by Chris Staron | Jan 21, 2025 | Episodes
Candy magnate Robert Welch founded the John Birch Society
Robert Welch was a candy magnate who invented the Sugar Daddy and sold favorites like Junior Mints and Milk Duds. He was also very anti-communist. His dubious research led him to found the John Birch Society, a group whose mission was to spread conspiracy theories worldwide. They had major support from wealthy men like Fred Koch, father of the Koch brothers (who financed opposition to Obamacare and climate change legislation).
The John Birch Society spread conspiracy theories in the United States
Some of their most notable campaigns were those against Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Earl Warren and President Dwight Eisenhower. They claimed that these men were communist sympathizers working behind the scenes to put the communist agenda. Bogus stuff, but they gained thousands of followers across the country. They also fought the income tax, said that black people would not have wanted equality if the communists hadn’t taught them to, and argued that the US is a republic and not a democratic republic.
Some famous leaders of the Religious Right had ties to the John Birch Society
Phyllis Schlafly, RJ Rushdoony, Tim LaHaye, and many others had ties to the birchers. This group had a huge influence on the Religious Right! Not to mention shifting the GOP to accept extremists.
Our special guest for this episode is Dr. Matthew Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University. His book is Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right.
Sources:
- Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right by Matthew Dallek
- Before the Storm by Rick Perlstein
- Divided We Stand by Marjorie Spruill
- Helpful Guardian article about the Koch brothers and Americans for Prosperity
- Christian Reconstruction: RJ Rushdoony and American Religious Conservatism by Michael McVicar
- NY Times article about J. Howard Pew’s connections to Robert Welch
- Dark Money by Jane Mayer
Discussion Questions
- What is the John Birch Society?
- Was communism a threat to the country in the mid-1900s?
- What would have been the proper way to respond to communism?
- What is the impact of conspiracy theories on American Christianity?
- There are real conspiracies in the US, like those by Donald Trump and his allies to steal the 2020 election. But a lot of Christians don’t believe these real conspiracies. How has an abundance of false conspiracies numbed our ability to recognize reality?
- Are you surprised Tim LaHaye, Phyllis Schlafly, and RJ Rushdoony were affiliated with the JBS?
- How can believers maintain their faith even when evangelical culture has been corrupted?
TRANSCRIPT – NOTE: this transcript was generated by AI and may not be 100% accurate.
Chris Staron: [00:00:00] This episode is part of a long series exploring how some evangelicals tied themselves to the Republican Party in the 1970s and 80s. It can stand on its own, but when you’re done, go back and start at the beginning of Season 6, because all of this ties together. This is the John Birch Society.
Darby, Montana is located on the western border of the state, not far from Idaho. The downtown looks like a mixture of Old West and tourist attraction. And in the 1960s, they found themselves with a stack of old Bibles in the school district. They were going to get new ones, but had a question. What is the proper way to dispose of the good book?
A local minister, maybe thinking about how we decommission old flags in this country, maybe? suggested burning them. Again, this was the 1960s, a time of upheaval in the United States. Civil rights marches and protests, Vietnam, drills where school kids ducked under desks in [00:01:00] anticipation of atomic weapons.
The idea of Bibles burning for any reason, to some, was offensive. Perhaps they didn’t hear the part about them being old and needing to be replaced. They just heard Bible burning and got angry.
What followed was a battle that lasted for years, led by the John Birch Society. The John Birch Society is a group of radicals on the far right. They oppose communism, or what they think is communism, and demand pro American messages in public schools. According to Senator Mike Mansfield’s office at the time, these conspiracy theorists were determined to take over school boards across the country.
They wanted approval of textbooks. And in Darby, the school board denied their requests. And then came the thing with the Bibles. Radicals trashed the home of [00:02:00] the superintendent, stalked him, called with threats and then called again. They harassed him until he resigned. Within just a few years, Darby School District lost 16 of its 23 teachers.
using what one historian called scorched earth tactics. Birchers could be anywhere in the 1960s, and their influence reached some of the biggest names in what became the religious right. They picked up existing fears about communism and amplified them. They were a minority, That made a lot of noise and along the way, regrettably influenced modern evangelicalism.
They’re burning anger going far beyond the boundaries of the Bible. You are listening to the show that uses journalistic tools to look inside the Christian Church. We press pause on the culture wars in order to explore how we got here and how we can do better. I’m Chris Sta and this is Truce.[00:03:00]
This season, we’re bouncing around a lot in time. Because, really, there’s no one way to talk about how some evangelicals tied themselves to the GOP and do it in a straight line. Previously, we covered the roles that schools and women played. We also investigated some of the guys who provided the theological backbone for ties to the GOP.
And now, we’re dipping into a few ideas that will help us grasp what’s coming. In the last episode, we discussed how libertarianism shaped economic ideas of the religious right. In the next two episodes, we’ll reference this one. Today, a minor but powerful influence on the ways that evangelicals with large followings Sure, my name is Matt
Matthew Dallek: Dalek, and I’m a professor of political management at George Washington University and a [00:04:00] political historian.
Chris Staron: His book is Birchers, How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right. He’s also written on Reagan’s first political campaign and efforts to hold down the home front during World War II. Let’s turn back the clock a little to see how this kind of stuff is kind of in the American DNA.
Matthew Dallek: So the country was founded in a revolution to overthrow centralized power in the form of the British king. Americans harbored deep suspicions of a concentration of power in a distant place. I think that that has lent itself. to this hyper-individualistic ethic in the country and this deep suspicion of federal authority, of elites trampling on individual rights
Chris Staron: The late 1700s were also an era of conspiracies in Europe, many of which were harnessed by the rich and powerful To stay in power. You can read [00:05:00] more about that in the book, Phantom Terror by Adam Zamoyski.
Matthew Dallek: A second element though, and this is obviously true in other countries as well, but it, but it’s especially true in the United States because the country has grown so much through immigration.
There, I think has long been, especially among native. white populations, conspiracy theories that target immigrants, that target Catholics, Jews, foreign ideas.
Chris Staron: For example, some Americans were afraid of new Catholic immigrants, that their growing numbers would make them into a voting bloc that would then take orders from the Pope.
Or that the Illuminati was going to seize the government.
Matthew Dallek: And they’re bringing left wing ideas. Socialism, anarchism, right, communism. They’re bringing foreign religions.
Chris Staron: One of the early purposes of public school was to homogenize the country so that ideas like this wouldn’t take hold. [00:06:00] Our unfortunate love of conspiracies was already in place before the John Birch Society.
In fact, this episode may make it sound like the JBS was the only thing going. It wasn’t. It was one of hundreds of fringe groups in the country by the late 1950s. It just happened to be both influential and well known.
Matthew Dallek: Yeah, so Robert Welch was a candy manufacturer. He was actually a highly successful salesman. He would go around the country and hawking junior mints. He was the vice president of the company. So he was an executive and he was very well off. I actually wrote a book at one point about the art of the sale.
