My decision to read Mark Newman’s Getting Right with God as the next selection from the Editor’s Reading List was prompted by a recent assignment to review the book From Every Stormy Wind that Blows, which tells the story of Howard College, the Baptist-affiliated institution in Alabama became Samford University. With Baptists on my mind, I began Mark Newman’s book, which looks at a different aspect of the same group. Newman’s interested me particularly, since I was raised Baptist in the 1970s and ’80s, and his subject is desegregation within the broader Southern Baptist movement. Common narratives say that desegregation occurred in the 1960s and ’70s, while Newman’s argument discusses the phenomenon over a longer period of time, from 1945 to 1995— according to the subtitle. This one was interesting to me too, since the book’s in-depth exploration earned it the Southern Regional Council’s Lillian Smith Award in 2002.

The opening chapter of Getting Right with God provides an overview of the Southern Baptist Convention’s origins and early history. The chapter’s timeline starts in 1845 with the lead-up to the Civil War and the founding of the denomination. Newman makes no bones about the Southern Baptist Convention’s founding; it was created because the national Baptist organization refused to seat slaveholders as delegates. After the war, then, white Southern Baptists wanted formerly enslaved African Americans to “remain within their denomination but in a subordinate, segregated position.” The newly freed people decided to create their own churches instead, and the SBC remained very white. Southern Baptists held firm though and, in their early evolution, developed a platform that included endorsing public education and insisting upon “law and order” for the maintenance of segregation. They opposed Reconstruction outright but wouldn’t endorse or oppose racial violence. Two exceptions came in the 1925 and 1946, when its Committee on Temperance and Social Service released statements discouraging lynching. The quandaries that one might expect are elucidated to a greater degree in the chapter, and Newman exposes the complexities of intermingling of segregationist ideals with Christian beliefs. By the end of the chapter, we are reading about the Durham Statement and the Fair Employment Practices Commission in the 1940s, as well as varying proposals and actions taken by state-level conventions. In the final paragraph, Newman writes:

By the end of World War Two, the first signs of incompatibility between the primary commitments of Southern Baptists and the maintenance of segregation had begun to emerge. However, few Baptists were aware of conflict, and the vast majority of them supported Jim Crow. Prompted by lynching, the emerging civil rights movement, federal court rulings, race riots and the virulent racism of Nazi Germany, many Baptist conventions had begun to develop an awareness of a growing discomfort with the worst aspects of racial discrimination and inequality.

Chapter two then moves into modern times: “An Overview: Southern Baptists and Desegregation, 1945 – 1971.” Newman opened with the first hundred years and is now moving to the period after World War II through the end of the Civil Rights movement. These decades of change made for some hard times for the Southern Baptists, whose “primary commitments to evangelism, law and order, and public education” were challenged. We learn early in the chapter that “approximately 64 to 70 percent of southern whites favored ‘strict segregation.'” There was a progressive minority, but those enlightened thinkers often held positions like college professors and newspaper editors, who had the ability to speak out and even affect policy . . . yet,  in reality, they were not going to change most people’s minds. The tough issue for the Southern Baptists was the integration of public schools. The average Southern Baptist was a working-class white person who was staunchly against integration and also staunchly for having their kids in public schools. Though a handful of solutions were offered, like “pupil assignment laws,” tokenism, and small church-based private schools, the fact was that their worst fears were coming true.

The third and fourth chapters lay out an interesting way to think about this situation: sociologically and Biblically. After all, the Southern Baptist denomination is a “church” – an institution with a social function – and it is the dominant one in the American South. Citing thinkers in the tradition of Emil Durkheim, we read that churches are supposed to create the conditions for harmony to exist. That notion of harmony hit a wall when the SBC’s beliefs couldn’t be reconciled with the realities on the ground. Newman explains that the group has a “voluntaristic” belief system, which means that everything comes down to the individual. So “social problems are the product of individual sins multiplied to a large scale.”  Furthermore, “some Southern Baptists adhere to a premillennialist view. They believe that the end of the world will be preceded by an ever-increasing spiral of social problems.” As the chapter moves forward, we also read about the phenomenon of “privatization,” which allows individuals to separate their own actions from larger ramifications in the public sphere. When faced with the opposing arguments that favored integration, like applying Jesus’s ideal of love to all people, a believer who buys into these concepts can just say, Nope, not for me. And not even their ministers have the power to move them, despite the fact that they are the religious leaders.

Opening chapter four, Newman tells us two important things. First, scholars often underestimate the power of religion in segregationist thinking. Second, we often think of the Civil Rights movement as a religious movement but we usually don’t think of the segregationist countermovement as such. Early on, he also introduces the concept of “legitimation,” which basically turns beliefs into knowledge in the minds of those who buy in. The chapter proceeds by sharing the Old Testament passages that underpin the resistance to racial integration, while bringing in the interpretation that, while Jesus did say to love everyone equally, “God had not withdrawn his approval of the practice” of segregation. Essentially, God sent Jesus with a message, and that message didn’t include a refutation of racial separation. Thus, the Social Gospel was off-base by focusing on the collective rather than the individual, and the Modernists had it wrong because they were too secular. Adding this all up and considering the issue of racial integration from this amalgam of perspectives: if scripture says (to the Southern Baptist) that segregation of the races is God’s will, then it is up to each person to oppose integration, and moreover, allowing integration would be inviting God’s wrath, as happened in places like Sodom and Gomorrah.

