Tell us about past events, so that we can reflect on them
and understand their consequences.
– Isaiah 41:22 CJB

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It was like a rubber band being pulled tighter and tighter. With me inside.

For seven years, I served as state women’s leader in an SBC entity. For another year, I served as onsite coordinator for a LifeWay-sponsored Living Proof Live event.¹

During those eight years, I worked with many women who wanted to serve God. They felt the effects of the restrictions placed on them and the friction between them. Together, we prayed to inhale and exhale the breath of God. We set as our goal “to know him, to grow in him and to echo his heart for the world.”

It seemed for a time that the system might allow it, that the structure might be flexible enough to move with the One we all said we served.

But then it became painfully obvious: The structure would only stretch so far. And, ever, it would resist the stretching. Increasingly, it would become more taut, more punishing, more fixed on keeping us all in line. Ultimately, violently, it would snap back to its original shape.

When the rubber band snapped, it ejected me from the life I had known – and catapulted me to a new place. At last, I could breathe again. I could sing again. I could go forward with God again. I felt hope and joy. At the same time, I felt beaten to a pulp.

Having dared to look behind the façade, I thought I had seen the whole picture. God knew: I had only begun to see.

What was that?

In the denomination I had thought good, in the lives of leaders I had believed godly, I had seen evil. Not just human sinfulness. Evil.

Unable to fathom it, I asked, “Lord, what was that?” He challenged me to research the history of the SBC, especially its founding and its first 50 years.

It was like pulling a thread that just kept unraveling.

I spent months reading everything I could get my hands on, then spent months grieving, processing, dealing with and praying over what I had seen, before gathering my courage to read more, to grieve more and, ultimately, to write.

I quickly learned: The Southern Baptist Convention was created to defend abuse and enable abusers.

By 1845, the national Baptist mission boards had decided not to send as missionaries slave owners who would not release their slaves. Furious, Baptists in the South seceded from the union with their Northern brethren and formed their own denomination – 16 years before the Southern states followed suit.²

But what the founders said is that they had to separate from Baptists of the North, for the sake of the victims of the abuse they insisted was not abuse. They cried, “We can never be a party to any arrangement” which would “drive us from our beloved colored people” and “the much-wronged Aborigines of the country … the four millions of half stifled Red Men, our neighbors.³

A system created to protect and deny abuse is itself abusive.

An abusive system that seeks to anchor itself to God and to promote abuse as godly is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It can fool a lot of people. It can decimate a lot of people. And it totally misrepresents the character of the God who gave himself for all people.

By the mid-point of the Civil War, the SBC had tied itself in perpetuity to the Confederacy and the mindset that had spawned it.⁴

Then, as now, Southern Baptists were not the only people to embrace this mindset. Far from it. But the SBC was formed to that end, officially pledged itself to that end and, despite all the posturing and image control in recent years, is still tied to that end.

Behind the façade, the Southern Baptist Convention embodies a mindset that we can trace, in the US, from the settling of the South to today.⁵

The mindset that spawned the Confederacy

The cotton gin changed everything. After its invention in 1793, white settlers poured into the Deep South, eager for the prosperity promised by “white gold.”

The Second Great Awakening deeply influenced the region too. For the first 30 years of the 1800s, the white-led church mushroomed across the South, and the Holy Spirit did his convicting work in believers’ hearts regarding the great injustices in the land. Letters, journals and deathbed confessions record as much.⁶

Yet, ultimately, the church chose to back, rather than buck, cultural norms, and the Christianity of the region took a dark turn.

For the Southern economy had tied itself to cotton, and cotton alone. That meant: Strip the forests, plant the same crop until the land was used up, move farther into the wilderness, repeat. All of which required much land, intensive labor and manageable wives.⁷

Southerners reasoned: We have to own slaves. We have to get the Indians off the land. We have to keep “our women” in their place.

At first, the awakened church pushed back against such injustices, especially slavery.

Then, the church began calling slavery “a necessary evil.”

And then, in the 1830s, the church widely adopted the stance first championed by pastor and slaveholder Richard Furman, a man Baptist historians have called “the spiritual father” of the SBC.⁸

Though they often couched it in less candid words, the church decided: Oppressing whole groups of people is not evil. No, it is God’s will, God’s plan, that white people, and especially white men, rule everyone else – in a Christlike manner, of course, and for Jesus’ sake.⁹

Church leaders declared this the only scriptural view. They labeled every other view – even and especially those based in the Word – as unbiblical and anti-Christ.

The more the Holy Spirit, and Scripture, insisted otherwise, the more the people shut their ears and eyes. When a few courageous voices cried out to warn, the white South labeled their words incendiary and enforced the Silencing that forbade dissent.

Ultimately, good church members across the South felt no guilt over slavery and other injustices they committed and approved. They felt no compassion for the people they abused and no remorse for abusing them.

They saw no irony in declaring, “We are Good Christians, maybe even The Only Real Christians.”

They saw nothing wrong with trying to make both Jesus and cotton King. In their minds, they were not trying to serve two masters; they were worshiping Christ alone.

They fell into a pattern: Whatever promised them power and privilege, they would strongly associate with their identity as Christians. They would see it as essential for doing God’s will. In their hearts they commingled loyalty to what they associated with Christ and loyalty to Christ.¹⁰

In time, what they associated with Christ would include the “peculiar institution” of slavery, the Confederacy, the Lost Cause, Freemasonry and the SBC.

The more my ancestors served these masters, the more they insisted they were the only ones truly serving Christ.

Isn’t that all in the past?