Chris Staron: This was in the 1930s and forties.
Matthew Dallek: He became a fairly prominent business leader. through the National Association of Manufacturers, one of the largest, most influential industrial lobbying groups [00:07:00] in the United States in the mid 20th century.
Chris Staron: You may remember them from Season 3. They advocated for free market capitalism and actively marketed economic ideas to pastors, a perfect breeding ground for what Welch was about to launch.
Its members were rich industrialists anxious about the New Deal and protections for labor. So some of them tried to market God and country as a way to establish order in the United States. Like, actually market it. In publications, ads, campaigns, sponsoring certain candidates. And one of those wealthy industrialists was Robert Welch.
Matthew Dallek: He, in the 1940s and 50s, became something of a proselytizer on the side. Meaning that, especially by the late 40s and early 50s, he would use his position of authority, of, of wealth, and, and just by dint of his authority as a leading businessman, to, uh, write articles and give speeches and, and [00:08:00] publish books discussing the threat that he saw of a communist takeover of the United States.
Chris Staron: Okay, so, cards on the table, there was an actual communist threat in the United States at the time. The Soviets had stolen plans for the nuclear bomb, and the government did turn up legitimate communist spies. And of course, we were spying on them, too. China and Russia saw tens of millions of deaths of their own people through starvations, gulags, labor camps, and straight up disappearances.
Communism was a threat, as were spies, but there are right ways to combat stuff like this, and there are lots and lots of wrong ways. Which do you think Welch chose?
Matthew Dallek: He was a businessman turned hardline anti communist who, in the 1950s in particular, he wrote a series of books, including a book about how the U.
S. was basically selling out its [00:09:00] foreign policy to the communists. As part of his anti communist fervor, he promulgated a number of conspiracy theories. about the alleged communist threat, the communist conspiracy as he saw it within the United States that had explained in his view why the country was losing the struggle against communist evil.
Chris Staron: He was inspired by guys like Joseph McCarthy, the senator who publicly and wrongfully accused people in the government and military of being spies. Look,
Matthew Dallek: he was not operating alone, but also had allied himself with people like, uh, William Noland, who was a hardline anti communist senator, Republican senator from California.
Robert Taft, a conservative, uh, Republican senator. Ohio Senator was one of Robert Welch’s heroes.
Chris Staron: We’ll talk about Robert Taft soon. He was Mr. Conservative in the 1940s and [00:10:00] super duper anti communist. In that era, the government was going through labor pains. Pains with labor. Unions. In the last months of 1946 alone, There were 4, 985 strikes in the United States, which some of these guys saw as proof that socialism had arrived.
To be clear, it hadn’t. But that didn’t stop them from equating labor unrest Rather than, I don’t know, cleaning up their factories, providing a living wage, or improving safety, the industrialists decided to fight back. One way Welch did this was by serving on the board of the Foundation for Economic Education, a libertarian group, that disseminated scary literature to factory workers on things like taxes and the French Revolution.
They also gave free conservative textbooks to poor schools. Walsh became a popular speaker. He was billed as someone who understood the [00:11:00] wicked ways of communism, and his target audience was well connected businessmen, men of influence who could then change their communities. This led to the founding of the John Birch Society, leading to the question, who was John Birch?
Matthew Dallek: Bill Nolan, the senator from California, who was an ally of Welch, helped Welch get access to files about John Birch. And Birch was an evangelist from Georgia, turned army intelligence officer, who served in China in World War II.
Chris Staron: Birch was murdered by Mao’s Communist army 10 days after the war.
Matthew Dallek: In these files, Welch believed that he had discovered not only that Birch was the first victim of World War iii, of, of communist plot to to take over the world, but he also, his murder had been covered up.
by communists and their sympathizers within the American government. [00:12:00]
Chris Staron: Which played right into the narrative he and McCarthy had already constructed, that the Reds had invaded the American bureaucracy.
Matthew Dallek: But conspiracy theories often take a shard, right, of reality, and they build that into something that’s almost unrecognized.
There’s the illusion that it is, at least in Welch’s telling, that it is based on his extensive research. But the conspiracy theory about the John Birch coverup or even Welch’s later charge that Dwight Eisenhower was a dedicated agent of the communist conspiracy, which really became quite infamous in, in the early sixties, that allegation.
And you know, some of these books are heavily footnoted, but not based on, on real sources, right? Like not based on Or what Welch claims that they, the sources say, don’t really say that. And so no, there was no government cover up, intentional cover up of John Birch’s death.
Chris Staron: [00:13:00] It’s like how people today say they’re going to do their own research on a topic and then read suspicious websites instead of looking for original documents or credible sources.
His research was the 1950s version of that. So there were people who believed that Eisenhower was a communist puppet. Even though, that made no sense. There was an even kookier belief about Senator Taft.
Matthew Dallek: That his death was caused by a radium tube implanted in the upholstery of his senate seat that caused the cancer that had killed him.
Chris Staron: Which is nutty, and based on nothing. And what was Welch’s source?
Matthew Dallek: As has been so widely rumored.
Chris Staron: As has been so widely rumored. He flat out admitted that it was based on rumor, not documented proof. But that really didn’t matter to his fans, who were already hooked. Of course there are genuine conspiracies.
There were. Like [00:14:00] communist spies stealing nuclear secrets from Los Alamos. But this was not one of them. Welch portrayed Birch as a martyr to the cause. Let’s be clear. He was a soldier at the time, not a civilian.
Matthew Dallek: Many movements, especially extreme movements, need martyrs. They need their narratives, and within those narratives, there are often heroes placed at the center of them, many of whom have sacrificed, given the ultimate sacrifice for the cause.
And Welch really appropriated and elevated this person who, of course, was not alive to protect his identity or his legacy.
Chris Staron: Welch spread the word through a biography of Birch and named his organization after him. Speaking of the organization, It was time to found it. Welch sent out letters, cryptic letters.
Get on a train, but not all together. Pretend you’re someone else, just some [00:15:00] normal businessman on a sales trip. Maybe in December 1958, 11 people, all white, almost all industrial leaders, showed up to a clandestine meeting.
Matthew Dallek: To the home of Marguerite Dice, who was a A member of, she was a minute woman.
Chris Staron: Another anti communist organization. She was already in the far right
Matthew Dallek: world. And Welch sent a letter to these folks saying, I need you for two days in Indianapolis to attend a meeting, but I can’t tell you the subject of it. I want you to stay. At different places. I don’t want you to all congregate at the same hotel.
And if anyone asks, just say you’re in Indianapolis on business.
Chris Staron: And they came. For two days, Welch laid out his plans for the John Birch Society, addressing rumors of a worldwide communist conspiracy. His goal was to take the fight to the communists in the United States.
