Book Review

Canada and the United States

In 1995, media trumpeted the Southern Baptist Convention's adoption of a resolution repenting its complicity in slavery and the sin of racism. One hundred and fifty years earlier, the convention organized after splitting from fellow Baptists over the issue of slavery; the new denomination adamantly endorsed it. In some ways, the 1995 resolution closed the circle. Mark Newman looks at the time between World War II and the adoption of that resolution, a half century when the entire nation struggled with matters of legal segregation and civil rights. Using the Southern Baptist Convention, which during that half century moved from being the largest Protestant denomination in the South to the largest one in the nation, as a case study illuminates how religion and society are intertwined and how religious institutions grapple with change in the culture that sustains them.

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Newman identifies three clusters within the Southern Baptist Convention in the last half of the twentieth century that approached matters of race in different ways. At one extreme were those who stridently affirmed racial segregation, using many of the same tenuous biblical arguments that their forebears had mustered in defense of slavery. At the other pole were those who condemned racism and aligned themselves with activists working to dismantle legal segregation in the South and elsewhere. But the largest group consisted of "progressives" who were at first ambivalent about matters of race, tending to see segregation and civil rights as political, not religious, matters and naively hoping that the emerging conflict in the larger society would not interfere with the church's mission in seeking the conversion of sinners.

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