strong head because they relied on foreigners. A preacher from the British Isles just sounds more sophisticated than an American saying the exact same thing. Whether it was a man like Martyn Lloyd-Jones or John Stott, American evangelicals relied on outsiders to intellectually defend the faith. We mainly relied on the evangelical wing of the Church of England. C.S. Lewis, Os Guinness, and J.I. Packer are but the most familiar faces of an impressive apparatus that commanded much respect worldwide.
While American Protestants no longer had access to Yale or Princeton, we had friends in high places in Oxford and Cambridge. Where did Baptist Evangelist Billy Graham turn when under fire from elites for his revivalism? None other than John Stott! He was Billy Graham’s most vociferous English defender, and one of Stott’s earliest books, Fundamentalism and Evangelism, was a 1956 defense of the American Evangelist’s self-identified “Fundamentalism” against snobbish high-class liberals.
To be clear, I do think God used that subjugation for good. Like Israel in Egypt, second-class status made us united as a people. It gave us the necessary skills for taking back a metaphorical Canaan, which we would have lacked if we went straight from clannish Fundamentalism to the present.
But this arrangement of Evangelicals and Fundamentalists working as junior political partners to Romanists and junior theological partners to the English Evangelicals is no longer sustainable. It is not a good stewardship of our resources.
It’s Time for Baptists to Step Out of Rome’s Shadow and Lead American Christianity
The Roman Catholic conservative elite (increasingly joined by Eastern Orthodox) have fed themselves on the evangelical masses for years, picking off the cream of the crop in Washington D.C. and academia, something I’ve seen over and over again. This is even as the Roman Catholic rank-and-file continues to vote (and live) against pro-life policies, biblical marriage, and family and fails to pass faith in Jesus and his way of life onto their children or grandchildren. It takes the earnest idealism of a young evangelical to deceive themselves into thinking the epistemic certainty of an infallible bishop, located somewhere in central Italy, will solve not only their current identity crisis but also comfort their souls for a lifetime.
Still, Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox both commend themselves for their “stability,” lack of change, and access to a community that will help a person get ahead. And these are powerful devices, not bad in themselves. But it is precisely here that the Roman and Eastern churches have misled many of my friends and colleagues.
Their faith in a bishop of Rome or an infallible eighth-century council called by a murderous queen in Turkey is a dead end. It is because of Rome and Orthodoxy’s inability to preach change, true justification, and repentance from Christ alone that they are unable to restore spiritual life to America.
Look at the maps. In the states where Roman Catholicism is the largest denomination in the U.S., the nation’s economy, culture, and spiritual devotion is in decline: New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, far eastern PA, Las Vegas, the southern ⅔ of California, southern Louisiana and southern Texas. And the church, the kingdom of God on earth, is the vehicle by which life is breathed. Yet Catholic political and spiritual leadership, from all the looks of it, promises a spiritually dead nation.
Regarding the Evangelical party of the Church of England, well, the Church of England has almost entirely apostatized. No more Stotts, Packers, and Guinnesses are coming to help us. Britain is in free fall as a nation and has let more foreigners into its borders in the last 24 years than crossed the channel for all of England’s 2000-year history before.
In many respects, America is the only part of the West that still stands as it did in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I’ve heard someone say that America is the only Western nation that avoided modernity regarding the total state, and I think this is part of why we are still vital as a people, especially here in the South, where the state is least totalizing.
And this is where God comes in. Between COVID, better employment laws, and (until recently) undisputedly better weather, Southern states are experiencing a population and economic explosion. Of course, Florida and Texas, but also Tennessee, Georgia, the Carolinas, and Alabama. With this comes millions of dollars of industry and new businesses, and most notably, many young people. As the Wall Street Journal gleefully reported just this week, Southern colleges are drawing record numbers of outsiders, and more want to come.
This is occurring hand in hand with the most extraordinary self-destruction of the Ivy Leagues. They are rapidly being downgraded in hiring standards as wokeness, anti-Israel sentiment, and, strangely enough, high-performing Asians take over the school. The Ivies prided themselves on passing along a shared culture and knowledge base that would serve anyone well worldwide, but that’s being seen as simply not true.
While the Ivies aren’t going to disappear, they don’t and won’t hold a monopoly like they used to. They aren’t the gatekeepers of the Protestant mind anymore. The Ivy League states (plus Michigan) have the lowest rates of biblical literacy in the country, and they are losing students and businesses to the fast-growing Southern cities, which have some of the highest rates of biblical literacy in the country,
This is a once-in-a-century opportunity that Evangelicals and Fundamentalists of a century ago could not have imagined. People are holding the South and its Biblically saturated culture in higher esteem than ever. The South is wealthier and more optimistic than ever.