Matthew Dallek: It would serve as [00:16:00] a kind of shock force.
force or shock troops to go after the alleged conspiracy, whether that was in the public libraries or the local school system or federal and state and local officials, that this movement would be a way to circumvent the parties, the political parties, to try to reach the public directly.
Chris Staron: They were afraid of mainstream media and institutions.
Like any of these groups, They needed to create an echo chamber. Walsh had a lot of ideas that went far beyond the fear of communism. For one, he didn’t like democracy, which he saw as leading to mob rule. The JBS actually handed out stickers claiming,
JBS: This is a republic, not a democracy. Let’s keep it that way.
Chris Staron: shard of truth there, right? Because the U. S. is a republic. We have people who represent us. But it’s a shard of truth that [00:17:00] goes haywire. Our elected officials don’t do everything. We directly vote on stuff like tax levies and whether or not to expand the rec center. Therefore, this is a democracy. So, which is it?
Is the United States a democracy or a republic? As it turns out, the It’s both. The U. S. is a democratic republic, but the Birchers decided to focus on only half of that equation, taking a shard of truth and running with it. See how they did that? This is something we’ll soon encounter with William F.
Buckley Jr., both a distrust of elites in government and the desire to put elites in power to keep the everyday rabble from influencing the country. Okay, so settle in, here’s just a few of the other things that Robert Welch taught. He denounced the civil rights movement and sit ins as a communist conspiracy, instead of, you know, people fighting for their rights.
He led the [00:18:00] charge in anti fluoride campaigns, didn’t like sex education in schools, and advised his members to scour textbooks, believed pro American ideas should be taught in classrooms, He slammed the New Deal and Roosevelt, said that Black people in the South wouldn’t have wanted civil rights if commies hadn’t convinced them of it.
Birchers tried to save the House Un American Activities Committee after it was rife with scandal. He sought to abolish the income tax, and ban products made in communist countries. By now, a lot of that probably sounds familiar to you. You could say that the John Birch Society was libertarian, but as you know by now, Libertarianism is a giant umbrella.
Matthew Dallek: They were libertarian in the sense that they believed in a radical devolution of federal power, right? They, they wanted to really roll back the federal government to a pre New Deal, even frankly pre progressive era [00:19:00] state condition.
Chris Staron: Like so many people we’ve talked about already, to Robert Welch, the New Deal was a no no.
Birchers didn’t like that the federal government was getting bigger and bigger and more involved in the lives of everyday people. That included how federal courts of the time shaped the country. One of their major campaigns called for the impeachment of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
Matthew Dallek: The question is, what did they not have against, uh, Earl Warren and the Warren Corps? To the Birchers, Earl Warren was the, one of the architects of the communist takeover of the United States through a series of liberal decisions, starting most famously, of course, with Bush. Brown versus Board of Education, ordering the desegregation of the schools, but extending to establishing rights for criminal defendants, banning, uh, prayer in public schools.
They were [00:20:00] affronts to local individual control. And this actually became, iconic social campaigns or social movements. of the early 60s. I mean, people remember billboards saying impeach Earl Warren. To Robert Welch and to many birchers, that, that campaign had a kind of shock value that, you know, as Welch once put it, you know, we may not win this battle, but by the time we’re finished, the enemy will know we have been there.
Chris Staron: They used harsh tactics against people they didn’t like, including Justice Warren. That’s why I included the story of Darby, Montana at the top of the show, where they drove most of the teachers and the superintendent out of the district. This wasn’t about just getting their voices heard. They could be nasty.
Matthew Dallek: I opened the book with the story of Patricia Hitt, who was a Richard Nixon loyalist, a California Republican, who was running for a seat on a Republican committee in Southern [00:21:00] California. And the Birchers, who hated Nixon, they also did not like Patricia Hitt. And they targeted her by Calling her at home at all hours of the day, calling her a communist, and they called a number of Republicans, of voters in the district, denouncing her as a pinko, using all kinds of epithets,
Chris Staron: harassing people on the phone.
Applying economic pressure. They showed up at all sorts of big events, like the National Women’s Conference of 1977.
Matthew Dallek: Sometimes the Birchers would picket. Earl Warren would, let’s say, give a speech at a commencement speech. And the Birchers would be out front, you know, basically accusing Earl Warren, the Chief Justice, who had been basically a moderate Republican from California.
accusing him of being a communist. They threw eggs at integrated school buses in Boston. At times they ran phone trees where they would basically call people in their homes, [00:22:00] obviously, with a recorded message about the communist conspiracy.
Chris Staron: Since they were secretive, your friends, co workers, and relatives could be members.
And you wouldn’t know. The Burgers had several key texts, many of them deriving from Welch’s writings and speeches. Like his two day talk that he gave over and over and over. He had
Matthew Dallek: written a long letter to a number of his friends, ultimately called the Politician, in which he charged that Dwight Eisenhower was a dedicated agent of the communist conspiracy.
Chris Staron: And FYI, he wasn’t. A second resource came from Welch’s two-day recruiting monologue. It was published as The Blue Book. The guys at the first meeting took tools like these and became apostles of Robert Welch.
Matthew Dallek: These 12 men, including Robert Welch, Went back to their communities, people like Bill Grady from Wisconsin or Fred Koch, who is the father of [00:23:00] the Koch brothers.
Chris Staron: Two of the main donors to the Tea Party in the far right in the last few years. They’re Rothbardian libertarians who put a lot of money into fighting unions. Koch was at that first meeting and became an evangelist for the Birch Society.
Matthew Dallek: They started to put their Their money, and their organizational muscle, and their contacts, their extensive network behind the John Birch Society.
Chris Staron: Spreading these half-truths and all-out lies. They did it through meetings, which were limited to 20 people to maintain secrecy. At first, they targeted people like them. Rich, white industrialists, mostly Christian, and people with high standing in their communities. Mayors, Governors, Doctors, Lawyers Welch didn’t want dissidents, just people who agreed with him.
One catalyzing event happened in 1959, when President Eisenhower hosted Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. It was [00:24:00] billed as an attempt to bring peace during the Cold War, but conservatives viewed the state visit as proof that Ike was soft on communism. They didn’t want peace with Russia, So the Birch Society did what they often did, they started a front group to protest.
It was called the Committee Against Summit Entanglements, or CASE. The Daughters of the American Revolution offered their support, and a petition was circulated to stop this event. Signed by people Jr., founder of National Review. Future GOP presidential nominee Barry Goldwater, libertarian Ludwig von Mises, Pierre DuPont from, you know, DuPont, and of course, Fred Koch.
By now, the Birchers were a known quantity. When Eisenhower discovered that one of his appointees was a Bircher, he had him fired. That’s how renowned this movement was. The sitting president ousted a staffer just for being a member.
Matthew Dallek: And one of the things that [00:25:00] appealed to them is that, as one member wrote, the John Birch Society gives you a chance to fight the communists everywhere that they appear.
