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Are You Temperamental, Uninhibited Or Conventional? What Your State Says ... - Forbes

US Map (photo credit: Thinkstock)

From the Bible Belt to Portlandia, stereotypes about the people that inhabit various regions abound. But are there any truth in the typecasts? Peter Rentfrow and colleagues set about analyzing data from 1.6 million Americans to find out.

Using data collected over 12 years from various sources including online personality tests using the widely accepted ‘Big Five’ personality model, the researchers looked at the personality traits associated with different states and regions. As our individual personalities are the driving force behind our behavior, the team also examined how the personality profiles of different areas relate to social and economic outcomes such as wealth, education, innovation, tolerance, crime, social mobility, political leanings, religiousness and health.

The results, published in this month’s Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, revealed a personality map of the United States, with three distinct clusters.

- Friendly and Conventional. Inhabitants of the north-central Great Plains and the South tended to be high in Extraversion, Agreeableness and Conscientiousness and lower in Neuroticism and Openness than other areas. These are the stalwart, Middle America red states: friendly, sociable and conventional with a high emphasis on family values, conservatism and the status quo. Demographically, the Friendly and Conventional areas tend to be mainly White and were less affluent, less educated, less tolerant, less healthy and less innovative than other areas, but high on social capital (the extent to which they value close relations and community). People in this cluster are more likely to vote Conservative and to be Protestant.

- Relaxed and Creative. Found mainly in the Western States and in areas of the Eastern Seaboard, the Relaxed and Creative cluster is characterized by low Extraversion and Agreeableness, average Conscientiousness, very low Neuroticism and very high Openness. Residents of these areas are more likely to be creative, relaxed, open-minded and individualistic. The Relaxed and Creative areas are culturally and ethnically more diverse, wealthier, more educated, more innovative, healthier and more socially tolerant than other areas. They are less likely to vote Conservative or to be Protestant.

- Temperamental and Uninhibited. A third personality cluster, found mainly in the Mid-Atlantic and New England, is typified by below average Extraversion, low Agreeableness and Conscientiousness, very high Neuroticism and above average Openness – think irritable, inquisitive, impulsive and quarrelsome. This cluster tended to include more women and older adults who were more affluent, more liberal, less socially mobile and less religious than those in other areas.

The authors posit several theories about why these personality patterns have emerged. Historical factors could play a part – the West Coast areas most associated with the Relaxed and Creative cluster, for example, were some of the last to be inhabited so it would have been the most entrepreneurial, ambitious settlers who braved the perilous journey and branched out in those areas.

Selective migration also influences the spread of personality characteristics – people are attracted to settle in areas which reflect their values and beliefs. The Friendly and Conventional profile is characterized by low mobility and a high regard for family and community values. It makes sense that people with this personality profile choose to settle closer to family and friends rather than move away to pursue career or education opportunities, which may contribute to the region’s relatively lower levels of education and affluence. Meanwhile, the West’s reputation for being more socially tolerant and open-minded may attract culturally diverse Relaxed and Creative types.

Finally, social influence and norms may shape what people believe are the accepted or preferred beliefs and values of their area, which then goes on to shape their self-image and the answers they provide in personality questionnaires. Areas within the Temperamental and Uninhibited cluster, for example, have the longest settlement history so are likely to have the oldest norms and traditions. These areas are also undergoing an exodus of residents – with those scoring higher on Openness and lower in Neuroticism are more likely to move away, leaving behind the more anxious, irritable individuals whose personality traits may spread through the rest of the population via ‘emotional contagion’.

It’s likely to be a combination of all three – historical traits passed down through generations create social norms about the types of beliefs and behaviors that are most valued in a particular area, which in turn attracts like-minded individuals to that area and so becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. It appears that, far from meaningless small talk, the question ‘where do you live?’ could provide valuable insights into an individual’s psyche.

Follow @DrSebBailey on twitter or on Forbes at the top of this post.

Are You Temperamental, Uninhibited Or Conventional? What Your State Says ... - Forbes

America"s Apocalypse: Armageddon in Jerusalem - Huffington Post

Nineteenth-century America invented a new kind of Millennialism. Ancient interpretations had looked forward to the thousand-year reign of the saints with Christ as a joyful vindication. America’s reading made the Revelation of John into a chronological map of catastrophe, from which believers could only be saved by the “rapture.” This concept, unrelated to the Millennium (Revelation 20:4-5), is absent from the Revelation of John. “The rapture” appears in its own setting in one of Paul’s letters, yet it has governed how many Americans, and now many Jews and Muslims, see the apocalyptic future.

Paul promises that living believers will be united with those who have died to meet the risen Jesus (1 Thessalonians 4:16-17): “the dead in Christ will arise first, then we who are alive, remaining, will be snatched up together with them in clouds to meet the Lord.” Paul was speaking of the resurrection of the dead, but Puritan interpreters conceived of the “rapture” (as the reference in 1 Thessalonians came to be called), the Millennium of the Revelation, and the Second Coming of Christ as all combined.

