Irony characterizes much religious history of the southern states in the United States. Smith's monograph on the modernization of the Southern Baptist Convention, especially its denominational level operations, is no exception. While Southern Baptists appeared to embrace and endorse religious fundamentalism in the early twentieth century, especially rejecting evolution in favor of creationism, they preferred their denominational distinctiveness, quite literally the label of Baptist, and did unite themselves with national fundamentalist leaders on the right in the same way that Baptists rejected the ecumenical tendencies of the Interchurch World Movement. Fundamentalist attacks on Baptist institutions threatened Southern Baptists’ senses of themselves in the same way that the moniker of interfaith missions challenged a sense of Baptist distinctiveness. Rather than commit to interfaith efforts to evangelize, Baptists chose to enlarge their own missionary endeavors. Baptist leaders maintained a staunch insistence on the autonomy of the local church, and yet they enlarged denominational-level agencies, ostensibly to permit these congregations to live out their Baptist faith. These leaders imposed a progressive-era understanding of management and leadership, which both transmogrified the Southern Baptist Convention and fulfilled the yearnings of many of its leading ministers for recognition as professionals. These same Baptists then adopted the Baptist Faith and Message, embracing a softer-sounding, but essentially similar theology to that of the fundamentalists, while simultaneously maintaining that this statement was not a creed. In the name of preserving and enlarging the traditional Baptist faith, these leaders fashioned a new and modern denomination.
Smith builds his study around the Seventy-Five Million Campaign, a post-World War I attempt to fund Baptist missions and a burgeoning Baptist bureaucracy. This fundraising attempt failed to reach its target goal, but it changed the business practices of churches and pastors, who not only budgeted more rationally at the level of the local church, but linked local churches and supported the growing denominational level enterprises through the Cooperative Program, the legacy of the abortive Seventy-Five Million Campaign. The Cooperative Program became the means by which Baptists enlarged both their foreign and home missionary enterprises and built influential denominational-level structures.
Smith focuses on the contributions of two Baptist leaders, E. Y. Mullins and L. R. Scarborough, in spearheading this change. Mullins found a harmony between the culture of Baptist democracy and the emergence of a cadre of professional, denominational-level leadership. Rather than compel obedience from above, these leaders used marketing through denominational literature to motivate and direct those individual Baptists to support educational and missionary activity at the denomination level as a proper Baptist duty. Scarborough recognized that iron-fisted fundamentalism destroyed denominational harmony, especially when charismatic fundamentalist leaders denounced the liberal tendencies of seminary professors and leading divines. He offered an alternative. Southern-Baptist-dominated governing boards would ensure that Baptist institutions and educational materials were theologically sound. These same enterprises encouraged younger Baptists to take up denominational-level work as their Christian calling which nurtured the on-going development of supra-congregational enterprises. The result was a Southern Baptist Convention that blended central-level influence with the traditional Baptist insistence on congregational autonomy.
Smith grounds his case on a thorough reading and analysis of the state-level denominational newspapers. These sheets printed letters that supported and that rejected denominational-level bureaucratization. Their editors weighed in with opinion-shaping commentary about modernism, anti-evolution, fundamentalism, and the growth of denominational-level enterprises. Victor Masters, the editor of Kentucky's Baptist paper, like many of his peers, supported fundamentalism's focus on scriptural authority, but rejected its lack of focus on proper church polity. Masters likewise found fundamentalism's northern roots to be troublesome because he believed in a type of lost-cause infused Southern exceptionalism. The God of history, he believed, had shaped Southern Baptists to lead the religious instauration of the United States, which was besieged by modernist thought and mongrelizing immigration. But Masters did not support the centralizing efforts by denominational leaders which, he believed, threatened Baptists’ congregational polity and the democratic religious culture. Masters’ critique of Scarborough's faith in the capacity of Baptist leadership to protect vital religious principles through policing Baptist institutions persisted as the conservative critique of Southern Baptist Convention-level enterprises which informed the conservative resurgence of the 1970s. Masters was exceptional for his day, as most of the editors Smith examined stressed the importance of the Cooperative Program and the growing enterprises it funded as consistent with Baptist polity. Controlled by Southerners, these enterprises protected congregational autonomy and shielded Southern Baptist congregations from schismatic tendencies from fundamentalist leaders from without, such as William Bell Riley and John Roach Stratton, and voices from within, like J. Frank Norris.
Smith's monograph incorporates the new consensus position best articulated by George Marsden that the storied fundamentalism of the early twentieth century centered itself in northern urban areas and not the southern countryside. Building on William Glass, Strangers in Zion: Fundamentalists in the South, 1900–1950 (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2001), Smith shows how effectively Southern Baptists expropriated fundamentalism's doctrinal thrusts, but he goes further. Using a denomination rather than an ideology as his locus, he shows why Southern Baptists might embrace doctrinal fundamentalism while eschewing the tactics and ends of its leaders that threatened traditional Baptist polity and identity, especially the deep marrow that Baptist congregations most resembled the early church of the First Century. Finally, his detailed analysis of the on-going tensions in Southern Baptist life, only partially mediated by Scarborough's attempt to mediate the relationship between congregational polity and a robust denominational structure, and to find a moderate middle way between modernism and radical fundamentalism, provide a splendid deep description of the sources of the conservative resurgence in Southern Baptist life in the 1970s.
