Uneasy in Babylon: Southern Baptist Conservatives and American Culture. By Barry Hankins. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002. 344 pp. $54.50, cloth; $17.95, paper.

Founded in 1845 to allow slaveholders to receive appointment as missionaries, Southern Baptist Convention was a product of the antebellum South. Along with Methodists and Presbyterians, who also split over slavery, the creation of the Southern Baptist Convention foreshadowed the national split that led to the Civil War. The convention kept some of that split alive, remaining a separate entity after the war ended and becoming more deeply a part of southern religious culture. Southern Baptists could be found at every social level of the white American South, from the yeoman farmer the deep South to the merchant on the seaboard to the planter culture. In the twentieth century, the schismatic southern churches began conversations with their northern counterparts about reunion. Methodists took the lead in 1939. Presbyterians discussed the issue longer, reuniting in the late 1970s. Baptists north and south also had discussions and signed comity agreements, promising not to encroach the other's territory, but Southern Baptists by the end of the 1950s were firmly committed to a separate and distinct identity.

By the 1970s, the Southern Baptist Convention had millions of members in all fifty states. The convention pursued a national identity, hoping not to merge with the Baptists of the north, but to overtake them. In addition to the mother seminary, the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in the border state of Kentucky, Southern Baptists had a seminaries in Texas, North Carolina, and Louisiana. However, they also had seminaries in non-southern Kansas and in quite non-southern San Francisco. This geographical diversity reflected something of a social and theological diversity among Southern Baptist leaders and laity. The convention had a few liberals, largely in the east and in some urban areas, a large number of fundamentalists, and large number in the middle. Holding the denomination together was a "Grand Compromise," a unifying theme of missions and Southern Baptist identity that united disparate parts as Southern Baptists. Regardless of one's individual theology, Southern Baptists had a shared language and shared identity that allowed liberals, conservatives, and people in between to unite.

The compromise was certainly tested significantly in the twentieth century, with Southern Baptists arguing about many of the same issues that divided Presbyterians and Northern Baptists. Southern Baptists alone did not divide. For the Baptists of Dixie, the fracturing would not begin until 1979, when theological conservatives launched a movement to reshape the convention in a more uniformly conservative manner. Like Baptists and Presbyterians of the north, Southern Baptists would split. Unlike these denominations, which saw conservatives depart, the Southern Baptist Convention became dominated by the conservative faction and many of the supporters of the "Grand Compromise" departed.

Such is the context necessary to follow Barry Hankins' well-written study of the theology and social view of the conservative leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention. No shortage of books exists on the takeover (the non-fundamentalist term) or conservative resurgence (the term of the current leadership). Hankins has not given us another book detailing the takeover. There are plenty of these books and many of them are strident and hortatory, either celebrating the protection of the convention from a slid into mainline liberal decay or decrying the theft of the denomination by fundamentalists masquerading as true Baptists. The goal with both of these is to convert people to the moderate or conservative cause, perhaps a noble cause, but of little value to those who seek to understand the nature of Southern Baptist conservatism. Barry Hankins' work stands outside this genre and joins a small but growing number of mainstream studies published by university presses that analyze developments in Southern Baptist life from the perspective of the trained professional historian.

Hankins aims to describe the theological background and social view of SBC conservative leaders, contrasting that with the background of the former leaders. He contends that the conservative leaders, themselves a diverse lot, are less insular than the earlier regime of Southern Baptist life. Their "openness" comes from their embrace of the evangelical subculture. Hankins points out that men like Al Mohler, Richard Land, Adrian Rogers, Timothy George, and Paige Patterson, all have affinities with the type of Christianity embodied in the National Association of Evangelicals. All of these men, likewise, have either pastoral or educational experiences outside the region of the SBC and the institutions of the SBC. In this sense, the new SBC has a brand of ecumenism of the right, while the old SBC was in many ways its own entity with little dialogue outside its own world.

The new conservatives, though, do possess a certain insularity or isolation (my words, not Hankins). Therein is his thesis. Southern Baptist conservatives "are convinced that American culture has turned hostile toward traditional forms of faith and that the South has become more like the rest of the United States than ever before. . . . [T]hey are seeking to put America's largest denomination at the head of what they perceive to be a full-scale culture war." According to Hankins, the South has changed along with Southern Baptists. Once at ease in Zion, as the title and thesis of Rufus Spain's 1967 book on Southern Baptists proposes, the denomination was at home in a Southern culture that it reflected and reinforced. Moderates were very much part of that southern culture and promoted a Southern Baptist insularity. There was plenty of irony in this insulation. By remaining in a Southern Baptist cocoon, the Southern Baptist leaders were able to bring some mainline type perspectives into the denomination.