Putting different passages together in this way produced a view that the Second Coming would come before the Millennium. “Premillennialism,” as it is called, contradicts another view popular in America during the nineteenth century: the conviction that progressive revelation leads humanity forward to greater civilization and an ultimate encounter with Christ at the end of time.

The tug of war between Premillennialism and progressivism shifted in 1909. That was when Cyrus Scofield first published his Reference Bible; the book consisted of the King James Version with Premillennialist notes. (He later included a chronology dating creation to 4004 BCE). Seismic events in the history of the twentieth century favored the rise of Premillennialism. World War I gave the lie to the idea of the steady progress of Western civilization, and particularly to idealistic views of the efficacy of government. Scofield scoffed at the idea of progressive evolution; most people would be left behind in apocalyptic chaos while only true believers were raptured.

Scofield predicted the Jews’ return to Palestine, and portrayed the apocalyptic “Gog” (Revelation 20:8) as Russia. At the dawn of the twentieth century, these seemed distant references to most observers. But then came the aftermath of the Second World War, with the establishment of the State of Israel and the start of the Cold War — in which the Soviet Union emerged as the major antagonist of the United States. These events became irresistible signs for some of God’s impending intervention in the rapture and the Millennium. The stage was set for a fusion of Premillennialism with American patriotism.

Books such as Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth (1970) encouraged the expectation of an imminent, Premillennial return of Christ and the start of a new Millennium very, very soon. The welter of competing apocalypses has increased to the point where academics and journalists who make it their business to cover modern millenarian timetables have had trouble keeping track of them all.

Mikhail Gorbachev’s birthmark, for example, seemed incontrovertibly to be the mark of the beast (Revelation 14:9-10). With Gorbachev’s removal from power and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Premillennialism hit a snag. Since then, those in search of signs of the coming rapture have shifted their gaze to Jerusalem. Predictions center on the imminent rebuilding of its ancient Temple, destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE, and feed into one of the most volatile confrontations of our time.

The best-known Premillenialist predictions about the Temple in recent times have come from an author of apocalyptic fiction, Tim LaHaye. Creator of the best-selling “Left Behind” series of the 1990s and 2000s, LaHaye portrays the Revelation of John as a forecast of how a new Temple must be built in Jerusalem in order to provoke a war that will bring human civilization to an end prior to Jesus’ return in glory.

The elaborate scenario imagined by LaHaye resolves a long-standing problem for those who hold literally to apocalyptic readings of the New Testament. In the Gospels Jesus appears to predict the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and his subsequent Second Coming (Matthew 24-25; Mark 13; Luke 21). But while the Romans indeed burned down Jerusalem and its Temple in 70 CE, no cosmic judgment followed. Why did the judgment not come if Scripture is infallible and if Jesus’ prophecy is valid? LaHaye contends that Jesus actually referred to the destruction of a different Temple to be built in the future. When that Temple is destroyed, the end will be truly upon us, for in the apocalyptic new Jerusalem there is no sacrificial temple left at all according to the Revelation of John.

Apocalyptic predictions about Jerusalem attracted a small following in the first decades after the establishment of the State of Israel. But the Six-Day War of 1967, when Israel wrested control of the area of the Temple Mount from Jordan, changed everything. Premillennialist thinking fueled a Christian Zionist desire to see the Temple built again. LaHaye also shifted the identity of the antichrist from a Soviet leader to the secretary-general of the United Nations. In a post-rapture world, the UN oppresses the Christians left behind, a scenario that has fed some of the Tea Party’s conspiracy theories. World government and globalization are aligned with Satan in this Premillennialist expectation, and Israel’s progress toward building a Temple becomes a sign that the end is near.

Some Israelis also believed that their victory must have been the result of supernatural intervention. Jewish expectations concerning the Temple have become influential, although unlike their Christian counterparts, Jewish apocalyptists do not see the new Temple as temporary. A self-styled “Jewish Underground” conspired unsuccessfully to blow up the mosques on top of the Temple Mount in 1984. An organization founded in 1987 developed a program dealing comprehensively with practical matters involved in establishing a new Temple: questions of how to purify workers on the site with the ashes of a red heifer, regular and repeated sacrificial practice, the clothing of priests, the correct design of utensils, and methods of purification. This is a program for a permanent, hegemonic Israel to which all Jews return and the nations offer obedience.

Even as this Israeli Jewish movement for a new Temple exacerbated tensions with local Muslims, it attracted the support of some Christians, especially in the United States. Cooperation between these Jewish and Christian Zionist groups has been extensive, and includes fund-raising and the efforts of a Pentecostal minister and cattle breeder to the produce red heifers, which are necessary for purification within any new Temple. Premillennialists support the new Temple as an edifice whose destruction will bring the end, while Jews who see the Temple as permanent nonetheless invoke the Revelation’s Armageddon as the pivotal moment of all history.