I mean, I’m paraphrasing. What I think they meant is that they got to fight the communists at the local level. They got to take the fight to the enemy within their community. And it was a group. As they saw that it was not just about talk and rhetoric, but about action.
Chris Staron: Action, like gaining small offices on school boards and business committees.
They put pressure on people they didn’t like or found suspicious. They placed ads in newspapers, handed out buttons, passed out information at events. Then there were the sneaky tactics. For example, take where I live, Wyoming. Birchers produced a variety of broadcasts that could be syndicated. And in the big cities, they had lots of competition.
But in rural places like Wyoming, they could capture their audience by monopolizing the only radio or TV station in [00:26:00] the region, radicalizing people who had few media options. So people like the pro Birch Reverend Carl McIntyre paid to saturate these rural markets. He gave 1, 000 to the effort. Which probably says a lot about why Wyoming remains so far to the right.
The John Birch Society had the membership. They had money and influence. Soon, they turned their attention to the big show, the presidency. Throwing their weight behind the nomination of one of the most influential people who didn’t become president, but who demonstrated that appealing to the extremes could win the nomination.
The John Birch Society was chasing the highest office in the land. I’ll continue the story after these messages. Why not leave a comment on your favorite podcasting app? It really helps people find the show. Okay, here come the ads.
Welcome back. So far, we’ve [00:27:00] mostly talked about the contributions of men, but they weren’t the only ones involved.
Matthew Dallek: The movement was founded by and run by, in headquarters in Belmont, Massachusetts, almost all by men.
Chris Staron: All the sectional leaders, many of the big donors, men, men, men.
Matthew Dallek: But the women, especially by I think the early 60s, were in many respects the most powerful force, especially on the ground.
Many were upper class and white. As they said, right, they had the time. They, uh, were often well off enough. So, right, they weren’t necessarily working.
Chris Staron: It gave them more agency. Both waves of feminism led women to write letters, petition, protest, and engage in civil society.
Matthew Dallek: Women who viewed themselves as educators, because again, the Birch Society had pitched itself as an education movement above all.
Chris Staron: So the women educated people. Distributing flyers, leading [00:28:00] discussions, and more. By doing this they could literally play an active role in shaping society. See themselves as part of a movement. They gained agency. While also Fighting their own equality.
Matthew Dallek: The idea that we’re policing morals in the community, I think that also appealed to a number of women as well.
Chris Staron: Within the JBS, women worked as secretaries. No surprise there. But many conservative bookstores that doubled as Berkshire distribution sites were operated, if not owned, by women. Sometimes several stores in one city. Los Angeles alone had 36.
Matthew Dallek: One historian likened them to coffee houses for the left.
Chris Staron: Where women led classes and connected people, which made them a powerful political tool.
Men and women alike wanted to change the country, make it in their image. What better way to do that than through politics? There was a major problem, though. Neither of the [00:29:00] political parties really fit the John Birch Society.
Matthew Dallek: But because Robert Welch had run for lieutenant governor as a Republican, he had attended the Republican convention in 1952, was a big supporter of Ohio Senator Robert Taft.
When Eisenhower won the nomination, he called it the dirtiest deal in American political history. And other founders as well. People like Bill Grady from Wisconsin had actually been both a supporter of Joe McCarthy, but also of Dwight Eisenhower.
Chris Staron: But Eisenhower and Earl Warren were Republicans. And according to the Birchers, they were commies.
Could they really belong to the party of Earl Warren? They would try. So they backed a number of Republican candidates in the 1962 midterms.
Matthew Dallek: And then in 1964, they flocked behind Barry Goldwater.
Chris Staron: Barry Goldwater. Someone we’ll cover soon in more depth. He’s credited by historians as pushing Republicans further to the [00:30:00] right and expanding the party to include extremists.
Like, you know, birchers. Even though he lost by the greatest margin of any U. S. presidential election. Lock that away for the future. Most of their successes were in lower offices. Though they sometimes gained prominent positions. Vice President Dan Quayle’s parents were Birchers. But as far as the far right was concerned, neither Bush nor Reagan met their standards.
They certainly did not like Nixon, despite his hardline anti communist stances. The Birchers were suspicious of Republican leaders. They didn’t really have another option.
Matthew Dallek: By 1968, though, they were very strongly behind George Wallace. The segregationist governor of Alabama.
Chris Staron: The third party candidate who said, segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.
And thankfully, Wallace lost. So the Birchers failed to win the big office, [00:31:00] but they did manage to push the GOP. Goldwater, whose first Senate campaign was funded, in part, by Welch, famously demonstrated to Nixon that Southern racists were a demographic that could be targeted by Republicans, nudging him in the direction of his long Southern strategy that I talked about earlier this season.
While they never made it to the big chair, Birchers made waves in other places. Notably, in Christian circles, including some of the names we’ve already mentioned this season. Take a deep breath because some of this might give you a headache. One Bircher sympathizer was R. J. Rush Dooney, the father of modern homeschooling and architect of Christian reconstruction.
His base of operations for a time was in Southern California, where some of his financiers read books by the John Birch Society. This is from a letter Rush Dooney wrote to Robert Welch.
RJ Rushdoony: Let me express my great respect for your work [00:32:00] and for you personally. I regard you as the clearest and most courageous public figure of our day.
Chris Staron: Rush Dooney gave money to the society but didn’t sign on as a member, knowing, of course, that a direct affiliation with them might harm his other work. What about Phyllis Schlafly, the Catholic woman behind the Stop B. R. A. battle in 1977? Her book, A Choice, Not an Echo, was a bestseller among birchers, and was instrumental in the nomination of Barry Goldwater.
She was a member of the JBS, but revoked her membership in 1964. Notably, she also canceled her subscription to National Review Magazine when it criticized Robert Welch. Her connection makes sense when you consider how she ran her organizations. They had a lot in common with the JBS from the way they subverted traditional media to the use of front groups that appeared interested in a single issue, and her [00:33:00] organized grassroots efforts.
Then there is Tim LaHaye, a hugely influential author in evangelical circles, including the wildly popular Left Behind book series. According to Matthew Dalek, LeHay regularly lectured and ran training seminars for the John Birch Society in the 1960s and 70s. He didn’t remain a Bircher, but his later work paralleled Welch’s.
As we’ll hopefully see later this season, LeHay formed the Council for National Policy, whose goal was to fight secular humanism. It’s a shadowy political powerhouse tying religious leaders to big money. One critic described it as
Journalist: A slick, updated, repackaging, birch society philosophy.
Chris Staron: They continue to operate in secret.
One of their members was the late Foster Frese. Now, if you lived in Wyoming, You’d know who I’m talking about. I literally [00:34:00] used to live next door to his investment business, and he funded a classical Christian school in my town. Speaking of deep pockets, there was Joseph Coors, the beer magnate who funded the Heritage Society.
