BAPTISTS WAGE WAR OVER ACADEMIC FREEDOM
by Tom Teepen,
Cox Newspapers

The other campus political correctness war - the theological and political bloodletting in the huge Southern Baptist Convention has claimed another victim. The fight carries important academic and political freight but it has gone little noticed outside its own circles.

The charge is not precisely clear - the board that canned him has seen to that - but Rev. Russell Dilday, president of the largest Baptist seminary, was having friendly truck with a known Baptist moderate.

And never mind that Dilday had invited Rev. R. Keith Parks as a commencement speaker well before Parks was purged two years ago as head of the Baptist Foreign Mission Board.

Etiquette be hanged. Trustees of Southwestern Baptist Seminary in Fort Worth say the ousted Parks should have been shunned once he had been anathematized.

The fight to retain a little teaching elbow room in Baptist institutions is arguably the most serious struggle for intellectual freedom in American academia today.

The issue, however, is being contested beyond the cultural radar of most of the folks who usually make a stink about such matters.

Barrels of ink have been spilled over campus incidents of trendy, vaguely leftist political correctness, with students and faculty dressed down for insufficient sensitivity to multicultural jargon or to attitudinal fine points.

Those issues, however, though annoying in their nonsense and sometimes abusive, are transient almost by definition.

The Baptists are playing for keeps, and both the numbers and the broader implications are substantial.

The Southern Baptist Convention has 15 million-plus members. Southwestern Seminary alone has 4,000 students, and six other seminaries have been taken over by convention hardliners as well.

Some important Baptist universities - Mercer in Georgia and Baylor in Texas, for example - saw what was coming in recent years and managed to set up boards independent of their state Baptist conventions.

But the seminaries, too, are training the next generation of Baptist leadership and their influence will go far beyond the pulpits.

The theocratic takeover of the convention through the 80’s was accompanied by a growing alliance with the Republican Party.

Indeed, the convention and its institutions, together with some evangelical independents like Pat Robertson’s TV ministry, are now the major force in the GOP right.

Understand, the issue here is not between religious conservatives and religious liberals.

Baptists are fundamentalists, period. The argument is over whether biblical inerrancy implies a religious orthodoxy and then places it and its political conclusions beyond inquiry.

There’s irony here, at a minimum. Historically, no faith insisted more firmly on congregational and even individual religious freedom; on “soul freedom.” None was more fierce for church/state separation or more skeptical of partisan confederation.

For many Baptist academics now, the transcendent issue may still be soul freedom, but the day-to-day issue is academic freedom.

*Teepen, based in Atlanta, is national correspondent for Cox Newspapers. This article is reprinted by the permission of Cox Newspapers after appearing in the March 15, 1994, issue of the Austin American-Statesman.

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