Fundamentalism, Fundraising, and the Transformation of the Southern Baptist Convention, 1919-1925

by Andrew Christopher Smith

Overview

Scholars and journalists have paid significant attention to the contemporary Fundamentalist tendencies of southern Protestantism. However, many studies neglect to consider how the Fundamentalist

controversies that roiled the Baptists and Presbyterians of the North during the 1920s affected the Southern Baptist Convention schism of 1970-2000.

Fundamentalism, Fundraising, and the Transformation of the Southern Baptist Convention, 1919-1925 explores the scope and character of the interaction between Southern Baptists and early

Fundamentalism during the late 1910s and early 1920s. By focusing more closely on the Southern Baptist Convention, Andrew Christopher Smith examines the interaction between the

northernFundamentalist movement and southern religion during the era. Though scholars agree that Fundamentalism is not native to the South, no book thus far has considered the effects of the

Fundamentalist movement and how it influenced southern Protestant denominational organizations, independent of southern rejection of Fundamentalist-sponsored interdenominational evangelistic

andeducational institutions. Smith proposes that Fundamentalist ideas, lingering in the atmosphere of the South after wafting there through hearsay, national religious periodicals, and the secular press,likely

influenced Southern Baptist self-understanding during this critical period.

Examining documentary evidence, Smith explains that following the First World War, Southern Baptists pushed toward bureaucratization. The “Seventy-Five Million Campaign,” a fundraising and

organization-building drive that the convention approved in 1919, was the denominational movement through which the selective appropriation of Fundamentalist ideas occurred. Exploring the interplay of

Southern Baptist claims and northern Fundamentalist precepts, Smith fills a void in scholarly examination of early-twentieth-century Baptist history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781621902270
Publisher:	University of Tennessee Press
Publication date:	04/22/2016
Series:	America's Baptists
Edition description:	1st Edition
Pages:	249
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.90(d)

Table of Contents

Foreword Keith Harper xi

Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 The Transformation of Baptist Identity: E. Y. Mullins and the New Baptist Democracy 15

Chapter 2 The Clock of the World: Southern Baptists, the Interchurch World Movement, and the Seventy-Five Million Campaign 41

Chapter 3 The Fundamentalization of Cooperation: Southern Baptist Reaction to the Fundamentalist Movement, 1919-1925 69

Chapter 4 Carrots and Sticks: Reward and Coercion in the Seventy-Five Million Campaign 103

Chapter 5 The Right Arm of Our Power: Southern Baptist Higher Education and the "Scarborough Synthesis" 135

Chapter 6 The Empire's New Clothes: Dissent against Denominational Centralization during the Seventy-Five Million Campaign 157

Conclusion: The Legacy of the Seventy-Five Million Campaign and the Impact of Fundamentalism among Southern Baptists 187

Appendix: J. Frank Norris's Relationship to the Southern Baptist Convention 191

Notes 197

Bibliography 235

Index 243