Peace Committee Results Questioned
By Steve DeVane

—Biblical Recorder: Journal of the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina, Aug. 1998. Reprinted with permission.

The man who sat through nearly every Peace Committee (PC) meeting as an objective observer says the group did little more than cement fundamentalist control of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC).

“The Peace Committee was an idea whose time passed long before it was ever elected,” said Dan Martin, who attended the meetings from 1985 to 1987 as a journalist for Baptist Press (BP). “The course was already decided and the course was going to be a political solution.”

Martin, then news editor for BP, attended all the PC meetings except the first and part of the second meeting, writing news stories about the proceedings based on statements from committee chair Charles Fuller.

Otherwise, he said in an Aug. 13 telephone interview with the Biblical Recorder, he was bound by a confidentiality agreement that ended when the minutes of the meetings were unsealed in June.

Martin, who now works for the Baptist General Convention of Texas, said when he and BP director Al Shackelford were fired in July 1990 by the SBC Executive Committee he considered the confidentiality agreement broken. But his interview with the Recorder was his first public comment about the committee meetings.

The conservatives on the committee stuck together while the moderates kept trying to negotiate, Martin said.

“The fundamentalists never moved. They started out as a unit,” he said. “The moderates couldn’t have put together an effective, one-man trip to the bathroom.”

Charles Stanley, who was SBC president during much of the Peace Committee process, asked the moderates in one meeting why the conservatives should negotiate when they were winning, according to Martin.

“They were winning. They had been winning for about five years,” Martin said. “That was probably an apt description.”

Stanley later tried to back off that stance, Martin said.

The conservatives believed they were winning because they were right, he said, adding he heard the conservatives say “with some glee” that God was on their side.

“The fundamentalists were on a holy war,” Martin said. “They were out to save the Southern Baptist Convention from liberalism. I’m convinced that Paul Pressler and Paige Patterson still think that’s what they did.”

Martin said he doesn’t think the moderates ever thought they were right and the conservatives were wrong.

“You can’t build up much of a head of steam without that type of fire in the boiler,” he said.

Martin said Fuller was pushing for consensus because the committee had to give a report to the SBC. “He was bull-dozing everyone toward the rock that never moved,” he said.

Before the resignation of moderate Cecil Sherman, the PC meetings were a competition between Sherman and Adrian Rogers, a conservative leader, Martin said. Sherman resigned from the committee in October 1986.

Martin said he believes Sherman was frustrated with the lack of unity among moderates. When Sherman was on the committee, Rogers talked about 40 to 50 percent of the time; and Sherman talked about 20 to 30 percent, according to Martin.

“Adrian certainly talked more than anyone else,” he said. “Some of them didn’t say ‘boo’ the whole time.”

Discussions were “impassioned” at some points but there was “never any danger of blows being struck,” he said.

He remembers sitting in a Peace Committee meeting and thinking, “What difference does this make?”

His thinking hasn’t changed.

“My whole feeling is ‘so what?’” Martin said. “It made no difference then or now.”

Even a suggestion during committee meetings that Fuller be nominated for SBC president as a compromise candidate would likely only have slowed the conservative momentum he said.

The moderates underestimated the fundamentalists, Martin said: “You’re bound to get whipped if you underestimate your opponent.”

He said some people suggested the conservatives might change the Peace Committee minutes. “Why?” he said. “They were proud of what they did.”

What he didn’t understand is why the moderates let a “diversity statement” into the committee’s report. The statement said that most Southern Baptists believe Adam and Eve were real persons, that books of the Bible were written by the traditional authors, that the miracles in the Bible were actual events and that the historical narratives in the Bible are accurate and reliable.

Fundamentalists used the statement to solidify control of the SBC, Martin said.

“When I heard it, I said ‘This is a baseball bat,’” he said.

The Peace Committee might have been effective if it were formed in the early 1980s. By the time the committee was formed in 1985, the moderates had lost the battle for the Convention, almost irrevocably, he said. “The Peace Committee was a logical exercise dealing with an emotional issue,” Martin said. “The whole takeover in my opinion was an emotional issue and Pressler and Patterson were master craftsmen

. “It was too little, too late and the moderates never could get together a real effort.”

October 1998