And get this: the South’s preeminent institutions are its churches and seminaries. Mostly, they are Southern Baptist Churches and seminaries. This is an opportunity to build with tools that last: To look beyond the current moment to forge a profoundly biblical culture that will stand the test of time.
Building Baptist Cultural Powerhouses
So, what are these tools that last? How do you build a biblical culture? The Reformation intentionally and strategically broke perverted Christian culture so that the gospel could shine through and save people’s souls. It did not pretend to get rid of cultural Christianity. In England, this meant the Church of England took over, and they did an okay job preserving the biblical message.
But the Baptists rose up and were fiercely critical of what it saw as its excesses and failures to conform to God’s word. Until the 20th century, the Baptists continued to be the reform movement of formerly liturgical and dead Christians like Episcopalians and Roman Catholics. But in most of the U.S., there’s no longer a liturgical church to free people from, especially not in the South.
The Baptists, which comprise the majority of Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas, Kentucky, and Virginia, are the de facto “state church” of the South and the United States. And they are the state church of the country’s most valued people, real estate, and culture. “He hath put down the mighty from their seat and hath exalted the humble and meek.”
The South is highly valued because it has maintained a strong, confident, conservative culture that has proven relatively resistant to cultural headwinds.
But with the influx of millions of foreigners (and I use that term most lovingly to describe northern and western citizens) to the South (not to mention international migration and resettlement), the Southern Baptists are facing a crisis.
They have been the cultural critics for centuries, and they have won. They chased the liturgical mailman until they caught him. They proved their point: individual choice matters and makes for a purer church.
Now what?
They’ve played a highly significant role in shaping Southern culture and life, and now it seems they’re afraid of their own identity. They out-built and outsold the Anglicans and Presbyterians, outlived the Methodists, and now they’ve convinced the invisible hand that their people and places are the best in the country to live. Of course, Southerners have always known of this superiority, but now we have to be confident in it. But deep down, I think Southern Baptists know their product wasn’t supposed to have a monopoly.
They fashioned themselves as the “Ken” to the paedobaptist “Barbie.”
Being the main show instead of the detractor requires pivoting. What got you here, won’t get you there. Of course, the pivoting shouldn’t be towards biblical indifference and cultural relevance (the mistake that hesitation and identity crisis provoke).
The pivoting must be to confidently double down on the fundamentals: a belief in the inspired and infallible Bible as rightly interpreting creation, the importance of worship for communion with God and ordering society, and the investment of critical time and resources into preparing and training pastors and missionaries with those skills.
One sign of a confident culture is its ability to make ceremonies and rites that are thick with meaning. The longer vital ceremonies are continued, like the coronation of English monarchs, the more meaning they convey. A culture that frequently changes its symbols, tears down its monuments, changes its street names, or replaces its flags is a culture that not only lacks confidence but is sowing the seeds of its own downfall.
Changing the name of your church to attract new members might have a short-term gain, but in the end, you shave off a little bit of the inherited meaning and emotion of something. If and when the SBC panders to immediate gratification, including immediate success, they are selling a portion of their birthright for stew, a part of their birthright they will never be able to recover.
A strong, confident civilization takes on steep challenges with confidence, knowing that easy victories are pyrrhic victories, but hard-fought battles yield a great gain. Biblical symbolism aims at this quick fix, quick conversion strategy. The symbols of the Bible aren’t how you convert someone, but the language of the Old and New Testaments teach the language, the map, of conversion.
This is how C.S. Lewis, an atheist from age 14, could articulate such a depth of Christian wisdom within a few years of his conversion. He wasn’t a biblically ignorant tribesman encountering Scripture for the first time. His whole society was immersed in Christian symbolism and language.
The many outsiders who move to the South from around the country need to hear the gospel, just as the native population still needs to be constantly reminded of it. This means they need to be met by a confident church willing to articulate the gospel clearly and incarnate it in all of life.
That church must be the Southern Baptist one.
Ten Recommendations for Cultivating Thick Baptist Community
In conclusion, I have ten recommendations for the Southern Baptist Convention on how to synthesize the wisdom and habits of their forebears, the colonial and Reformational Anglican church, and other Protestant traditions that also found much success in the American context.
It’s time to unite the body of evangelicalism in America with its rightful head: A confident, forward-leaning, and elite leadership class comprised of Southern Baptists.