Not surprisingly, support for the erection of this Temple does not extend to Muslims. What Judaism calls the Temple Mount is for Muslims al-Harim al-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary, which their religious authorities should regulate. According to Islamic tradition, in 621 CE the Prophet traveled by night during a miraculous journey from Mecca to Jerusalem, and then journeyed into heaven. Jewish activity on the Temple Mount that appears supportive of the new Temple project has repeatedly led to violence; in 2000 came the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa Intifada, when Ariel Sharon, then a candidate for prime minister, made a campaign visit to the Temple Mount with an armed escort.

This is not to say, however, that Muslims reject millenarianism. The Quran includes a strongly eschatological dimension, and elements from the Revelation of John have featured in Muslim eschatology. Even Gog and Magog (Revelation 20:8) find their way into the Quran in a way that shows the influence of the Apocalypse. The Surah Al-Kahf, “The Cave,” identifies Gog and Magog as the ultimate enemies of believers; they are kept out provisionally by a wall of supernatural power, but are ready to erupt at the last judgment (18:94-102). In a recent pamphlet Shaykh Shafar al-Hawali attacked American leaders as if they were Gog and Magog. Armageddon entered the vocabulary of militant Islam after the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, enabled by Arabic-language publishers such as the Cairo-based Dar al-Kitab al-Arabi.

Readings of the Apocalypse that predict millennial catastrophe prompted a counter-reaction. Secular intellectuals have dismissed the whole book. Mainline churches today incorporate only brief passages of the Revelation within their worship, usually laundering them of their apocalyptic dimension. But attempting to ignore the visions in this book has brought bad results: it is better to confront them for what they are than to permit them to be manipulated into scenarios of desperate vengeance and self-vindication. The Armageddon that Jerusalem faces derives less from the Revelation of John than from forces of human history so insistent that they have forced that book into their own designs.

America"s Apocalypse: Armageddon in Jerusalem - Huffington Post

Fairfield County bishop looks forward to new ministry - New Haven Register

BRIDGEPORT >> Bishop Frank J. Caggiano had been on the job only a week when Pope Francis sounded an alert to the Roman Catholic world in an interview with his Jesuit order, published in America and other Jesuit journals.

Unpretentious, with a slender build and deep-set eyes, Caggiano has an openness and generosity that echo the pope’s approach to the issues confronting the church: women’s roles, acceptance of gays and lesbians and others.

Pope Francis’ interview both excited and enraged the faithful, with statements such as: “A person once asked me, in a provocative manner, if I approved of homosexuality. I replied with another question: ‘Tell me: when God looks at a gay person, does he endorse the existence of this person with love, or reject and condemn this person?’ We must always consider the person.”

Caggiano’s response is to remind us that all people, gay or straight, “are called to a life of conversion, a life of holiness. So those who are gay and those who are straight are loved by the Lord equally. …

“The church teaches very clearly that gay and lesbian Catholics deserve respect, are to be loved just as the Lord loves them, and they are to be welcomed into the church. And that is the genesis of the pope’s comment that they are not to be judged simply for the people that they are.”

But Caggiano adds his interpretation of church teaching that was not emphasized by the pope, but which has not changed:

“On the other hand, there is behavior that we believe, in our tradition, violates that which the Lord taught. That applies to gay couples and straight couples; it applies to everyone. … It violates the natural law but more specifically it violates that which the Lord has specifically taught. And therefore whether they’re gay or straight isn’t the issue. The issue is the call to holiness by each individual person in their own state of life.”

Jesus loves you, but physical love is still constrained to that approved by the church, Caggiano said. Still, it’s up to God to judge, not us.

Brooklyn born and bred

Fairfield County is new ground for the new bishop. A first-generation American from Brooklyn, born of Italian parents, he spent most of his life and ministry in the borough.

He actually spent some time in Connecticut, but the priesthood called him out of the state. After attending Regis High School in Manhattan, “By some act of God I was actually accepted at Yale, and political science always intrigued me so that’s what I had decided to study,” Caggiano says.

“My father was absolutely enthralled with the idea that I would go to Yale because, for him, this was making it, finally. So there was … a lot of enthusiastic encouragement on the part of my dad in particular to go to Yale once I was accepted.

“The difficulty was that there was growing inside of me this sense of a vocation that I had known since I was young — service in the church, priesthood.” And it just happened that he was born on Easter Sunday in 1959.

After just one semester, he left his “cosmopolitan experience” at Yale, took a year off, then entered Cathedral College of the Immaculate Conception. He was ordained a priest in May 1987.

Sunset Park. Bensonhurst. Canarsie. Diverse posts, all in Brooklyn, “the only … completely urban diocese in the country.” He earned his doctorate at Gregorian University in Rome.