The fifth chapter goes into the rare bird, the Southern Baptist progressive. These folks, who occupied a distinct minority in the 1950s and ’60s, “created a crisis in the plausibility structure.” Newman writes, “Progressives successfully challenged the mystic, sacred and seemingly immutable character of segregation.” And they pointed to their own Biblical passages that refuted the proof of the opposing viewpoint, such as the assertion in Acts that “God is no respecter of persons.” According to our author, the progressives experienced the post-war and Civil Rights years in three stages: 1945 – 1953 when a “separate but equal” concession was suggested, 1954 – 1959 when school desegregation was looming, and after 1960 when the movement was in full swing. Though the progressives advocated for their own position, they “were reluctant to attach segregation, because it was an established racial custom that the majority of Southern Baptists supported. Such attacks would have been divisive and might have resulted in segregationists withdrawing financial support from denominational programs” that were forwarding progressive views. They decried the Curse of Ham as “no more than a myth” and tried “to calm popular fears.” By that third stage, they were calling for integration outright. The tide of history was against the traditional folks, and a new era dawned in the 1970s. Newman writes,

During the course of the 1970s, Baptist colleges and universities that had not already done so adopted non-discriminatory admissions policies, as did many Southern Baptist churches. Integration of Baptist institutions seldom extended beyond tokenism but segregation in principle had become largely unacceptable.

Now, I’m going to make a big leap, because chapters six, seven, eight, nine, and ten deal almost completely with the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s. This project, Nobody’s Home, deals with the time frame of the 1970s through today, and Newman barely mentions anything in the 1970s during these chapters. They deal with school desegregation, the concept of “law and order,” evangelism and missions, and the diverse experiences of Baptists during desegregation in six through nine. The tenth chapter covers white Baptists during the years 1945 through 1971. Finishing those chapters, I knew I was finishing with what is the backstory to my interests. I was almost to the parts I had come to read about.

The eleventh chapter covers the years 1972 through 1995— well, actually, it covers the 1970s then spends about two pages on the 1980s and a few sentences on the 1990s. This is an interesting chapter, whose story contains the awkward and many-faceted tale of what integration and post-integration looked like for the South and for Southern Baptists. One of the first things that Newman tells us is the subject of “race relations” declined in importance and virtually disappeared in the 1970s. His source material for this book included convention agendas, Baptist newspapers and newsletters, and similar ground-level materials, and the way he puts it, people pretty quickly put the baby to bed. After two-and-a-half to three decades of turmoil, resistance, neglect, and avoidance, it was just kind of over. Some black congregations joined the SBC, but most didn’t.  Surveys of congregations, asking whether they were integrating went mostly unanswered, though the responses typically came from more progressive churches. About integration, Newman writes:

The unwillingness of African Americans to join white Southern Baptist churches can be attributed to white hostility, different styles of worship, loyalty to traditional black denominations, and a growing affinity among some blacks for separatism because of the failure of the civil rights movement to achieve large-scale integration and their disillusionment with the small benefits that limited integration had brought. Residential segregation, class differences, and the tendency of Southern Baptist churches to join white flight to the suburbs also served to reduce the number of blacks that Southern Baptists could reach.

One problem with integration was that white congregations thought that integration meant black Baptists joining white churches, and never the other way around. The concept of compromise was never a two-way street. It was: join us or don’t. Some white Southerners took a laissez faire attitude, proclaiming that that’s the way the cookie crumbles: “blacks stay with blacks and whites stay with whites.” The major issue that served to divide, which had nothing to do with churches or the Bible or God, was busing of children within the public schools. It’s no secret that Southern whites didn’t like busing and responded to it with a variety of actions, suburban flight and the formation of private schools most prominently. By the end of the chapter, Newman writes quickly and without much detail about the 1980s and ’90s. In the ’80s, “[m]any black churches joined the SBC because it offered financial support and educational materials.” And in the final pages, we learn why his subtitle bookends this story when it does:

In 1995, the SBC adopted a resolution by a 95 percent majority that apologized to African Americans for Baptists’ complicity in slavery and “for condoning and/or perpetuating individual and systematic racism in our lifetime . . . ” and asked for their forgiveness.

Though Getting Right with God is a thorough, thoughtful, insightful, and well-researched book, that subtitle really should have made it clear that the book was about the 1940s through the early 1970s. I realize that Newman must have wanted the 1995 resolution in there, but he stops his work – his best work – before the 1980s are even on the horizon.

As the editor of a project about the belief, myths, and narratives that have shaped the South since 1970, I chose to include Getting Right with God because Baptists are the largest denomination in the South and because their political power has been tremendous during the years this project covers. Though I was impressed by the book itself, I was disappointed in its relevance to the time frame that I’m focusing on. I kept reading and reading, thinking it would pay off when I reached the sections on the ’70s, ’80s, and 90s. I considered cutting it from the Editor’s Reading List when I realized how Civil Rights-heavy it is, then I thought, Just read the book and go with it. I will admit that it is compelling to consider how a large and powerful cultural institution like this one goes from pro-slavery roots in 1845 to apologizing for that position in 1995. It’s also interesting to ponder how such an influential organization, which affects the views of millions of people, is built upon the bedrock of individualism. In some ways, to me, that seems like less of an organization – in the truest sense of that word – and more of a herd mentality, where micro-level social forces sway the personal beliefs of a sea of adherents this way or that way.  Whatever it is that happens, one thing is certain: Southern Baptists have their beliefs, myths, and narratives, and apparently . . . hardly anybody has the power to change them en masse.