These recommendations are biblical, and none should be at odds with the SBC’s priorities. However, as the ruling church, the unofficial “state church” of the South, these are intentional practices to strengthen their witness for the present and the future.
- Keep the Lord’s Day for rest, worship, and mercy. This is a great tradition of the American faithful, but it’s also a command rooted in Scripture, and its fruit will be great.
- Integrate the liturgical year and its feasting, fasting, and seasonal music into the Baptist Church. Choose your ceremonies carefully, of course, and don’t simply carry over the most in-vogue practices. There must be ways of keeping and redeeming time in spiritual ways. And as the liturgical churches fall into numerical irrelevance–despite the current Anglican revitalization–Baptist leaders will have to translate that calendar in a way that doesn’t lead people out of the Baptist church but leads them deeper into relationship with Jesus Christ in the state church of America.
- Attend worship, read Scripture, and sing at home with friends and neighbors on federal holidays. The Reformation refocused Christians away from an overbearing and distracting church calendar. The Puritans introduced civil holidays like Thanksgiving, Election Day, and other national prayer and feasting days. Yet we don’t hold Election Day worship services anymore, though we need those holidays to be sanctified. The secularization of our national celebrations must end. Jesus Christ holds our society together, so we have a duty to recognize him in our national and civil life, starting with holidays.
- Discuss spiritual preparation for death regularly. Thinking about dying well will help you live well and will help you feel on a longer-term scale. This is one of the things that Anglicans have done the best. The Church of England has produced many meditations on death, greatly aiding them to think on a civilizational scale: not just for your immediate needs, but what your children and grandchildren will need. This contemplation of death is already baked into Southern literature, so we don’t have to go too far looking for it.
- Pray the Psalms daily and make the Word of God the plumb line of your spiritual conversation. Again, this is something that previous generations of Christians knew. Every denomination had Psalters that they sang from regularly until about 1900, and then, for whatever reason, they stopped printing them and using them. There probably won’t be a resurgence of metrical Psalters, but there’s an explosion of new resources for praying and singing the Psalms. So fill your prayer life with them. The Psalter gives you all the symbols of redemption.
- Practice congregational singing at home. What happens in church on Sunday is to flow out into daily life afterward. As Dr. Sinni argued earlier, church worship practices imitate Jesus’ redemption and remind you of God’s mercies, that you are saved anew every day. I began singing to my daughter right after she came out of the womb, and she immediately stopped crying, listened, and calmed down. I’ve sung to her almost every day of the last year and a half. One morning, when I sang Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence in the kitchen, my 11-month-old daughter ran over and retrieved our two paperback hymnals, and handed one to me. Holding hers upside down, she began yelling the best she could to sing along. You can train your family in these things while they’re young, so they will not depart from them when they are old.
- Glorify missions and missionaries as adventurers. Jordan Peterson has had a tremendous impact on young men in part because he has convinced them that life is an adventure. In Edinburgh, Scotland, two glorious statues stand side by side. One is of Sir Walter Scott, the great storyteller of Scotland’s past. The other is of David Livingstone, a missionary to Africa. Livingstone motivated a generation of British and American explorers, statesmen, and pastors, not least among them President Theodore Roosevelt. But the true impact of Livingstone’s missionary efforts is incalculable. We will produce more of what we glorify. Why don’t we build statues of the great missionaries today?
- Apply the Ten Commandments to civil life because they are God’s standard of justice and mercy, not because they are a ticket to heaven. In their fullness, they are the standard of good civil conduct and personal holiness.
- Internalize justification by grace through faith. A mind made righteous by Christ alone will not fear isolation or confrontation with the world. It will invite it. All suffering and condemnation will only further convince the justified that they do the work of the Lord. The soul who knows they are justified will invite trials and tragedy because victory is assured. Justification by faith is the bedrock of anti-fragility.
- Run towards the action. Perhaps you know the name Isaac Avery. He was a Colonel at Gettysburg, leading a charge up Cemetery Hill. En route, a bullet struck him while on his horse and he fell to the ground, half paralyzed and gushing blood. Left behind at the moment, when his men later found his contorted body in the woods, his mortal wound had left him unable to speak. Signaling for a paper and pen, he wrote down upon it, “Tell my father I died facing the enemy.”
It’s time for Baptists to embrace their current position. They are the rightful inheritors of the mantle of leadership in American Christianity.
It’s time to unite the body of American evangelicalism, thriving in the South, with the head of a confident, culturally engaged Baptist elite.
And then attack the Negative World head-on.
For if we all die facing the enemy, running towards the action, I do not think our work will be in vain.
