I first published this post, asking these four questions, on July 21, 2018. January 6, 2021, it seemed important to ask them again.

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Would President Trump betray his country to protect and promote himself?

Would US Evangelicals betray their God to protect and promote themselves?

Could either of the above do such a thing – and loudly declare, and even believe, they had not?

A true story from the past

In May 1845, 293 delegates from nine states, all white men, met in Augusta, Georgia, to found the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). The precipitating issue: decisions made by the national Baptist mission societies not to send out missionaries who were slaveholders.¹

Southerners loudly insisted that not to allow slaveholders to serve as missionaries violated the rights of all southern Baptists. In reality, the ruling only affected a tiny percentage of Baptists, those whites who owned slaves and would not relinquish them to go to the mission field.

Ah, but if southern Baptists went along with a decision to disqualify slave owners from missions service, that would suggest agreement that slavery might be a sin.

If they opened that can of worms, a whole tangle of sin issues would pour out, including: greed, pride, bigotry, divisiveness, powermongering, fearmongering and abusive violence. To allow such things to be exposed would threaten the deep deception the leaders had cultivated, deception that allowed profound injustice to hide in plain sight.

For if Southerners truly examined these issues – and gave the Holy Spirit permission to speak – a few, or maybe many, might repent. Then pressure from within the South might erupt to free the slaves. The slaves themselves might revolt. Wealth, status, power, all hung in the balance. Thus, by the 1840s, white Southerners had agreed together never to allow any discussion of the topic that even hinted slavery might be sin.

Immediately after the meeting in Augusta, the delegates released a report explaining why “the organization of the Southern Baptist Convention became necessary.” The report reveals the astonishing self-deception.

It accused “the late General Convention of the Baptist denomination of the United States” of denying the Southern churches “equal rights” and of committing a “breach of covenant.” And it declared:

THEY WOULD FORBID US TO speak unto THE GENTILES … ‘We can never be a party to any arrangement’ for monopolizing the Gospel: any arrangement which … would first drive us from our beloved colored people, of whom they prove that they know nothing comparatively, and from the much-wronged Aborigines of the country … We sympathise with the Macedonian cry from every part of the heathen world, with the low moan, for spiritual aid, of the four millions of half stifled Red Men, our neighbors; with the sons of Ethiopia among us, stretching forth their hands of supplication for the gospel, to God and all his people.

And thus waxing eloquent, SBC founders seceded from the union with their Northern brethren, while accusing the non-seceding parties of breaking covenant. They created a new denomination solely to defend and align with slavery. But they said they did it for the Gospel and for the benefit of the two groups whose human rights they had most thoroughly denied – the “much-wronged” Native “neighbors” that whites had driven from the land a decade earlier, and the “beloved” blacks they continued to enslave. The SBC founders wrote:

Our OBJECTS, then, are the extension of the Messiah’s kingdom, and the glory of our God.²

Descent into deception

For the first three decades of the 1800s, the Second Great Awakening profoundly impacted the church in the South. Methodists and Baptists, especially, experienced the Spirit of God powerfully and grew in numbers exponentially. The Awakened exuberantly received the Lord Jesus Christ. Yet they repeatedly refused the voice of the Spirit as he confronted them about their treatment of whole groups of people.

When challenged – particularly by Northerners, whom white Southerners considered far less righteous – the South in general and the Southern church in particular grew increasingly defensive and deceived. The presenting issue was slavery. In the first light of awakening, people across the South widely agreed that slavery was an evil, unconscionable system. Preachers in the South loudly denounced it. By the 1820s, however, people across the South spoke of slavery as a “necessary” evil. Far fewer preachers mentioned it. By the 1840s, preachers and people agreed in calling slavery a positive good, designed by God and advocated in his Word.