He follows Bishop William E. Lori, after a 16-month gap when the diocese had no bishop. “First and foremost, the people have been extraordinarily welcoming and gracious,” he says. “They have been very energized. There’s an enthusiasm, there’s a joyfulness and I think part of that is simply because there is a bishop in the diocese.”

His diocese ranges from the Gold Coast of Greenwich to the poverty of Bridgeport and the rural roads of Weston. Caggiano says he enjoys the differences, “because the variety is very life-giving.”

Living in Trumbull, doing his own laundry and driving his own car, he says to “see the sun rise above the trees is absolutely spectacular … that is a tremendous moment in the day when I can pray and really feel very close to the Lord.”

‘The Pope Francis Factor’

Whether in Brooklyn or Fairfield, however, he faces the same challenge: “the need to preach the gospel effectively in a way that people in contemporary life can understand, appreciate and embrace,” especially youths and young adults, who are not hostile to the church but simply “don’t feel any compelling reason to give the church a second look.”

He calls a recent surge of energy “the Pope Francis Factor.”

That surge may increase the continual calls in the church for greater lay involvement and less of a top-down structure. Francis warned in his interview that the “infallibilitas of all the faithful” is not “populism.” Caggiano emphasized that “by virtue of baptism every single member of the church is called to share in the priestly, kingly and prophetic office of Christ. … We’re all in this together.”

But while listening to all is vital to “read the signs of the times,” Americans can slip into thinking that the church should be more democratic, Caggiano says.

“That skews one basic fact. The fact is that the truth is not something; the truth is someone. It’s the person of Jesus the Christ, whose presence is embodied in the community which is the church, from the apostles.”

While some things are a product of tradition, such as married clergy, other things, such as women priests, are unchanging, he says.

“The substance of the faith will not change, because it’s a person, it’s Christ. And the teachings that we embrace about the person of Jesus Christ, about the events of his life and that which he taught, those will not change, those are not subject to a democratic vote, but many of the disciplines of the church which are designed to, if you will, embody, strengthen, allow people to understand the truth, embrace it, accept it, engage it, those have changed over the centuries and they can continue to evolve.”

On many issues, however, “Lay leaders have a rightful place to be consulted and to be part of … decision-making, whether it’s at a parish level, whether it’s at a diocesan level. There are bodies and organs that are already in existence that can help to do that.” One, the Lay Pastoral Council, may have gone out of existence since Lori left, “but if it does not (exist), it will be created,” Caggiano says.

The issue of women clergy is basic because, while “Women are equal in dignity and participation in the life of the church,” the church cannot do what Jesus, as recorded in the Bible, did not do.

“Jesus of Nazareth broke every social norm that existed in the time of his age, every single one that I could imagine, including socializing with Samaritan women who are adulteresses. That would have rendered him ritually unclean and ostracized from any aspect of Judaism, and he chose to break the norm.

“But when he chose his apostles, he chose only men. I do not know why he chose to do that; that is what he chose to do. … That deliberate choice of having men only to be his apostles and their successors is something that I as only a human being have no authority to revise.”

Caggiano says some choices by Jesus are mysteries to us. “But when we’re with him, then we’ll know. But until then … to make an accommodation, as reasonable as for some it may appear, is not a line I will ever cross.”

Caggiano says this is unchangeable because Jesus is not “a prophet, is not a nice guy, is not a guru, he’s not a person who teaches you a philosophy of life. … And see, in my mind … it all boils down to a single question, to be very blunt about it. ‘Who do you say that I am?’ … If you answer that question with anything less than ‘You are Christ, the son of the living God,’ then you are not answering it in a way consonant with the Catholic Church.”

Another unchangeable teaching, as far as Caggiano is concerned, is divorced and remarried people being able to receive Communion. “The difficulty is the remarriage part of that phrase,” Caggiano says. Those who are not “in a healthy and holy environment with their spouse” will be accepted if they no longer live as wife and husband. And if a marriage is found to have had “an impediment” to being a true sacramental relationship, which is a lifetime commitment, there is provision for annulment.

“So what do you do when a marriage existentially seems to have ended and a person finds themselves falling in love with someone and wants to enter into a lifetime relationship (without an annulment)? That’s where the difficulty arises. I cannot imagine the church ever changing that because … that really comes from the mouth of the Lord himself.”

Caggiano says the church needs to improve its outreach to divorced Catholics, “Because when a marriage ends, it’s an extraordinarily painful experience and the last thing the church wants to do is traumatize those people … even more.”

On the other hand, married priests is not an unchangeable church teaching — there are exceptions to the rule and priests were married in the early church. It is “a discipline that has changed … I would be very curious to see the unfolding of the papacy of Pope Francis to see what his thinking is on that,” Caggiano says. “We will have to see if he has guidance on that question.”

But Caggiano says he sees value in celibacy for priests. “When I was pastor at St. Dominic’s in Bensonhurst, I could not imagine serving the people as I tried to serve them and also be married at the same time. I could not imagine doing both. There’s a freedom to celibacy that allows a level of self-gift that would not be appropriate for a married person.” After 9/11 was another time when Caggiano felt he had “married his people” and could not have imagined being married to a woman.