How I wish the trauma of war had awakened them! How I wish they had humbled themselves, confessed and turned from a mindset that has resulted in untold dehumanization, exploitation, violence, sexual abuse, ripping apart of families and carnage.

Instead, pastors described the defeated Confederacy as another Christ.

Whoa. Wait. Make sure you get that.

For decades, white pastors across the South described the Confederacy as another Christ – whose soldiers had fought evil, suffered innocently and died an atoning death. As a result, they said, a baptism of blood had purified all of the (white) South.¹¹

And thus, a church culture with a divided heart sparked a new cry in the land – a blatantly blasphemous cry: The South will rise again!

50 years later

This mindset passed down to the next generation. By the turn of the century, Jim Crow laws and new, more insidious, forms of oppression and slavery had been implemented to keep people “in their place.” Christians were still openly declaring:

The white people of the South mean to rule,
and they will rule.
– Alabama Baptist, Nov. 28, 1899

Fifty years after the Civil War, the same attitude flared up in other places across the US, rebirthing the Ku Klux Klan and reinvigorating racial and gender injustices often done in the name of God.

100 years later

A century after the Civil War, the Civil Rights movement and a new women’s movement exposed and confronted many wrongs. Many white Christians counted these movements evil and vehemently opposed them.

Yet eventually, the clashes of the 1960s resulted in such major changes that, by the time I was researching this history, white people who heard about my project would ask, brusquely, “Haven’t we dealt with all that? Isn’t that all in the past?”

As soon as the questions left their lips, they would change the subject. They weren’t looking for an answer. They were warning me not to go there, not even to bring the matter up.¹²

150 years later

From April 2011 to April 2015, people in the South and beyond celebrated the 150th anniversary of the Civil War.¹³

In June 2015, Donald Trump announced his candidacy for President. In the months that followed, white Evangelical leaders became his biggest fans. And across the US, the mindset that spawned the Confederacy erupted again, as if from nowhere.

But that mindset had not died and risen again. It had lurked, festered and spread, in large part, in the hearts of people like me, people who have believed themselves to be Good Christians serving Christ alone.

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For a much more detailed look at this topic, see Deborah’s book, We Confess! The Civil War, the South, and the Church (e-book updated 2020).

Posts related to We Confess

• Illusionists! The abusers we have not seen
• Tell us about past events
• How do I tell you?
• This “good Christian girl” is a woman now
• Four questions – about Trump, Evangelicals, self-deception and the Civil War
• The great righteousness-justice divide

Series: Will You Follow Me?

My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me. – Jesus, in John 10:27

Part 1: Behind the façade in the SBC – On the one hand, Christian leaders pummeled and guilted me to choose a denominational organization above all else. On the other hand, the quiet voice I had spent 40 years learning to know spoke by the Spirit and the Word.

Part 2: The Civil War, the South and the church – After abuse began to open my eyes to evils in my church culture, God took me on a pilgrimage into the past, to show me what is happening now.

Part 3: Going with God – Choosing to go with God where my church culture had forbidden, I had no clue how much seeing, how much grieving, how much pain lay ahead. And how very much love and life.

Footnotes

1. I describe these years in the post, Behind the façade in the SBC. ↩︎
2. Southern Methodists created a separate denomination in 1844. ↩︎
3. Southern Baptist Convention Annual, 1845, 19. ↩︎
4. See: SBC resolutions adopted May 13, 1861, and posted in the Journal of the Congress of the Confederate States, May 17. “Resolution on Peace,” SBC Annual Meeting in Augusta, GA, 1863; available at sbc.net/resolutions/801/resolution-on-peace. For more details on the events that led up to these resolutions, see the post, Four questions – about Trump, Evangelicals, self-deception and the Civil War. ↩︎
5. The mindset that spawned the Confederacy is an explicit offshoot of an implicit belief rooted in the Doctrine of Discovery. The implicit belief has affected all of the US from its founding. See and hear Mark Charles’ penetrating exposé in his post and TEDx talk, We the People. ↩︎
6. See chapter 4, “The Convenient Sin,” in The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders, by James Oakes. ↩︎
7. The conditions the slave culture created for white women looked nothing like the plantation myth. See chapter 3, “The Slaveholders’ Pilgrimage,” in The Ruling Race, especially pages 76-91. ↩︎
8. This description seems to have disappeared from the internet in recent years. Yet in 1994, Jesse C. Fletcher said in The Southern Baptist Convention: A Sesquicentennial History, “Richard Furman would become the spiritual father of the Southern Baptist Convention” (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, pp. 32-33). In 2006, James T. Draper Jr. and John Perry quoted Fletcher’s phrase in their book, LifeWay Legacy: A Personal History of LifeWay Christian Resources and the Sunday School Board of the Southern Baptist Convention (p. 25). ↩︎
9. See Richard Furman’s “Exposition of the Views of the Baptists Relative to the Colored Population of the United States,” beginning paragraph 7. For a more detailed exploration of Furman’s life and views, see chapters 2, 3 and 4 of We Confess! The Civil War, the South, and the Church. ↩︎
10. I tell how I discovered this in my own life, in the post, Behind the façade in the SBC. ↩︎
11. See Baptized in Blood, by Charles Reagan Wilson, especially pages 44-45, 58, 73-77. ↩︎
12. “Meanwhile, racial injustice that many whites see as ‘all in the past’ has never gone away. Rather, it has remained hidden in plain sight, a systemic issue across the entire US, that has never stopped producing violence and loss of life.” – We Confess, p. 9. For specifics, see this 17-minute “Holy Post” video by VeggieTales guy, Phil Vischer. ↩︎
13. The term used again and again in describing memorial events was “celebration.” See chapter 1, We Confess. ↩︎