Baptists in America: A History

by Thomas S. Kidd

TRUETT’S AND MULLINS’s views dominated Southern Baptist life in the early twentieth century. While Southern Baptists extolled the virtues of institutional separation of church and state, and revered their history of dissent, they at the same time saw church and state as allies in the promotion of freedom and democracy. As Baptist scholar, preacher, and critic Christopher Canipe has argued, the cherished wall of separation had come to function like a mirror. When Baptists looked at American democracy, they saw themselves.47 This was true not just of Southern Baptists. Northern Baptist liberals routinely trumpeted the ways in which a progressive Social Gospel worked hand in hand with the march of civilization and democracy. A major thrust of Rauschenbusch’s theology included transforming the conception of God from “despotic” to “democratic.” As he concluded his classic book, A Theology for the Social Gospel, “The era of prophetic and democratic Christianity has just begun.”48 Nothing could have signaled any more clearly that many white Baptists had gone from outsiders to insiders and joined the American mainstream.