White Protestants and the Civil Rights Movement in Kentucky
A mere two weeks after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision declared racially segregated schools unconstitutional, Southern Baptists flocked to St. Louis for their annual convention. Attendees at that June 1954 meeting heard a stirring report that lauded the High Court’s action as “in harmony with the constitutional guarantee of equal freedom to all citizens and the Christian principles of equal justice and love to all men.” Although the ten thousand Baptists who gathered in St. Louis represented every state in the nation, two Kentuckians dominated the debate that followed. W. M. Nevins of Lexington warned that the Brown decision put the nation on a dangerous path toward racial amalgamation: “If we are going to eat with [blacks], and go to school with them, and go to church with them, the time is going to come . . . when some of you that sit in this audience today will have grandchildren with Negro blood.” Another Kentuckian, J. B. Weatherspoon, sprang to the report’s defense. The Southern Seminary professor urged that rejecting the progressive statement would send the message that America could “count Baptists out in the matter of equal justice.” “I don’t think we want to do that,” he concluded, to enthusiastic applause. The report sailed to victory on the wings of Weatherspoon’s oratory, his hearers approving it by an overwhelming voice vote. As if to acknowledge this commitment to a perilous but worthy path,
Uneasy in Babylon: Southern Baptist Conservatives and American Culture
Uneasy in Babylon is based on extensive interviews with the most important Southern Baptist conservatives who have wrested control of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) away from moderates. Known to many Americans from their appearances on national TV talk shows, such as Larry King Live, they advocate a return to traditional values throughout the country. Women should be submissive to their husbands, Disney World should be boycotted because of its tacit support of homosexuality, and multiculturalism is the death knell for the American way of life, these culture warriors aver. Almost 40 years earlier, historian Rufus Spain published At Ease in Zion: Social History of Southern Baptists, 1877-1914, showing how Southern Baptists had built a culture of their own in the South in which they were very comfortable. At the end of the 20th century, however, the new Southern Baptist conservatives live in a very different South where they are not at ease and do not dwell in Zion. Rather, asserts Hankins, because they are uneasy in a culture that to them resembles wicked Babylon, they intend to lead the orthodox side of the looming culture war in America. Hankins shows how differing cultural perceptions help explain the great chasm that developed between conservatives in the SBC and the moderates who preceded them as leaders of the denomination. The book covers the elite leaders of Southern Baptist conservatism from the 1960s to the present, focusing especially on how their views were formed as they studied and lived outside the South, how those cultural perceptions functioned in the 1980s and 1990s as they became highly visible activists in American culture, and how their writings have influenced journalists in both the religious and secular media. As the first mainstream historical treatment of SBC conservatism, Uneasy in Babylon will be valuable for religious and academic libraries, southern historians, and theologians, as well as general readers knowledgeable about the century-long battle within the Southern Baptist Convention.
Adultery and Divorce in Calvin's Geneva.
Acknowledgments Introduction 1. The Institutional Matrix 2. The Pierre Ameaux Case: Divorce for Adultery and Blasphemy 3. The Antoine Calvin Case: Divorce for Adultery 4. The Jean Bietrix Case: Forced Reconciliation 5. Death for Adultery 6. The Galeazzo Caracciolo Case: Divorce for Religious Desertion 7. The Rationale for Divorce: Theodore Beza's Treatise Conclusion Abbreviations Notes Bibliography Index