In late 1858, secessionist James Henry Hammond, of South Carolina, described the startling turn-around that had occurred:

And what then [in 1833] was the state of opinion in the South? Washington had emancipated his slaves. Jefferson had bitterly denounced the system, and had done all he could to destroy it … The inevitable effect in the South was, that she believed slavery to be an evil – weakness – disgraceful – nay, a sin. She shrank from the discussion of it … and in fear and trembling she awaited a doom that she deemed inevitable.

But a few bold spirits took the question up; they compelled the South to investigate it anew and thoroughly, and what is the result? Why, it would be difficult now to find a southern man who feels the system to be the slightest burthen on his conscience; who does not, in fact, regard it as an equal advantage to the master and the slave, elevating both; as wealth, strength and power; … and who is not now prepared to maintain it at every hazard.³

Refusing the truth, sincere Christian people embraced the lie that their Southern culture and the church entwined with it were virtue incarnate, and that anyone who challenged the South on any point opposed God himself.

“The pulpits of the South offered the ‘dark suggestion that the God of the Yankees was not God at all but the Antichrist loosed at last from the pit.’”⁴

Church-state alliance

By 1860, white Southern Christians, especially pastors, were among the loudest voices calling the Southern states to secede. Why? Fifteen years earlier, the church had done it first and, Southerners thought, with great success. The Methodists and the Baptists had led the way.

In December 1860, Southern states began withdrawing from the Union. April 12, 1861, Southerners fired on Union troops stationed at Ft. Sumter, South Carolina, starting Civil War. One month later, on May 13, the Southern Baptist Convention meeting at Savannah, Georgia, passed a report and resolutions declaring the denomination’s alliance with the newly formed Confederacy. Four days later, the Congress of the Confederate States, meeting in Montgomery, Alabama, received the report and wrote it into their minutes.

The report starts with a sentence reminiscent of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold this truth to be self-evident.” But, again, what’s evident is profound self-deception. At length, the SBC accused the Union of oppression, abuse and a “lawless reign of terror” aimed at the South. It asserted, in essence: “We’ve been deprived of our rights! We had to make the break! [Sound familiar?] But [unlike the Christian denominations we split off from] the US just will not let us go!”

The report studiously avoids mentioning the word “slavery.” And yet, that was the “right” Southern Baptists saw themselves losing. They wanted free rein to maintain an oppressive and abusive system that denied other peoples any rights. They wanted to continue their reign of terror over the enslaved and to continue to stamp it, “Approved by God.”

In 1861, the SBC as a denomination “distinctly, decidedly, emphatically” pledged allegiance to a government that its members thought would protect them and their privileged way of life.⁵

In 1863, SBC delegates further vowed: “We have no thought of ever yielding.”⁶

One more question

Isaiah 41:22 says, “Tell us about past events, so that we can reflect on them and understand their consequences” (CJB).

So one more question:

What consequences did this profound self-deception of the past produce?

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The history portions of this post are adapted from We Confess! The Civil War, the South, and the Church, chapters 4 and 6. See We Confess for more details and other primary sources.

Image by Jerry Kiesewetter at stocksnap.io.

See also

• The Civil War, the South and the church
• The great righteousness-justice divide
• This “good Christian girl” is a woman now
• Tell us about past events
• How do I tell you?

Footnotes

1. Jesse C. Fletcher, The Southern Baptist Convention: A Sesquicentennial History (Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1994), 10. ↩︎
2. Southern Baptist Convention Annual, 1845, 19. Available at sbhla.org/sbc_annuals/index.asp. ↩︎
3. James Henry Hammond, Selections from the Letters and Speeches of the Hon. James H. Hammond, of South Carolina (New York: John F. Trow & Co., 1866), 344-345. ↩︎
4. John Lee Eighmy, Churches in Cultural Captivity: A History of the Social Attitudes of Southern Baptists (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1972), 21, quoting W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Knopf, 1941), 80. ↩︎
5. Journal of the Congress of the Confederate States, May 17, 1861. ↩︎
6. “Resolution on Peace,” SBC Annual Meeting in Augusta, GA, May 1863. ↩︎