Caggiano looks on the sexual abuse crisis as “a grave wound to the life of the church, apart from the sin that was perpetrated and the innocent lives that were terribly wounded and hurt. It has shattered the trust of many an individual and, if not shattered, has called into question the trust that they once had in the leadership of the church on every level.”

Rebuilding that trust will be one of his high priorities because, “First and foremost, those who are harmed need to be cared for. And from what I can gather here, the diocese under Archbishop Lori has done a very good job of trying to be of assistance to those who were (victimized).”

Coming in, he says, “I am committed to do whatever I can to strengthen the processes and procedures that we have to make sure that it never happens again. To be a resource to those who were hurt in the process and to the best I can with all of my colleagues … rebuild that trust.”

Call senior writer Ed Stannard at 203-789-5743. Have questions, feedback or ideas about our news coverage? Connect directly with the editors of the New Haven Register at AskTheRegister.com.

Fairfield County bishop looks forward to new ministry - New Haven Register

How the religious right won: Birth of the fundamentalists, in our modern times - Salon

Excerpted from “Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism”

Fundamentalism is a paradox. Its partisans—of any faith—call for the return to an imagined arcadia in which God’s voice boomed plainly from scripture. Yet as a historical phenomenon, fundamentalism is wholly modern. It is a set of reactions against the aftershocks of the Enlightenment and the evolution of global capitalism: the breach between faith and reason, the rise of the secular public square, and the collapse of traditional social hierarchies and ways of life. Creatures of modernity, fundamentalists have happily availed themselves of modern technology. Fundamentalists ranging from separatist Baptist preachers to Al Qaeda propagandists have demonstrated a genius for employing the latest media and political (or military) weaponry to spread their message and accomplish their aims. To fundamentalists, history, too, is a technology: a trove of data to be strategically deployed.

Nowhere have the uses of history been clearer than in the clashes between conservative and progressive evangelicals for control of their denominations throughout the 1970s and 1980s. In the Southern Baptist Convention, many conservatives would have objected to the “fundamentalist” label as a Yankee epithet, a synonym for a barefoot bumpkin sorely lacking in southern grace. But if their self-perception was not fundamentalist, many of their goals and tactics were. The decisive battles over the meaning and role of the Bible in modern society did not, primarily, unfold in the form of dueling proof texts or Sunday pulpit ripostes, but in skirmishes for control of the machinery of intellectual authority: seminaries, missions boards, denominational presses, and authorized church history. The personal magnetism of gurus was not sufficient to stanch the secularist tide. Just as thousands of volunteers at Billy Graham’s crusades worked to settle new converts into local churches before their enthusiasm could evaporate, conservative activists knew that the fervor wandering sages left in their wake would fizzle unless channeled into institutions and sustained by an infrastructure built to teach and train future generations.

Southern Baptist conservatives considered themselves the “silent majority” in their denomination. They were confident in a groundswell of support if they could mobilize laypeople for the cause. In 1969 Paul Pressler, a seventh-generation Texas Baptist, graduate of Princeton, and prominent Houston lawyer, complained to an ally, M. O. Owens: “We are in the majority but losing because we have not spent the time necessary to organize and assert ourselves. . . . With cohesive action by trained individuals who are committed to Biblical truth, we could move into influencing the Sunday School Board in the publication of their materials, in helping select editors for our state Baptist papers, and generally provide the type of sound Christian leadership which we should have in every phase of the Southern Baptist Convention and in our state and local conventions and associations.” While Pressler mobilized Baptists in Houston around the cause of Christian education, Owens was organizing the Fellowship of Conservative Baptists in his home state of North Carolina.

Years earlier, conservatives had begun to build an alternative system of higher education to compensate for the drift of the denomination’s seminaries away from biblical inerrancy. They wanted nothing more than to reverse the policy of careful accommodation that had brought so many conservative Bible schools and seminaries into line with the expectations of secular academia, and to root out those scholars who applied the term inerrancy to their own pliant interpretation of the Bible, rather than to scripture’s “literal” meaning. Pressler disdained accrediting agencies, which he believed were “controlled by the liberal northeastern schools.” He advocated firing tenured professors so that the agencies would withdraw accreditation, seeing as “the only reason our seminaries have their accredidation [sic] with the accreditting [sic] agency is so a few liberal graduate students could attend some northeast liberal Divinity Schools.”

