This study concerns a network of progressive dissidents among Southern Baptists in the twentieth century. It explores their activities, understandings, and methods of relating to one another and to the broader southern and Baptist cultures of which they were a part 'A Genealogy of Dissent' developed along several pathways of influence, unfolding along the lines of a family tree, beginning with a remarkable, and today virtually unknown, figure named Walter Nathan Johnson. A pioneer racial integrationist who also challenged the corporate 'captivity' of Christianity in the United States, Johnson created a network of supporters and sympathizers from the 1920s through the '40s out of which came civil rights workers, labor organizers, advocates of women's rights--including ordination to the ministry--and proponents of disarmament and abolition of capital punishment, all within the ordinarily conservative group of Christian believers known as Southern Baptists Within this network arose a culture of protest against the usual southern and Baptist ways of behavior, and to a certain extent ways of belief, especially having to do with questions regarding the nature of a just society. While in many ways the people in this family of dissidents believed themselves to have been alienated from their traditions as southerners and as Baptists, for the most part they believed their protests to be a fulfillment, not a rejection, of the basic tenets of their beliefs as Southern Baptists For the most part, these dissidents avoided the usual pathways of institutional advancement in denominational life in the United States, preferring to place their efforts to influence life in the South on the individual and congregational level and in issue-oriented coalitions within and outside the ranks of Southern Baptists. Their most dramatic effects on the Southern Baptist denomination at large were inadvertent, serving to validate the cries of outrage over supposed liberalism in the Southern Baptist Convention raised by a resurgent fundamentalist party that mounted a successful takeover effort of the convention in the late 1970s and '80s / acase@tulane.edu
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TULANE/oai:http://digitallibrary.tulane.edu/:tulane_27369 |
| Date | January 1996 |
| Contributors | Stricklin, David Bruce (Author), Malone, Bill C (Thesis advisor) |
| Publisher | Tulane University |
| Source Sets | Tulane University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Access requires a license to the Dissertations and Theses (ProQuest) database., Copyright is in accordance with U.S. Copyright law |
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