Theological and social conservatives in the denomination became increasingly frustrated and sought ways to counter what they perceived as liberal drift. Their contacts outside the Southern Baptist world in the arena of the conservative evangelical subculture provided these leaders the tools the needed to win the support of many rank and file Southern Baptists. The conservatives claimed that their views were the historic Baptist views and that moderate views were shaped by culture and then baptized into religious language. Once in power, Southern Baptist conservatives claimed that the Baptist tradition had always been counter-cultural. With the denomination firmly in the shadow of conservative evangelicalism, Southern Baptist leaders began addressing social views such as abortion, race, religious liberty and church-state separation, and women in ministry in ways that ran against the dominant views of American culture. The old Southern Baptist Convention reflected the world that was its home, the American South. The new Southern Baptist Convention challenged that world. According to Hankins, Southern Baptists were now part of American evangelicalism, the South was less Southern, and Southern Baptists were waging a culture war in the world but not of the world.

Hankins also demonstrates that Southern Baptist identity is more nuanced than one might suspect. The conservatives are themselves diverse. He points out that the banner of inerrancy, the talisman that conservatives used to oust moderates, has multiple meanings among their tribe. For the average Southern Baptist supporter, the populist, the term means a literalist hermeneutic that demands a young Earth, biblical incompatibility with evolution, rejection of female ordination, and a reading of the Bible that dismisses higher criticism. However, this populist understanding is not, Hankins proposes, the definition of inerrancy actually embraced by many of the conservative leaders. Their understanding of the word and the populist understandings of the word differed. Their use of the word united these groups.

Hankins also challenges some non-conservative, moderate Baptist interpretations of the conservative takeover of the denomination. A classic charge of moderates against the conservatives is that they have departed from Baptist distinctives. They are, in fact, not real Baptists. Hankins not only avoids these types of conclusions, he challenges them. He argues that the conservative movement does stand in a certain tradition of Baptist life that extends back to the 1600s. They are not the only piece of the Baptist quilt or the only stream that flows into the Baptist lake, but they are a part. Hankins goes to great lengths in his chapter on conservatives and religious liberty to argue that the rejection by conservatives of strict separation as the one and only historic Baptist position does have some historical basis. There is no single Baptist metanarrative that either conservatives or moderates can claim. What both can claim is that they stand in one of several historic Baptist traditions, and Hankins makes this point well.

Hankins clear arguments are based on numerous primary documents of moderates and conservatives alike. His bibliography not only supports his text, it will be of great assistance to other scholars who will explore this yet-to-be exhausted topic. The great strength of his sources can be found in the numerous interviews that Hankins conducted with large numbers of conservative leaders. For several years, Hankins gathered oral histories of important figures in the conservative movement of the convention. These interviews are the heart of his study.

Uneasy in Babylon has continued the conversation about developments in the nation's largest protestant denomination. Several questions, not answered in the book, are raised by my reading of the book. I do want to know to what extent the Southern Baptist Convention is a national movement and to what extent the conservative leadership reflect non-southern identities. There is little doubt that the denomination is geographically national and that the new leadership has embraced an identity with the non-southern evangelical subculture. I wonder, though, what motivated the majority of Southern Baptist Convention messengers from 1979-1990 to vote for movement conservatives as convention president. What did the conservative movement have that appealed to these people? Were the supporters of the conservatives attracted to them because the leaders had ties to non-southern conservative religious movements? Or were they attracted to the conservative leadership because they suspected the old guard leadership had left the southern ways? I suspect it was the latter. Religious conservatives, with their ties to non-Southern Baptist conservatives, tapped into southern nostalgia. The conservatives gained control because they were more southern than the moderates, not less so.

The Southern Baptist Convention's conservative shift under the rubric of inerrancy has often been compared with the rise of conservatives under the same rubric among the Missouri Synod Lutherans. I think this comparison has limited value, but I do think the convention needs to be examined in the light of larger trends in religious life. The larger trends, though, may be issues connected to southern culture. There was another schism in religious life that parallels the time of the Southern Baptist Convention conflict, but is rarely compared. In the late 1970s, when northern and southern Presbyterians reunited, large numbers of southern Presbyterians formed the Presbyterian Church in America, concerned that the northern branch was too liberal for the faith. The growth of this denomination in the South during the 1970s and 1980s parallels much of the successful growth of the conservative movement in the Southern Baptist Convention. Certainly there is something quite southern about religious conservatism of the Baptist and Presbyterian variety.

Uneasy in Babylon is the latest of several studies of Southern Baptist life. This book is the second contribution made by the author. Hankins 1996 study of early twentieth century Baptist fundamentalist, J. Frank Norris, was a revision of his dissertation. David Stricklin's 1999 examination of the Southern Baptist Left, A Genealogy of Dissent (University of Kentucky), applied the same objective-leaning approach to the other wing of Baptist life. These non-polemical studies are adding to our understanding of the complex world of Southern Baptist identity and assessing that institution's place in the larger world of American religion and culture.

Merrill M. Hawkins, Jr., Carson-Newman College