If the mainstream intelligentsia, the guardians of intellectual authority, had abandoned the faith, then the true believers in the pews must wake up and redirect the church and surrounding culture. The new conservative schools reflected a populist backlash against the perceived elitism of the denomination’s main seminaries. A Jacksonville, Florida, pastor founded Luther Rice Seminary in 1962 specifically to aid local clergy who were unable to enroll in seminary full time. Conservatives seeking to build “a School of the Prophets” in the Deep South founded Mid-America Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisiana in 1971 (the school later moved to Little Rock, and eventually to the Memphis area). That same year Jerry Falwell founded Lynchburg Baptist College (now Liberty University) in Lynchburg, Virginia, and W. A. Criswell founded his eponymous Bible Institute. Criswell, a former SBC president, pastored First Baptist Church in Dallas, the largest Southern Baptist church in the country (where Billy Graham was nominally a member for fifty-five years). When he announced his “vision” for the school in 1969, Criswell emphasized the need to provide Bible training for Sunday school teachers and the “many Southern Baptist pastors who had not had the opportunity to finish college or even to begin.” His mission statement sounded like a noble call to democratize knowledge, but Criswell’s desire to exclude was just as strong as his inclusive spirit. He wanted to reclaim Southern Baptist education from the ivory-tower elites and wave the banner of “the common man” as cover for his capture of intellectual inquiry.

A string of smaller but crucial conservative organizations appeared throughout the 1970s. In 1973, a group of Baptists incensed at the liberal sentiments evident in some of the denomination’s agencies—particularly the socially concerned Christian Life Commission—organized as the Baptist Faith and Message Fellowship. They sponsored a Baptist Literature Board to offer curricula stressing biblical inerrancy as an alternative to the more moderate publications of the Sunday School Board. Despite the reports from moderate “spies” who attended these organizations’ early meetings, most moderates failed to foresee the conservative grab for power at the 1979 convention. Sociologist Nancy Ammerman has suggested that moderates failed to build a coalition because in the past, fundamentalist agitation within the convention was disorganized—a few fire-breathers shooting off empty threats against the evils of Darwinism and drink. Moreover, moderates did not move to protect their control of the convention’s agencies and boards because they were loath to admit that their denomination concentrated power in the hands of hierarchical leaders or bureaucrats. “They had lived for nearly 150 years with a myth of democracy….They assumed that consensus would emerge from their common efforts to discern the will of God.”

The conservative leaders had no illusions about how power worked in the SBC. Their strategy was simple: elect one of their own as president of the convention for ten consecutive years, during which time all crucial denominational positions would come due for renomination, allowing conservatives to gradually populate all SBC boards, agencies, and trusteeships with their allies. They borrowed tactics from secular political parties, occupying skyboxes at the 1979 convention in Houston’s Astrodome where their leaders could coordinate backroom dealings and voting procedures. That year they elected Adrian Rogers, pastor of Bellevue Baptist Church in Memphis, as president of the SBC—the first in an unbroken series of conservative presidents that continues today. The conservative plan extended beyond theology and church life to national politics. Ed McAteer, a Southern Baptist layman and wealthy sales executive who helped found the Moral Majority, used his experience as a former field director for the Conservative Caucus, a nominally secular organization founded in 1974, to ally the SBC with the emerging New Right coalition. Rogers, who prior to his election was known as a captivating preacher rather than a political activist, signaled his new ambitions in a high-profile sermon at the April 1980 “Washington for Jesus” rally on the National Mall. “The scream of the great American eagle has become but the twitter of a frightened sparrow,” he warned the crowd of 200,000. “America must be born again or join the graveyard of nations.”

Political spectacles were not a practical way to reach the average lay-person, but print media could do the job. For many evangelicals—especially Southern Baptists, who considered themselves set apart from the rest of American Protestantism and delighted in the cocoon of SBC institutions that sustained them from cradle to grave—the church newspaper remained a pillar of enlightenment and counsel. “Editors carry weight in SBC life,” James Walker, who worked for the Arkansas convention, wrote to Don Harbuck, a prominent moderate in the state. “They speak to the issue before it hits the floor [at the national convention] and some people accept editorials as the ‘voice of God.’” Their writers were more mission-minded now than ever before. The founding of Christianity Today presaged the rise of a conscious school of evangelical journalism grounded in the idea that a Christian journalist should not only report news of concern to his church, but discern the truth of all world events through an all-encompassing Christian worldview. Baylor University, the oldest Southern Baptist university (and one of the few that escaped conservative control), offered a dedicated program in Christian journalism as early as the 1960s. Similar curricula sprouted at other schools. Pat Robertson, who had built his own television empire, founded Regent University in 1978 out of an express desire to boost evangelical influence in the media. From its earliest years, the university’s curriculum stressed television and print journalism.