He was pro Birch. And J. Howard Pugh, a wealthy oilman and co founder of the Pugh Charitable Trusts. He was a Presbyterian layman and a major backer of Christianity Today. Which, by the way, feeds ads to this show. His money helped finance Barry Goldwater, Nixon, and Billy Graham. He funded spiritual mobilization, the Foundation for Economic Education, and the Christian Freedom Foundation.
He supported the John Birch Society, though he denied that he was a member. membership. But he was on the editorial advisory board of a Bircher magazine, American Opinion, and was a stockholder in Robert Welch, Inc. So, I’m guessing J. Howard Pugh was okay with Robert Welch. Not only were [00:35:00] some Christians with large followings Birchers or Bircher adjacent, a lot of money that funded evangelicalism in the 20th century came from Birchers.
Okay, so let’s check in. Who here’s still breathing normally? Does it lighten the mood if I tell you that Mad Magazine did a riff on the Birchers? I’ll put up a link for patrons who want to see it for themselves. This brings us to a big question. Why did some religious right leaders dabble in bircherism
Matthew Dallek: They sympathize with a lot of the birch worldview, especially on moral questions, right? The idea that the major institutions in American life were corrupting traditional family values, trampling on the Christian character.
Chris Staron: After all, the Warren Court did end required Bible reading and prayer in the schools.
Matthew Dallek: You remember. Sexual revolution, gender [00:36:00] relations, 60s and 70s, women’s rights, it’s a civil rights struggle, the gay liberation movement. progressive education, right? And this is, I think, a worldview that the Birchers held and that attracted people like Phyllis Schlafly, for example, or Tim LaHaye. They wanted to reimpose or restore what they saw as the lost Christian character of the country.
I don’t know that the Birch Society necessarily defined their trajectory. And then I think the Birch Society also inspired some of their organizing. tactics and their strategies.
Chris Staron: strategies. This is not to say that all evangelicals were or are racists or are against the civil rights movement. There was strong pushback against how fast the world was changing, how big the government was getting, and how involved it was in the lives of everyday people.
And yes, there was a lot of pushback against it. Though they hated the government telling people what to do with their lives, they wanted the government [00:37:00] to tell people what to do with their lives, just in their own way. The John Birch Society saw a deep decline in the 1970s, as it was taken over by people further and further from the mainstream.
It lost some of its influence, but is still going today, spreading propaganda, and we hear echoes of it every time a prominent conservative accuses somebody of being a communist, when they’re probably not. We may never understand the full impact that the JBS had on even juggles in that era, but we do know that Lahaye, Schlafly, Rashtooni, and others shared their negative view of America’s trajectory.
They started powerful organizations of their own that went around traditional forms of media. So they couldn’t get fact checked. Sure, a number of birchers in the 1960s considered themselves Christians. Remember the first episode of the season? When someone calls themselves or a movement Christian, we have to ask ourselves, [00:38:00] what did they mean?
Let’s go back to the beginning of the episode, back to the small town of Darby, Montana. Do Christians run teachers and superintendents out of a school district for replacing old Bibles? Who knows? Would Jesus harass someone over the telephone? Do true followers of Christ terrorize their neighbors? No.
Instead, we should be on the lookout for secret societies that claim to have all the answers. And then, expose them. Finally, Should Christians delight in gossip and rumors? Can we participate in spreading conspiracies as the Birchers did? It’s often done today on social media and around the water cooler and seen as harmless, but it’s not.
Listen, we need to reconcile with the fact that when we spread lies, we are liars. Conspiracy theories are not cute. And they’re not fun. They besmirch the name [00:39:00] and witness of God’s church. And yes, there are actual conspiracies in the world. But can we achieve our outcomes by hitching our wagon to dubious organizations?
To lies. When we partner with extremist groups, we do something far worse than looking silly. Or spreading lies. We tarnish the name of God.
Special thanks to Matthew Dallek. I first heard about his book, Birchers, on NPR’s Fresh Air back when I was driving a school bus. And the book is quite good. Other sources can be found on the website or in your show notes, including Before the Storm by Matthew Dallek. by Rick Perlstein. If you want to keep me working on this program instead of driving a school bus like I used to, consider giving a little money each month to help me out.
One other Christian podcast is exploring the [00:40:00] legacy of the John Birch Society. I mean, really? This is important stuff, and the reason I can cover this kind of thing is because I’m an independent, for profit company. If I were running a non profit, I’d be too scared to call out the shenanigans of wealthy financiers I’d be chasing their money.
I want to run this show with 10 to 20 a month coming from a lot of individual donors, instead of by the grace of a few major backers. This gives me journalistic independence that other ministries don’t have. If you want to be a part of this crazy and original project, visit truespodcast. com slash donate.
There you can also learn about bonus materials, like more of my conversation with Matthew Dalek, including how the John Birch Society. laid the groundwork for the Trump era. That’s trucepodcast. com slash donate. Thanks to everyone who gave me their voices for this story, including Jackie Hart and Bob Stevenson.
As usual, I’m indebted to my brother, Nick, and my small group for helping me process this information. Truce is a [00:41:00] production of Truce Media, LLC. God willing, we’ll talk again soon. I’m Chris Starin, and this is Truce.
by Chris Staron | Nov 19, 2024 | Episodes
Paige Patterson’s plan to make the SBC more fundamentalist
It all started with a meeting over fancy donuts. Paige Patterson and a friend met together to plot the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention. Before that time, the SBC had been more theologically diverse (though, not necessarily racially diverse due to its founding as a group that desired slavery). But if this group of fundamentalists was going to get a whole denomination to turn their way, they’d have to be clever. It would take time.
Use the system against itself
Their scheme involved getting fundies elected into high office who could then turn committees and sub-committees to their side. It’s a story of a minority group gaining control of a large organization, and steering it toward their vision of what it means to be a Christian.
Sources
- The Fundamentalist Takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention – by Rob James, Gary Leazer
- The Evangelicals by Frances Fitzgerald
- Christianity Today article about Paige Patterson’s allegations
- Religion News article about Patterson
- Tennesseean article about Patterson
- Article about early Baptists
- Church History in Plain Language by Bruce Shelley
- Cornell’s article about the separation of church and state
- Frances Shaeffer and the Shaping of Evangelical America by Barry Hankins
- Johnson Archives about SBC
- Johnson Archives SBC Resolutions
- Certified Pastry Aficianatro article about beignets
Discussion Questions
- The episode starts with a discussion of accusations about Paige Patterson. What was your reaction to that story and why?
- Is it possible for a spouse to be a part of the salvation of their husband or wife? Where are the lines?
- When were you baptized? Did you do it as an adult, child, or both? Why?
- What do you think is the “right” way to baptize someone? Why?
- What are your thoughts on inerrancy?
