The “Southern” entitling the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) is a stigma in the eyes of critics. It’s an honorific in the heart of Baptist Believers. It will be celebrated in the future.
The Southern Baptist Convention is an association of fully independent churches. Like the churches in the Book of Acts.
It split with American Baptists in 1845 followed the refusal of the Northern-led mission boards (notably the Boston-based Foreign Mission Board) to appoint slaveholders as missionaries.
The “Resolution On Racial Reconciliation On The 150th Anniversary Of The Southern Baptist Convention” repented and apologized that “many of our Southern Baptist forbears defended the right to own slaves, and either participated in, supported, or acquiesced in the particularly inhumane nature of American slavery” and “in later years Southern Baptists failed, in many cases, to support, and in some cases opposed, legitimate initiatives to secure the civil rights of African-Americans.”
Cultural Marxists and some Christian critics, see all Southerners (and perforce the SBC) as permanently stained with the sins of slavery, segregation, and racism. That’s their problem and a thin straw to lean on.
Today, the two most ethnically and linguistically diverse churches in the U.S. are Southern Baptists and Roman Catholics. So much for racism and prejudice.
For the Southern Baptists who are actual Southerners, which is an ever declining number, and completely reject every aspect of racial discrimination and prejudice from the 1950/60s, the transformation of their human heart is the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. It’s praiseworthy indeed.
So, what is the Southern about this “low” church Protestant denomination that makes it so special?
It’s how the hundred plus years from 1861 past the 1960s baked the Bible into Southern Baptists much like the 70 years of the Babylonian captivity made the Jewish exiles become more Jewish.
First, “The” War humbled survivors. Southern manhood suffered casualties comparable to Soviet and German soldiers in WW 2. My ancestors, who survived, were truly humble and grateful to God.
Second, “The” War devastated the South. Reconstruction stole what wasn’t destroyed until there was nothing left worth looting. When a people have lost everything, when all wealth is reduced to the coins and silver you’ve hidden successfully from Union soldiers, then you have nothing to rely on except the work of your hands and the grace of God.
The economy went to zero when the currency went to zero.
Third, building capital (wealth) in an agrarian society is slow. One crop at a time. Farmers are at the mercy of weather and markets. Farmers pray a lot. Years of gain and loss become decades. The crushing poverty for almost all Southerners was generational.
The older generation too old to fight, the generation of warriors defending their homes, the women fiercely keeping the farms, and the generation too young to fight were forged by the crucible of war. Their experience and the slow crawl out of poverty shaped every generation to follow – even unto the Baby Boomers.
Fourth, throughout these generations, Southerners held to the Bible. They weren’t taken in by Marx, Darwin, Dewey, Freud, or others until Cultural Marxism slowly metastasized into Southern public education during the 1970s.
Most Southerners share the same Biblical worldview from the American Revolution.
Fifth, as Protestant denominations moved away from the Bible, the Southern Baptists didn’t. The Bible-Believers won the SBC Seminary struggles of the 1980s/90s.
Bible-Believing congregations are but remnants in other mainstream Protestant denominations.
Consequently, all that made the Southern in Southern Baptist put the Bible into the Believers. God-breathed new life into another “People of The Way” – living the Book of Acts in this time and place.
And, this matters for Western Civilization.
Because Evangelicals, whose standard bearers are Southern Baptists, are the hard core to contend with Cultural Marxism – the Human Secularist Totalitarians who work to destroy Western Civilization.
And, Evangelicals will be over-represented as soldiers of the Cross dealing with Muslims, as the Islamist Totalitarians who work to destroy Western Civilization.
Southern Baptists, regardless of region, ethnicity, language, or country of origin should take pride in the adjective which denotes the trials that made their body of Believers become stronger Christians.
Centuries from now, the descendants of Southern Baptists still will seek to be the Church of Acts by whatever name they like.
Read James Atticus Bowden at https://jatticus.wordpress.com/ and https://substack.com/@jamesatticusbowden and https://x.com/jatticusbowden
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