When conservatives began purging the SBC’s agencies and boards of all opposition, the Baptist Press editors did their best to cover every stratagem— much to their subjects’ displeasure. “SBC Journalism: Besieged!” long-time Baptist Press director Wilmer C. Fields titled his account of the “brazen, shameless attempt by fundamentalists to intimidate, bully and undermine Southern Baptist journalists and their publications.” Fields argued that the campaign to co-opt church media was not merely another political tactic, but a threat to the core of Baptist identity. “Our forefathers wisely protected and cherished free access to full information,” he wrote. “That structural freedom is linked to freedom of access to God, to an open Bible, to a divine right to private judgment in spiritual matters. . . . The state newspapers have been major channels for this ebb and flow of the Baptist mind and spirit. They are a vital part of the ‘jugular’ system [that Paul] Pressler and his political party set out to take over and dominate a decade ago.” Fields’s conservative opponents would have most likely agreed. Their primary aim was, after all, to reclaim the Baptist mind and spirit for their cause, to refashion Southern Baptist identity around inerrancy and the culture wars. Obstreperous editors were only a mild inconvenience. Conservative leaders forced many—including Fields himself—to resign or retire.

History Is Written by the Victors

This battle over denominational identity and heritage was not unique to the Southern Baptist Convention. Nazarene scholar Timothy Smith, responding in the Christian Century to Harold Lindsell’s accusations, argued that Wesleyans, Lutherans, and Calvinists who questioned inerrancy were not caving in to modern biblical scholarship but drawing “upon the writings of the Reformers themselves to affirm our conviction that the meanings, not the words, of biblical passages are authoritative, and that understanding these meanings requires close and critical study of the texts, rather than incantation of supposedly inerrant words.” A young Assemblies of God scholar, observing “the tentacles of inerrancy” that strangled faculty at his church’s educational institutions, noted “that the inerrancy position has never been officially adopted by the General Council and made part of the ‘Statement of Fundamental Truths’”—but this had not stopped church leaders from insisting on inerrancy as a litmus test for true servants of the Assemblies of God. When Concordia Seminary faculty were forced to submit to questioning about their beliefs during the controversy in the Lutheran Church (Missouri Synod), both conservatives and their opponents described the interrogation as a chance to show “how Lutheran we really are and what it means to be Lutheran.” In churches riven by the debate over biblical authority in the 1970s and 1980s, both sides claimed authority through a selective reading of their shared tradition.

Historically, Southern Baptists have opposed the idea of creeds: formal statements of doctrine to which all members of a church must subscribe. Every Baptist is expected to articulate his beliefs for himself. The principle of “soul liberty” or “soul competency” means that each believer is accountable to no one but God. Few principles, however, are absolute in reality. Early Baptists approved confessions that reflected consensus and set boundaries for acceptable beliefs, although they did not recite them in worship. Southern Baptists, alarmed by Darwinism’s challenge to traditional interpretations of the Bible, adopted a “Faith and Message” in 1925 declaring their belief that God created man “as recorded in Genesis.” The convention elaborated on this statement in 1963 after seminary professor Ralph Elliott roiled Southern Baptists by advocating a nonliteral reading of the creation story in his book The Message of Genesis. The SBC emphasized the “proper balance between academic freedom and academic responsibility” in Christian education, but reiterated the fallible nature of any doctrinal statement, the possibility for future revision, and the importance of soul competency.

Conservatives began to suspect that the historic Baptist resistance to creeds provided cover for heterodox interpretation of essential doctrines. They pushed for traditionalist revisions and more rigorous enforcement of statements of faith at the denomination’s seminaries and colleges, and even agitated for emendation of the Baptist Faith and Message. Creeds, far from threatening the Baptist way, were the only way to preserve it. “To warn the inhabitants of the building of what is going on under the foundation is not to declare that every room in the building must be decorated exactly alike,” wrote M. O. Owens. He lamented the theological promiscuity that went on in the guise of “soul competency”: “Tragically, we are using that cliché [‘Nobody tells a Baptist what to believe"] and concept to exalt a humanistic view of the competency of the soul, so that it would become far more definitive and important than the doctrine of the primacy and supremacy of Scripture.”

Moderates were furious, and accused the “creedalists” of betraying the church’s founders. As early as 1969, partly in response to the publication of W. A. Criswell’s inerrantist screed “Why I Preach That the Bible Is Literally True,” a small number of progressive students and professors affirmed a different strain of their heritage by founding the E. Y. Mullins Fellowship. They named the group for a turn-of-the-century theologian who helped the church grapple with modern biblical criticism and ushered in an age of relatively liberal scholarship. When reporters inquired, the fellowship named “the nature of biblical authority” as first among “the most pressing of issues facing us,” along with academic freedom at the church’s seminaries and publishing house, and the denomination’s “minimal constructive response” to social problems like race conflict, poverty, and the Vietnam War. Samuel Hill, a progressive Southern Baptist historian who had recently published a fierce critique of Southern fundamentalism called “Southern Churches in Crisis” (1966), addressed the group’s charter meeting. Members of the fellowship believed history was on their side, if only they could convince fellow believers that the “historic Baptist principle of the freedom of the individual to interpret the Bible for himself”—as well as the progressive, even mainline tilt of the SBC intelligentsia since the 1920s—was the narrative that should win out.

