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Baptist Battles: Social Change and Religious Conflict in the Southern Baptist Convention

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Nancy Tatom Ammerman, a major sociologist of religion, wife of a Baptist minister, and herself a Baptist who was once part of the SBC but is no longer, conducted this fine sociological study of the SBC. It is very rare that sociologists or historians get to see a church schism while it is taking place, but Ammerman and her research assistants were able to do just that in the mid-'80s. Ammerman gives us insider insights and uses her outsider researchers and sociological tools (including a scientific survey) to achieve balanced objectivity. Her last chapter, as she admits, is somewhat less objective because she is emotionally invested in the survival of what was then called the Southern Baptist Alliance. Now called the Alliance of Baptists, it is one of several small splinters from the ever-more-fundamentalist Southern Baptist behemoth. Anyone wanting to understand how Southern Baptists, who in 1976 were typified by someone like Jimmy Carter, could become the far-right religious/political powerhouse of today should read this book.

This book is valuable in that it goes far beyond the conflict within the Baptist Church itself. It goes to the struggle over the very soul of Christianity. As emphasized throughout this book, nothing causes the decline of Christian churches faster than the undermining of the Word of God by theological liberalism. Witness the virtual disappearance of significant Christian practice and influence in western Europe. In this book, Criswell is perceptably cited (p. 81) in pointing out that the onset of theological liberalism, as exemplified by the so-called higher critical approach to the Bible, quickly led to a precipitous decline in church attendance, conversions, prayer meetings, missionary activity, etc. Worse yet, theological liberalism, or modernism, is often disguised with euphemisms such as "theological moderates". But Criswell (p. 84) is quoted as saying, "A skunk by any other name still stinks". Very well put!