Baptist Fundamentalists Still Shy of Goal : Conservatives Win 8 Presidencies, but No Administrative Posts

DALLAS — Fundamentalists have won eight straight presidential elections in the Southern Baptist Convention, but have yet to capture any executive posts for the 19 institutions of the largest U.S. Protestant denomination.

“We are winning, but we have not won,” says the Rev. Paige Patterson of Dallas, one of the two field generals of the fundamentalist takeover.

The last three administrative jobs within the Southern Baptist bureaucracy have eluded the fundamentalists. A fourth post, the presidency of the Home Mission Board, a domestic missionary agency, is considered likely to go to the fundamentalists, but that prospect may have hit a snag.

The Home Mission Board will hear from its search committee at its three-day meeting starting Monday in Atlanta. It appears that only a nominee suitable to the fundamentalist majority on the board can be approved. “There is no question that the conservatives are in control of the Home Mission Board Board of Trustees,” Patterson said.

However, the search committee is not expected to have a recommendation ready for the board. Jim Newton, a Baptist Press news official, said the eight-member search committee has a rather balanced mix of fundamentalists and “moderates,” but he could not confirm reports that the committee was deadlocked.

So-called moderates head most of the denomination’s seminaries and agencies, which receive about $130 million a year from 36,000 churches nationwide for missionary, educational and other programs.

Unhappy with what they saw as biblical and social “liberalism” in Southern Baptist seminaries and agencies, Patterson teamed in 1968 with layman Paul Pressler of Houston, a Texas appellate court judge, to form a communications network of like-minded pastors and laymen to change the leadership. When their candidate won the Southern Baptist presidency in 1979, the Patterson-Pressler alliance set a goal of winning control by 1989, using “biblical inerrancy” as a rallying cry, saying their opponents were weak on the authority of an error-free Bible.

Patterson favors the label “conservative” over fundamentalist, a term that he considers too “volatile.” However, the Baptist Press, the denominational public relations arm, has adopted the terms “fundamentalist-conservatives” and “moderate-conservatives” to indicate that both sides are theological conservatives yet differ in attitudes toward those who disagree with them. Church historians have also applied the term fundamentalist to Christians who have worked to rid their churches of leaders who tolerate anything less than ardently conservative beliefs.

If beliefs were enough to gain the pleasure of Patterson and allies, then the election last year of the Rev. William Crews of Riverside as president of Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary in Mill Valley would have been considered the first fundamentalist victory. But Patterson said he does not count Crews’ election a triumph for his side.

Crews, a theological conservative, said he is glad to see the shift to the right in the Southern Baptist Convention. However, he has consistently maintained that he will avoid the partisan battles, and, like many California Southern Baptists, will stay apolitical.

Because of that stance, Crews “is a remains-to-be-seen proposition,” said Patterson in a characteristically frank assessment of the progress of the fundamentalist drive.

Patterson declared that it is no longer possible to be apolitical in the denomination.

“Maybe there was a day when that was true, but to be apolitical right now is to be for the Establishment and against the return to the past, to our former principles,” Patterson said, seated behind his president’s desk at the Criswell Center for Biblical Studies.

However, “if he lets his theology dictate his options, then Bill Crews will turn out to be a monumental shift in the direction of conservatism,” Patterson added.

Crews, reached by telephone, indicated that the fundamentalist leadership has changed its tune. “Once the issue was theology,” Crews said. “Now it’s an issue of theology plus politics.”

Patterson, 44, cannot remember exactly the year (“about 1968”) or the date when he was challenged by Pressler to work for change in the Southern Baptist Convention, but he remembers the time and the place. “The whole thing began in New Orleans about 1 a.m. in the Cafe duMonde, a famous French doughnut and coffee place in the French Quarter,” Patterson said. The Texas-born Patterson was doing graduate work in the late 1960s at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.

“We agreed we would thoroughly study the convention documents so that we knew how the system worked,” Patterson said. After locating a like-minded conservative pastor in each state, a meeting was held in Atlanta and a communications network established.

“The judge and I got up front and took the shots; we did that on purpose to protect people. From the start, it was the concern of a couple hundred pastors and laymen that have been very intensely involved in it,” he said.

Since the mid-1970s, Patterson has been associated with the 26,000-member First Baptist Church of Dallas, the largest Southern Baptist congregation in the country. It is pastored by the avidly conservative W. A. Criswell, one of the most powerful voices in the denomination.

“Of course, in 1979 it all began to come together,” Patterson said.

That was when the Rev. Adrian Rogers, a big-church pastor from Memphis, ran successfully but decided not to seek a customary second term. Other fundamentalist flag bearers won, and Rogers returned as a candidate in 1986 and won. Rogers is favored to win another one-year term as president of the 14.6-million-member denomination when it holds its annual meeting in St. Louis on June 9-11.

The president’s power to make institutional change is indirect. Each year he nominates the members of a board that in turn nominates clergy and lay appointees to vacant terms on the boards of the 19 seminaries and agencies. Through that slow, staggered process a fundamentalist majority or near-majority has supposedly been reached on every board of trustees.

Nevertheless, fundamentalists were foiled in two recent administrative elections.

--Alvin C. Shackleford of Nashville, Tenn., was elected director of the Baptist Press on a 33-26 vote by the denomination’s executive committee last month after a motion backed by fundamentalists to postpone the election had failed. The Baptist Press, directed for years by Wilmer C. Fields, is widely regarded by journalists in the secular press as the best denominational news service in U.S. organized religion, but fundamentalists have criticized it as sometimes biased against fundamentalists and emphasizing too many “negative” stories.

Shackleford said he believes the Bible is infallible and inerrant (“I was an inerrantist before I even learned the word”). He asked for “a year of grace” from his March 15 starting date to demonstrate his fair approach. He has been editor of the Southern Baptist news journal for Tennessee.

Patterson, in the interview, said his alliance was “very disappointed” that a man with a larger percentage of support was not nominated by Harold C. Bennett, president of the executive committee. “We view that as very unfortunate,” Patterson said.

From Shackleford’s record as an editor in Tennessee, “we don’t think he’s been fair at all,” Patterson said. “But, after all, we’re not out to be vindictive. We would be most unthoughtful not to grant (a year’s trial), so we’re prepared to live with that.”

--N. Larry Baker, a “moderate” seminary dean from Kansas City, Mo., was elected executive director of the Christian Life Commission in January to replace Foy Valentine, who will relinquish the office March 15. The agency is charged with helping Southern Baptists practice Christian ethics in family life, race relations and other moral concerns, as well as have an impact on public morality.

Because of heart problems, Valentine retired from that job but was rehired to write a history of the commission and work on fund-raising projects.

But Patterson charged in the interview that Valentine’s departure “was a deliberate move before we could get enough people on the Christian Life Commission to determine the next executive director. That (action) is viewed with maximum unhappiness by the conservative people in the convention.”

Besides disagreeing with the new director’s social and religious views, Patterson accused the commission of duplicity by hiring Valentine back “at about $90,000 to be involved in fund raising. Now, either he needed to retire or he didn’t for health reasons.”

Responding in an interview to Patterson’s remarks, Valentine said, “I will trade my 90% blockage of one area in my heart and 60% in two other areas with any fundamentalist who will come forward, including Paige Patterson.”

Valentine said there is “absolutely no comparison of the pressure and stress of what I will be doing for a limited number of months and the job I have held for 27 years.” Valentine also said the new salary figure Patterson gave “is grossly inaccurate.”

Of the stalled fundamentalist drive, Valentine said with a laugh, “There is a pretty high level of frustration for some people.”

Nonetheless, Patterson is confident that the fundamentalists will have the last laugh.