By the late 1970s, things were not going their way. Increasingly marginalized in denominational leadership in the years that followed, moderates branded themselves as “loyalists” and the “traditional mainstream,” lamenting their church’s drift into the embrace of ultraconservative activists like Jerry Falwell and the Christian Reconstructionist movement. “No where in Baptist History, do I see the ‘BRETHREN’ our ‘FOREFATHERS’ ADVOCATING that Baptist churches of like faith and order sign a decree….The way I believe all Baptists believe is that the only ‘CREED’ that Southern Baptists could adopt, if they would adopt one ‘WOULD BE THE NEW TESTAMENT,’” wrote a reader to the Baptist Press in 1977.

Moderates were particularly disturbed by one enthusiasm they noticed among some conservative Southern Baptists: a zeal for Reformed theology. A small but influential cadre of conservative leaders promoted a view of biblical inerrancy that originated in Reformed scholasticism and nineteenth-century Presbyterian and Baptist scholarship, a Calvinist understanding of salvation, and a plan for engagement in politics that contravened classic Baptist conceptions of the division of church and state (not to mention the old southern doctrine of the “spirituality of the church,” which had long discouraged clergy from speaking out on “worldly” matters like slavery and Jim Crow). They traced the long roots (going back at least to the Revolution-era Baptist leader Isaac Backus) of their concern that state-sponsored secularization of American public life, such as the Supreme Court’s decision to ban scripture and prayer from public schools, did not reflect the Founders’ intentions but rather threatened free exercise of religion. “What we demand is religious liberty, not mere toleration,” wrote conservative leader Richard Land.Conservatives also argued—correctly—that in the nineteenth century the dominant theology of many Baptists was far more Reformed than it later became. Therefore, they reasoned, it was the conservatives who were “traditionalist,” who defended “original” Baptist identity.

Moreover, they believed that the only intellectually robust defense of inerrancy lay in the Reformed tradition’s philosophical rationalism—a point that irritated conservatives in the more pietistic, revivalist wing of the SBC. Those conservative Baptists who doubted the authority of Calvin and his successors were “not aware of the basic structures of thought, rightly described as Reformed, that are necessary to protect the very gospel they insist is to be eagerly shared,” said Albert Mohler, who came of age in the early days of the controversy and went on to serve as president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. In the 1980s and 1990s, Reformed theology began to enjoy a renaissance among conservative Southern Baptists, particularly young pastors—because, Mohler said, it was the only intellectual system that could stand up to modern American culture. “If you’re a young Southern Baptist and you’ve been swimming against the tide of secularism…you’re going to have to have a structure of thought that’s more comprehensive than merely a deck of cards with all the right doctrines.” Like the neo-evangelicals who refashioned Reformed presuppositionalism and inerrancy for wide consumption decades earlier, Mohler believed his theology provided a worldview sturdy enough to withstand the perils of modern thought.

The conservatives won their crusade for a new Faith and Message in 2000. The revision added a more authoritarian preamble, calling for Baptists to accept “accountability to each other under the Word of God.” In early drafts, the editors excised all mention of “soul competency” and “priesthood of believers,” but after criticism from the convention, they restored these phrases in the document’s preamble just before publication. The 2000 Baptist Faith and Message stressed a more Reformed theology of salvation, emphasized God-given gender roles (the justification that conservatives in 1984 used to pass a resolution against the ordination of women), and included more explicit condemnation of social “vices” like homosexuality. By this time, many moderates had abandoned the SBC altogether.

The Southern Baptist conservatives won control of their church in two ways. They conquered the institutions of intellectual authority, and they used those institutions to propagate a new narrative of Southern Baptist history and identity. They portrayed their faction as a holy remnant reclaiming the God-given right to govern. Despite the denomination’s long record of accommodating a range of theological opinions and forms of Baptist identity—what some Southern Baptist scholars have called the “Grand Compromise”—they insisted that only those members who shared their confidence in the inerrant Bible still belonged (leaders who favored Reformed theology could not be quite so uncompromising about that).

Just as John Howard Yoder had protested Francis Schaeffer’s account of history and politics, moderate Baptists flailed against the conservative juggernaut. Neither succeeded in halting the conservatives’ rise to cultural and institutional power, but in their fight they made the vital point that the Christian Right—in the unyielding and absolutist form that the movement had taken by the late 1980s—was not synonymous with American evangelicalism. Instead, the Christian Right was the product of a long struggle within evangelicalism, in which leaders with very different opinions and priorities vied to convince believers of their true duties to God and to their fellow man. In a religious tradition in which no single authority had ever reigned for long, in which sola scriptura had released a cascade of quarrels and no faction could resist issuing a creed, a declaration, a “call,” or a list of “fundamentals” to define itself against its kin, Schaeffer, Falwell, and other self-appointed spokesmen of the Christian Right appeared, to casual observers, to reflect some kind of consensus. One must not underestimate the power in this illusion of solidarity—but one should not take it for reality, either.

Excerpted from “Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism” by Molly Worthen with permission from Oxford University Press. Copyright

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