Transcript: (note: may not completely match the final edited version)
This episode is part of a long series exploring how some evangelicals tied themselves to the Republican Party. It can stand on its own, but when you’re done go back and start at the beginning of season 6. In the first few minutes of this show, we’re going to bring up the subject of abuse. It won’t be graphic, but it may not be appropriate for all audiences. You can skip the first 3-4 minutes if you want to get around it. This is The Fundamentalist Takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention.
In 2018, over 2,000 women in the Southern Baptist Convention signed a letter written to the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary The letter included this passage:
LETTER: “The Southern Baptist Convention cannot allow the biblical view of leadership to be misused in such a way that a leader with an unbiblical view of authority, womanhood, and sexuality be allowed to continue in leadership.”
It was written in response to an audio clip from 2000, where, during what appears to be a question and answer segment, Paige Patterson, former president of the SBC, gave advice for women facing abuse. This is where the story gets a bit graphic. He offers an example of advice he gave in a church where he once served.
[get down]
The woman followed his advice. Then, on Sunday she came up to him with two black eyes. Obviously, her husband had beaten her again. She said to Patterson, “I hope you’re happy.”
[did to her]
It’s an ugly story. Paige Patterson seems fixated on the husband’s salvation. What he glosses over is the abuse. What that woman endured. There is a lack of reporting to the authorities, confrontation of the abuser, or the option of a safe place to stay. If you want to save a guy’s soul, why not go to him instead of letting him beat his wife first? By the way, interesting tie-in, Patterson delivered the opening speech at the Pro-Family, Pro-Life Rally in Houston, TX in 1977. The rally that stood in opposition to the National Women’s Conference. Remember that? Sadly, it makes one reconsider that event in new light. Patterson preaching against feminism, while across town women gathered to argue for their rights. Only for him to be brought down decades later by an issue that disproportionately affects women.
In 2018, the media was replete with stories of women who came forward. People and organizations of all kinds were called to reckon with the history of abuse in the United States. But there was more. According to Christianity Today:
CT: “Paige Patterson lied to the board of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary about a rape allegation that came before him at another seminary, withheld documents from his previous presidency, and referenced attempting to “break down” the victim of a more recent rape incident.”
Some charges were dismissed. But the story had particular resonance. Patterson was more than just the head of a seminary. A national figure. He, along with others, was an architect of the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention. A move that drowned out moderate voices and boosted fundamentalists into power. No small thing for the largest Protestant denomination in the United States.
This is an important story for us to cover as we catalog how some evangelicals in the US tied themselves to the Republican Party. It wasn’t just the SBC. Rather than go denomination by denomination, I thought it best to focus on just one. This move was part of a national trend as theology shifted toward the conservative, often incorporating political ideologies. It started in 1979 and brought with it some lasting changes just one year before the election of Ronald Reagan. What began with Patterson and another man grew into an institutional takeover, and, some might say, left a black eye on the Southern Baptist Convention.
You’re listening to the show that uses journalistic tools to look inside the Christian Church. We press pause on the culture wars in order to explore how we got here and how we can do better. I’m Chris Staron. This is Truce.
It’s rare to find a funny line in the history books I use for this show. As an improv comedian, I appreciate one when I read it. There is a small book I purchased, thanks to patrons, called The Fundamentalist Takeover in the Southern Baptist Convention. The introduction starts with a brief rundown of the condition of the SBC before it was taken over by fundamentalists in the late 1970s. It was moderate. Then the fundies made this claim: that the seminaries and denominational agencies were being overrun with liberals.
Not like… you know, we want national healthcare liberals, theological liberals. It’s the whole reason fundamentalism became a thing in the early 1900s. Because there were people who were saying, “the miraculous parts of the Bible aren’t real” or “we believe Jesus was a good man, but not God,” or even “there are more ways to God than just through Jesus.” We covered this in-depth last season. I called them by another name: modernists.
When the fundies ramped things up in the 1970s, they trotted out that old chestnut: that modernists are coming. This is where the book features its sick burn.
SBC: “If a lion that ate liberals was set loose in Southern Baptist institutions prior to the fundamentalist takeover, he would have soon starved to death.”
It’s funny, right? There really wasn’t a problem with modernist theology in the SBC. But their concerns were enough of a boogeyman to open the gates and allow the fundamentalists to take over. Before we get there… a little history lesson. First… some music.
(old timey music)
King James the I of England. His reign was after the Protestant Reformation, there have already been wars over religion. And James championed this idea that was already fashionable among rulers: that they get their power not from the people, but from God. Some people protested, and for their efforts, died in prison, or were hanged, drawn and quartered… nasty stuff.
These people were called “separatists”, which will be confusing later because the term came to mean something else. Religious liberty was the key issue. When the movement spread to the colonies on North America, one liberty they sought was to baptize adults.
Adult baptism. It’s something we take for granted here because it’s totally legal here and normal in a lot of churches. Here is me baptizing a young man in my church last year…
(clip)
Can you tell I was emotional? What gave it away?
Some churches baptize people when they are babies. (baby crying). It’s how they did it in King James’ time, sometimes as a way to declare the church’s power over a person from birth. Some Christians, though, argued that baptism was meant for people who made a personal commitment to Christ. Like my friend did. Babies can’t do that. This idea, though, was considered in some places in the colonies, to be blasphemous. A capital offense. So, yeah, life wasn’t much better for Baptists in the colonies than it had been for their separatist elders back in England.
This persecution brings us to one of the most famous letter exchanges of the post-Revolution era. That of Thomas Jefferson and the Danbury Baptist Association of Connecticut. Now we need some different music. (Music) What is that? A flute or a fife? I could never tell.
The First Amendment had already been added, limiting the power of the government to respect one national religion. But some states like Connecticut and Massachusetts dug in with the Congregational denomination. They didn’t force people to attend, but they enjoyed taxpayer money, and the muckety mucks often favored it.
The Danbury Baptists sent new president Thomas Jefferson a letter asking him to encourage laws. He was president, not a legislator, but he did send a response, including this famous passage:
JEFFERSON: “Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between a man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature would “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.”
The origins of separation predate the letter and are an example of Jefferson being influenced by… the Enlightenment. Despite what Frances Schaeffer claimed. The phrase “building a wall of separation between Church and State” is all Jefferson. And who wanted it??? Baptists. Why? Because they had long been persecuted for their beliefs.
The Southern Baptist Convention was founded on similar principles. They didn’t want to force everyone to believe the exact same thing, Summarizing what one historian said about those early days, they weren’t about theological uniformity. Their goal was missions.
And… well, this was the early 1800s in the South. It was also about slavery. Saw that coming, didn’t you? Along with southern Methodists and Presbyterians, they pushed the mythology of the Lost Cause, or, as another historian put it:
FITZGERALD: “…the cult of fallen heroes and the idealization of antebellum white culture as chivalrous, decent, and pure.”
