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Do They Still Sing 'Amazing Grace' in Dixie?
| Article
# : |
13435 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1987 |
6,494 Words |
| Author
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James J. Thompson, Jr.
James J. Thompson, Jr., is the book review editor for The New
Oxford Review. He has written three books: Tried as by Fire:
Southern Baptists and the Religious Controversies of the 1920s
(Mercer University Press, 1982); Christian Classics Revisited
(Ignatius Press, 1983); and Fleeing the Whore of Babylon: A
Modern Conversion Story (Christian Classics, Inc., 1986). He
has coedited (with George M. Curtis III) The Southern Essays
of Richard M. Weaver (Liberty Press, 1987). |
The air crackles with energy and optimism at the Southern Baptist "Vatican" in Nashville, Tennessee. Baptists today boast of their loosely knit denominational structure: individualistic, democratic - each congregation its own master. Baptists shun hierarchy and organization. Or at least they say they do. The massive Sunday School Board headquarters in downtown Nashville - locus of many of the denomination's enterprises - belies the cherished self-image of a simple, God-fearing people who disdain the trappings of denominationalism.
Admittedly, one can still discern traces of their humble rural roots. Scratch an impeccably groomed Baptist official, and you glimpse his granddaddy, a grizzled old farmer, traipsing behind a mule on a hardscrabble forty acres in middle Tennessee. Enter a well-appointed Baptist church in the Nashville suburbs on a Sunday morning and you catch resonances of the rough-hewn religiosity that coursed through the weathered clapboard churches that dotted the villages and countryside of an earlier South. Southern Baptists have not forgotten their origins; yet they have prospered, exploded in numbers, and invested their future in boards, agencies, committees, and sophisticated corporate organization. They have, as one hears in these parts, moved uptown.
If you walk across Lower Broad in downtown Nashville, you leave the Baptist Vatican and enter the Methodist "Mecca." The Methodist Publishing House occupies an entire city block of prime real estate, a multimillion-dollar industry the location of which evidences the Methodists' refusal to permit the Baptists to hog center stage. Two can play the game or rich-and-powerful denomination.
But all is not well in Mecca. Unlike their across-Broad rivals, Methodists have been losing numbers at a shocking rate. Striving to ape the Episcopalians and Unitarians in intellectual sophistication and avant-garde liberalism, Methodist leaders have transformed their church into a social-justice seminar. While Baptists concentrate on evangelizing the heathen (aided by the latest technological gadgets and marketing strategies), Methodists frantically extirpate "sexist" language from their hymnals, pass resolutions in favor of homosexuality, and coo over fatigue-clad Sandinistas. Methodists have diverged from their Baptist brothers. Gone are the days when the two denominations were kindred peas in the Southern religious pod.
Prelude to the era of revivalism
Before the Awakening
...
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