In the years following Reconstruction, Southern church members, both black and
white, were more likely to belong to Baptist churches than to any other single
denomination. By 1890, 88% of the South's white Baptists were members of churches
affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention.1 And of all white church members in
the South as of 1906, almost one-third (1.82 million of 6.2 million) belonged to churches
affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention.2 Half a century later, in 1952,
sociologists would use Baptist church density as one indicator of a distinct Southern
region.3 And in 1999, sociologist John Shelton Reed would note that with a national
membership of 15 million, the Southern Baptist Convention at the end of the twentieth
century was the largest religious organization in America and the South's "de facto state
Based on these numbers, it seems fair to say that the Southern Baptist Convention
has been an institution of significant cultural power in the South for over a century. But
in the early 1880s this regional institution was only beginning to take its modern shape.
While we tend to think of Baptists as a denomination, the early Southern Baptist
Convention (established in 1845) was less a denominational body than a voluntary
organization whose primary purpose was foreign missions (along with limited domestic
missions and Sunday School work). Completely dependent on the financial contributions
of local churches and state associations, the Southern Baptist Convention had no power
over theological issues or local church policy. Therefore, despite the high percentage of Southern church
affiliation with the Convention, these affiliations before the 1880s were generally loose,
consisting mainly of local churches and Baptist associations making donations to the
Convention's foreign missions work and sending representatives (one per $100) to the
Convention's annual meetings.
Only after Reconstruction, during the era known as the "New South," would the
Convention's leadership embark upon an increasingly concerted campaign to enlist white
Southerners to the cause of building a centralized, regional denomination. As Robert
Weibe points out, "America during the nineteenth century was a society of island
communities. . . . The heart of American democracy was local autonomy."5 The
movement to strengthen a South-wide Baptist Convention, therefore, reflected the
national trend in the late nineteenth century away from local power, embodied in this
case by the local church, and toward regional and national institutions as exemplified by
the Southern Baptist Convention.
This project focuses on this campaign over a forty-year period, 1880-1920, with
particular emphasis on the emergence in the 1880s and 1890s of three agencies -- the
Home Mission Board, the Sunday School Board, and the Women's Missionary Union -- that together would strengthen the power and reach of the Convention throughout the
South. In looking at these three agencies as well as the later 75 million campaign, this
study seeks to answer the following two questions:
- If an interest in missions was neither new in the late-nineteenth century
nor unique to the South, how did the setting of the late-nineteenth
century South make the Convention's missions campaign distinct?
- How did national trends toward business efficiency, professionalization,
and secularization affect the growth of the Convention between 1880
In order to answer these two questions, it is helpful to think of the SBC's development
over this forty year period as (at least) three movements rolled into one. The first, and
perhaps the most meaningful to white Southern Baptists in the 1880s and 1890s, was that
the Convention movement was a Southern movement, a fervent effort to reclaim and
restore a defeated South. Secondly, and seemingly contradictorily, this was a
progressive movement. The Convention's leadership, primarily made up of a growing
class of urban professionals, consistently expressed a belief in the uplift of their more
rural (and resistant) brethren and also made efforts to organize the Convention according
to standards of business efficiency. Finally, the Convention movement was an
expression of fervent religious belief in the soul-saving power of the Gospel and in
Southern Baptists' particular responsibility to evangelize and baptize "all nations." But
even this sacred mission of evangelism was largely a product of more worldly trends,
including the science of social work, the bureaucratic organization of institutions, and
America's increasing cultural and military imperialism. Ultimately, the Convention
movement would express both regional and national ideology, would negotiate between
tradition and change, and would act upon sacred beliefs intricately bound up with secular
The end of Reconstruction in the 1870s marked a turning point for the Southern
Baptist Convention. White Southern "redeemers" reclaimed control of Southern state
governments throughout the 1870s, and the Southern Baptist Convention followed in the
1880s and 1890s with its own form of "home rule" based on the combined efforts of the
Convention's Home Mission Board and Sunday School Board. During and after
Reconstruction both the (Northern) Baptist Home Mission Society and the (Northern)
American Baptist Publication Society considered the war-torn South a mission field.
Northern Baptist Missionaries conducted mission work among former slaves and helped
Southern churches to rebuild. The American Baptist Publications Society supplied
Sunday school literature for Southern Baptist Sunday schools. Both Northern Baptist
organizations formed relationships with Southern Baptist churches and state conventions,
alliances that could not be prohibited by the completely voluntary Southern Baptist
Convention. In the eyes of the leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention, those
regions of the South that maintained relationships with Northern Baptists were lost
territories to be reclaimed by the SBC. In 1892, Southern Baptist Home Mission Board
Secretary I.T. Tichenor would look back on the difficulties the Convention had faced in
the early 1880s, the greatest of these being the relationships between Southern Baptist churches and
Northern Baptist institutions like the Publication Society and Domestic Mission Board:
"[A] survey of the field indicated a great
defeat and a lost cause. Impressed with the conviction that the existence of this
Convention depended upon the resuscitation of its fortunes, the new [Southern Baptist
Home Missions] Board threw itself into the arduous work before it with the
determination to use every proper effort to reclaim its lost territory. . ." [my emphasis]
Their desire to "reclaim" the South "rather than surrendering the field to others"
impressed upon the SBC's leaders the importance of replacing its weak Home Missions
Board with a stronger one in 1882 and in establishing the Sunday School Board in 1891
as the Convention's own publishing house for Sunday school literature. In 1914, the first
Sunday School Board Secretary J.M. Frost would look back on the Board's establishment
in 1891. Frost remembered that the campaign for a Southern Baptist Sunday School
Board was a product of Home Missions Board Secretary Tichenor's sense of "the
imperative need that a people make their own literature."7
"[The establishment of the Sunday School Board] was the settlement of one of the most
vital and momentous questions ever raised in the Convention, and determined the far-
reaching policy, that the Baptists of the South would act for themselves, and not depend
on others [i.e. Northern Baptists] to make their literature or conduct their publication
interests or foster their Sunday school work."