Southern preachers boosted the idea that the South was the most spiritual part of the country and that the war wasn’t a judgment on slavery. But God’s punishment for their lack of spiritual fervor. Yeah, that stuff was in the SBC.
But… they didn’t pick sides on battles over Calvinism and Arminianism, or pre and post-millennialism. They doubled down on their fight against evolution shortly after the Scopes trial of 1925. In the Progressive Era, the SBC fought against things like alcohol and gambling. They sometimes framed WWII as a global struggle for Christianity. Afterward, the SBC established monies for world relief, supported the United Nations (the United Nations!), and stepped up efforts of world evangelism.
The SBC even went so far as to back the integration of schools with Brown v Board of Education, despite protests. No, I don’t think all members were on board, but as an institution, that’s pretty good. After WWII when church attendance in the US boomed, the SBC outpaced other denominations from five million members in 1941 to 10 million in 1961. They did, however, refuse to join the National Association of Evangelicals. Like any large group of people, they made some good decisions and some poor. They weren’t always unified, especially on things like race. And they zigzagged in ways that might surprise us.
As they did in their 1971 convention. There, they worked to liberalize laws around abortion to permit it in rape, incest, and fetal deformity… but also…
SBC: “…in the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.”
That sentiment wasn’t long-lived But it was echoed by others, even those with fundamentalist backgrounds like the NAE, though with some caveats.
To say someone was a Southern Baptist didn’t mean they agreed on all points. As morals changed in secular society in the 1960s, along with protests over war, and the rights of women, homosexuals, and people of diverse races, some people felt uneasy. Especially conservatives, even those who voted to renounce segregation like WA Criswell. Criswell was, in the early 70s, the president of the SBC.
He and his followers took the anxiety in the country as proof that people had turned their back on the Bible. Maybe they hadn’t heard of Vietnam and Watergate. They grew fearful that the denomination spent too much time on progressive causes and not enough on missions.
So they formed The Southern Baptist Journal. Hoping for what one historian called:
FITZGERALD: “…an uncompromising stand on biblical inerrancy and belief in a literal creation.
Inerrancy became their key issue.
Inerrancy sounds complicated but is pretty simple. If the Bible says it happened, it really happened. There was a literal creation… an actual big fish to swallow Jonah… and that Jesus really was virgin born. There are various flavors of inerrancy, though. Like, was the Prodigal Son a real person or an illustration Jesus used to make a point?
This conservative faction of the SBC was big on inerrancy. They started their own schools, the Criswell Bible Studies Center in Dallas and the Mid-American Baptist Seminary in Memphis. But in the mid-70s, they were still just a faction. With their own schools, their own conferences, network, and seminaries. Not quite in control. But they were hardly outsiders. Speakers at the 1977 conference included those like Criswell who preached on the need to double down on inerrancy.
In the mid-1970s, the SBC was run by moderate conservatives, bent on maintaining unity. But that was about to change. As the country witnessed a sudden conservative resurgence, the SBC was soon swept up. The largest denomination in the United States was about to be taken over.
I’ll continue the story after these messages. But while you listen to the ads, why not leave a 5-star review on your favorite podcasting app? Thanks
[COMMERCIAL BREAK]
Welcome back.
In 1967, two men met at Cafe du Monde in the French Quarter of New Orleans. They’re famous for their beignets and, in researching this episode, I realized I had been there shortly after Hurricane Katrina while I was producing my first audio story. This is the sound of me trying my first one. A beignet, by the way, is basically a donut in a different shape.
These two guys met there to discuss what they perceived as the liberal drift of the SBC. One of them was Paige Patterson, the guy from the top of the episode who was ousted for mishandling sexual abuse. At the time he was a student.
The other was Paul Pressler, a state appeals court judge in Houston. Twelve years later, for the 1979 annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention, the two formed the Pressler-Patterson coalition. Their goal: a conservative takeover of the denomination.
To do so, they just needed to play the system. Pressler had the idea, and he called it “going for the jugular”.
Here’s how it worked. First… elect a president who is sympathetic to their goals. They get a one-year term.
PRESIDENT: (boisterous) I stand behind the inerrancy of scripture!
The president had a lot of power. Almost at the end of their term, they nominated people for the committee on committees.
COMMITTEE: (boisterous)I nominate people who think exactly like me.
That committee got to choose people for the one nomination. This happened a full year later. All of these bits are staggered.
COMMITTEE: (proclaiming!) We too stand with the inerrancy of scripture!
COMMITTEE: (proclaiming!) We too stand with the inerrancy of scripture!
COMMITTEE: (proclaiming!) We too stand with the inerrancy of scripture!
Then this group nominated trustees and directors to SBC agencies and institutions. Like schools and missions boards. Those people then got to hire staff.
COMMITTEE: I see here on your resume that you think the country is in the toilet. When can you start?
Simple as that. If they got the seat at the top, they could get their kind of people hired everywhere else. Use weaknesses in the system to gain control of the system itself. The process took years. Two years from the election of the president to that of the trustees. But trustees weren’t all elected at once. From beginning to end, the takeover was really a ten-year process. It all started with that first presidential election.
Pressler and Patterson crisscrossed the nation before the 1979 convention to build their coalition, conducting a 15-state get-out-the-vote campaign.
At the pastor’s conference, James Robison, one of the fundamentalists, told those in the audience that…
ROBISON: “My friends, I wouldn’t tolerate a rattlesnake in my house… I wouldn’t tolerate a cancer in my body. I want you to know that anyone who casts doubt on the Word of God is worse than cancer and worse than snakes.”
Therefore, he argued, southern Baptists needed a president…
ROBISON: “…who is totally committed to removing from this denomination anyone who does not believe that the Bible is the inerrant, infallible Word of the living God.”
Their man for the job was Adrian Rogers. You may have heard his sermons on the radio or read his books. He was pastor of the Bellevue Baptist Church in Memphis. Despite their being several other conservative candidates, he won with 50% of the votes because the fundamentalists voted as a bloc.
By the way, there is a bit of a twist here. In the period between last season and now, I’ve been referring to fundamentalists as people who are separatists. Not like the separatists who vexed King James from earlier. Instead, these are people who largely stay out of issues of the world because they’ve got their own subculture. For a long time, the way to tell the difference between evangelicals and fundamentalists was whether or not they were engaged in the culture. But thanks to people like Frances Shaeffer, the New Right, Jerry Falwell, Criswell, Phyllis Schlafly, and others, fundies were getting in on the game. Thus creating a new thing: fundamentalists who engage the culture. A new species! What historian George Marsden deemed “fundamentalist evangelicals”.
