Welcome to part 4 of the Cheap Religion, the Conservative Resurgence. Parts 1, 2 and 3 can be found in links at their respective number.
Table of Contents
Welcome to the 1970s.
The 1950s was characterized by increasing religion in the United States to counter communism in the Cold War. The outgrowth of increased funding in religious studies characterizes the 1960s. The Civil Rights Movement, Sexual Revelation, and even the Hippie movement find their roots in the theological aftermath of Nazism. These groups and their Liberation theology counterparts are a response to the Christian Fueled rise of Anti-Semitism and White supremacy found in Nazi Germany. However, suppose the US government had its hands in the rise of Christianity. In that case, these theologies of Liberation would face a pendulum swing because their core is anti-nationalist Christianity.
The swing comes from The Conservative Resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention.
Let’s note something before I describe how this all goes down. The Southern Baptist Convention does not speak for all the protestant churches and none of the Catholic churches. However, the moves it makes in the Conservative Resurgence describe the birth of what we might call the modern-day (1980-present) evangelical.
The SBC has long been the largest protestant group, so it picks up certain theologies from smaller evangelical groups like the Churches of Christ and redistributes other theological moves to other groups. An excellent depiction of the Southern Baptist Convention’s hold on protestants in America can be found in the movie, “The Eyes of Tammy Faye.” In the film, despite being in the Assemblies of God movement, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker are ultimately pushed out of their position in the Christian Broadcast Network by the Southern Baptist and Liberty University founder Jerry Falwell. What becomes clear is that the money and power of Protestant America flow through the Southern Baptist Convention.
The Conservative Resurgence
The Conservative Resurgence is the moves by prominent Southern Baptists to elect and reappoint members aligned with a Christian Nationalistic tendency (promoted as American Patriotism) throughout the Southern Baptist Convention, churches, and universities. If you are reading this and thinking it happened all in one election, you would be wrong. It took over a decade to slowly replace leaders that leaned liberal (or communist in the language of the resurgent). It was the first cancel culture. Leaders and Pastors who sympathized with the Civil Rights movement, peace in Vietnam, Hippies, or “the gays” were pushed out no matter the theological backing. The Conservative Resurgence is the primary move of entangling Christianity with the Republican party.
Authoritarian Theology
That theological backing was a more complex problem, though. The tenured professors most sympathetic to the causes of liberation (see last week) kept teaching sound anti-nationalist and anti-Nazi theology. They shaped the pastors coming out of the schools, and the pastors shaped the congregations. The back-and-forth tension had some aspects of healthy dialogue, but the resurgent had more authoritarian ideals.
Here is a video of the keynote speaker, Paul Weyrich, at a Conservative Resurgent event, attempting to disallow votes from Blacks, Hispanics, and women in favor of White men. He explains that allowing them to vote would prohibit White Male Supremacy. He is, of course, correct that allowing other people groups to vote diminishes White Supremacy. It is also profoundly against the unalienable rights described in the Declaration of Independence.
Professors and Faith Statements
So what to do about those pesky, tenured, and well-respected professors and their anti-White Supremacy theology? The answer is scarily elegant. Faith Statements.
Faith Statements, by their very nature, are designed to remove tenured professors and promote White Supremacy. If you have ever signed one (I did as a college freshman who didn’t know any better), then you have participated in White Supremacy. Faith Statements are a legal loophole for the Resurgent Baptist, which requires everyone from the president to the janitor at the university to sign the Faith Statement. The trick was to figure out something that the most studied professors would never agree to and that the layperson wouldn’t understand why they wouldn’t agree.
Again, the answer is surprisingly simple – Biblical Inerrancy.
Biblical Inerrancy
Biblical Inerrancy is not sola scriptura. Anyone who has studied the history of the canon knows Biblical Inerrancy is a farce, but most lay people have yet to study history. Yet, Biblical Inerrancy is close enough to sola scriptura to convince the typical churchgoer of its truth when you lean into the emotions of patriotism to remove a “communist” or “liberal” professor. (If you want a deeper dive into Biblical Inerrancy, let me know in the comments.)
With professors removed and scholarship down, control is easy. You teach people what you want them to believe and call proper regurgitation faith. If you control the keys to biblical interpretation, then anyone who interprets it differently, especially in favor of marginalized groups or women, is a heretic.
You can look at the SBC’s cultural dominance to see the success of the assumption that most churchgoers would not care or look too closely at the Bible and its history. Evangelical churches are filled with people who are outraged over books being in schools only to have them read a passage from the Bible, and then they ask to keep the Bible out of schools.
2 Problems
However, there are two problems with the reliance on the Bible as being interpreted in a particular White Supremacist direction. The first is a close reading of the Bible, and the second is the internet.
- A close reading of the Bible consistently teaches love and acceptance of the other. I was poor, and you visited me. Jesus was criticized for eating with sinners. Jonah preached to Nineveh. The message of acceptance is inherently a problem to White Supremacy. The rift over “Jesus loves me this I know for the Bible tells me so,” and White Supremacy might be the entire reason for the exvangelical movement.
- The second problem is the internet. I am a layperson who has learned to read Akkadian, Hebrew, and Greek. I can do so because the internet exists. I can translate the earliest Christian texts and discern meaning from a 2000-year-old history. When I have that in my back pocket, Biblical Inerrancy, first accepted as a doctrine at any church group anywhere in history in the year 2000, can’t hold up. I am not alone in my usage of the internet.
Is this why they are leaving?
For any of you older church leaders who may have read this and are wondering where your young people have gone, it isn’t that they didn’t take God, Jesus, and the Bible seriously. They took them so seriously; they saw how little you cared for them. We see how weak and incritical your faith is. We see how much White Supremacy, covered by American Exceptionalism (and Patriotism), fuels your faith. Or at least that’s all you have shown us. So, if you want churches full of American Nationalists instead of Jesus’s followers, then you have succeeded.
The Conservative Resurgence demonstrates the evangelical turn toward poor scholarship (as noted in the 1980s) and Christian Nationalism. If you are not pushing back against both of these, then you are supporting a system that will grow into something that looks like the Nazis and the Holocaust (history rhymes, not repeats).
How does this happen? What is the mechanism of this intentional weakening of faith? While there are many conflicting accounts and no unifying theory, my best answer is monopsony. Next week, I will describe monopsony. The following week, we will apply the concept to the Conservative Resurgence and see whether it is descriptive. The thesis revolves around Ronald Reagan and the SBC utilizing monopsony to entangle the Conservative Resurgence with the Republican Party.
What do you think? What is your experience? I have pieced this info together from dozens of tidbits in interviews and articles. If you want a book detailing some of this in more extended form, I recommend Isaac Sharp’s work here.