Fundamentalist candidates won the convention presidency for decades, including Paige Patterson himself. Within ten years, nearly all of the boards that govern the operations of the SBC were stocked with people from the takeover. Schools, publishing, missions. It took a long time for things to change, though. Remember that it was two years from a fundamentalist president to fundamentalist trustees. That is likely why, in 1979 the denomination seems similar to the way it had been. Even to the point of reaffirming their previous stance on abortion. They had this little gem adding it:
SBC: “…we also affirm our conviction about the limited role of government in dealing with matters relating to abortion…”
Largely, in 1979… business as usual. Spending time affirming and reaffirming previous decisions. And… then came 1980…
SBC: “Be it further resolved, That opposition be expressed toward all policies that allow “abortion on demand,” and be it further resolved, That we abhor the use of tax money or public, tax-supported medical facilities for selfish, non-therapeutic abortion, and be it finally resolved, That we favor appropriate legislation and/or a constitutional amendment prohibiting abortion except to save the life of the mother.”
See that change? They went in 1979 from affirming several kinds of abortion to only allowing it when the mother’s life was in danger. Allow me to point out something else that will be important in a few episodes… the concern over tax money being used. Even in 79, there is a libertarian desire to keep the government out of this practice.
The same year, 1980, the year the country voted in Ronald Reagan, they issued strong statements against pornography, homosexuality, and the Equal Rights amendment, and called for a reversal of Roe v. Wade.
At first, the old guard of the denomination seemed to regard the takeover as a momentary conservative nudge. Just the pendulum of public opinion swinging in another direction.
Remember, the SBC had long made room for a variety of beliefs, avoiding things like creeds. But the fundamentalists didn’t share that desire. Theirs was a mission of conformity. In 1987 a report was created that offered recommendations of what “most” Southern Baptists believe…
CREED: “One: They believe in direct creation and therefore they believe Adam and Eve were real persons. TWO: they believe the named authors did indeed write the biblical books attributed to them by those books…”
Which sounds, you know… like a creed. And it was used in the North American Missions Board as a guideline for hiring new staff.
Then there is a curious 1988 resolution. Since the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s, there has been a strong emphasis on individual Christians having direct access to God. No need for a priest or bishop to go between us and God. Every believer is equal. But then in 1988, there was a resolution passed that took a curious swipe at this idea…
1988 RESOLUTION (faded out): “Whereas, The high profile emphasis on the doctrine of the priesthood of the believer in Southern Baptist life is a recent historical development; and Whereas, the doctrine of the priesthood of the believer has been used to justify wrongly the attitude that a Christian may believe whatever he so chooses and still be considered a loyal Southern Baptist; and Whereas, the doctrine of the priesthood of the believer can been used to justify the undermining of pastoral authority in the local church…”
It’s a little hard to grasp all of that, so I’ll summarize. Essentially it calls the priesthood of the believers a new theological development.
Says that it wrongly gives permission to some to believe whatever they like. That it has been used to question leadership. You know, people calling out pastors like those at the top of the show who called out Paige Patterson. It also does a weird about-face and re-affirms the idea of the priesthood of believers. It pokes holes in it… and then says, “Yeah, we’re still cool with it.” without providing reasons. This may seem like a small thing, but some fundamentalist leaders like WA Criswell, who we’ve already mentioned, really liked their power. This is a quote from him:
CRISWELL: “Lay leadership of the church is unbiblical when it weakens the pastor’s authority as ruler of the church… A laity-led, deacon-led church will be a weak church anywhere on God’s earth. The pastor is the ruler of the church. There is no other thing than that in the Bible.”
This belief, if twisted the right way, could allow preachers to have unchecked power. Not something every pastor sought, but it was there if they wanted it.
Fundamentalists also took over the SBC colleges and seminaries. Pressler and Patterson stirred fear that they were being infiltrated by “liberalism” and that many professors didn’t believe the Bible. Nothing motivates like fear, right? Fundamentalist students, equipped with tape recorders, recorded professors and took notes on them. At least one professor was targeted for something he claimed he never said, but that a student reported. Others resigned.
Dr. Richard Land became director of the Christian Life Commission. You remember him, right? He’s the one who railroaded me years ago at the Southern Baptist Convention. I made an episode about it at the end of season 3.
(CLIP)
That guy. He was a strong anti-abortionist, approved of capital punishment, was all about inerrancy, and other key pieces of the fundamentalist agenda and steered them to become more involved in national politics.
Fundamentalists took over the Foreign Missions Board. Started their own publications, and flexed their muscles in the SBC’s Lifeway Christian Resources. Virtually every nook and cranny of the SBC.
The temptation is to say that the fundamentalist push was just to elect Ronald Reagan. But maybe you noticed that some of this happened even after he was out of office. You can hear the echos of Frances Schaeffer’s worldview fundamentalism. It’s all there.
And the fundamentalists, excuse me, fundamentalist evangelicals, pulled their denomination deeper into politics and culture wars. A denomination born out of fears of religious homogenization, came full circle and demanded homogenization.
(music shift)
In June of 1990, a group of men gathered together again at Cafe du Monde in New Orleans. Imagine them there, drinking their coffee and eating expensive donuts. Beignets. Perhaps the birds were chirping. Or maybe they heard people partying on boats nearby. It must have felt like visiting Graceland. This is where their whole movement started! This is where Paige Patterson and Paul Pressler hatched their plan. And it had worked! Like a reveler in an old-time movie, one climbed onto a table. He yelled, “Victory in Jesus!”. Why? The Southern Baptist Convention had been taken over by the fundamentalists.
This episode involved a lot of different sources. Visit trucepodcast.com for a full list. Major help came from the short book The Fundamentalist Takeover in the Southern Baptist Convention by Rob James, Gary Leazer, and James Shoopman. I’m also indebted to Frances Fitzgerald’s The Evangelicals.
Truce… takes so so long to produce. When I typed these words I was sitting in the rotunda of the Star Valley High School in Afton, Wyoming. A group of teenage girls shouted a song in the distance. Parents cheered at a wrestling tournament I’d driven our local team to. I do this show while juggling so many things. Listening to audiobooks while washing busses, recording scripts in my church basement, and editing while I volunteer at the library to try to increase my chances of getting an affordable house someday. This show not only takes work but sacrifice. There is no big organization backing me. It’s just us. You and I and listeners like you. If you want to be a part of making this my full-time job, visit trucepodcast.com/donate. There you can learn about supporting Truce on Venmo, Paypal, Patreon, or by old-fashioned check. That would mean more episodes for you, and I’d have to dodge fewer footballs being tossed around by hoards of little kids playing around my table. Seriously, I should have moved. Those kids are not careful around computers.
Thanks to everyone who gave their voices for this episode…
Truce is a production of Truce Media LLC.
God willing, we’ll talk again soon.
I’m Chris Staron. This is Truce.
Okay… the difference between a beignet and a donut, according to the Internet: Beignets are made with a single rise, making for a chewy texture. They have a longer rise, and they are often covered in powdered sugar.
I don’t know… sounds like a donut…