Nowhere in the reports of the establishment of these two Southern Baptist
agencies was there any reference to any theological disagreement with Northern Baptists.
Southern Baptist leaders saw a threat not to their belief but to their desire for regional
autonomy. Their home missions efforts in the late nineteenth-century, therefore, fulfilled
a dual purpose: to save souls and to unite the South under the Convention's control.
This fervent campaign borrowed from the rhetoric of war to explain its role in the
region and throughout the world. Home Mission Board Secretary Tichenor had served as
a chaplain and sharpshooter during the Civil War, and most of the other Convention
leaders, coming of age a decade later, would probably have grown up hearing stories of
Confederate heroism and the "Lost Cause." Now soldiers of Christ, they spoke the
language of war to describe their mission work. "Reclaim[ing] its lost territory" within
the South would lead to the Convention's "conquest of the world" for Christ. The
different regions and peoples of the South were "fields" upon which, under the "heroism
and generalship" of Secretary Tichenor, Southern Baptist home missions workers must
make a "slow but steady advance."9 These are but a few of the many examples of the
conflation of the rhetoric of war with the rhetoric of missions. Southern Baptist
leaders' deeply held belief that they were the instruments of Christ is inextricable from
their struggle for power within the South and, in their eyes, throughout the world.
Also present in the rhetoric of Southern Baptist leaders were references to a New
South, an idea that enjoyed significant currency among many Southerners in the years
following Reconstruction. As Paul Gaston explains, "the New South doctrine would
become, in the 'eighties, the South's major intellectual and moral issue." On the surface
this doctrine of industrial Progress for the South would seem to have been a call for
national homogeneity and unity. However, Gaston argues that in calling for Southern
industry and Progress, the New South spokesmen -- composed mainly of educated
Southern newspaper editors, businessmen, and intellectuals -- were in actuality expressing
a rhetoric of regionalism: "Underlying the [New South spokesmen's] professions of
nationalism . . . were calculations of concrete gains for the region."10 Wilbur J. Cash would make the same point in 1949:
"So far from representing a
deliberate break with the past, the turn to Progress clearly flowed straight out of that past
and constituted in a real sense an emanation from the will to maintain the South in its
Interestingly, Cash would note the same rhetoric of war among the proponents of a "New
South" that the SBC's leaders were using to talk about their missions work:
"[The New South spokesmen's espousal of industry and Progress] was in large part merely
a revolution in tactics. The surrender [of an agrarian "Old South"] contemplated was
only such a surrender as a general in the field makes when he gives up untenable terrain
in order to bring his forces into position to strike more effectively for victory. The New
South meant and boasted of was mainly a South which would be new in this: that it
would be so rich and powerful that it might rest serene in its ancient positions, forever
impregnable. . . .
The language and figures, you will observe, are basically the language and figures
of the Civil War; and the feeling, I am sure, is the feeling of that war also. In the feeling
of the South, Progress stood quite accurately for a sort of new charge at Gettysburg,
which should finally and incontestably win for it the right to be itself for which, in the
last analysis, it had always fought."
The rhetoric of a New South that would, on the surface, come to resemble the
North in terms of industry and Progress, was in actuality a rhetoric of regionalism. The
New South movement, while making few material gains, gave Southern progressives a
rhetoric of renewal that presaged future glory and material wealth for their distinct
region. The goal was not to be vanquished again; defeat had come at the hands of the
Union military but a new and revitalized South would be strong enough in resolve and in
material independence to keep control of its own territory amidst an onslaught of
"Yankeedom."13 The efforts of the Southern Baptist Convention can be seen, therefore,
as part of a larger New South ideology that was at its height when the Convention's
Home Missions Board, Women's Missionary Union, and Sunday School Board were
established. The leaders of these three agencies would embrace Progress and new
business methods in order to create and maintain a region united in opposition to the
influence of Northern Baptists.
The rhetoric of the New South was a rhetoric of urban middle-class progressivism
that did not bear great resemblance to the primarily rural, agrarian South. Similarly, the
campaign to build a regional denomination controlled by the Southern Baptist
Convention was devised and carried out primarily by a small group of urban, middle-
class Southern Baptists.
To give a sense of the constituency that would have to be courted in order to
establish the SBC's regional power, it is helpful here to look more closely at Baptists in
the South who were not among this group of Convention leaders. Despite the
leadership's vision of a New South and a Southern Convention, ministers and
congregants of local country churches, far removed from the Southern cities where
Convention power was concentrated, did not see themselves as part of a larger
institutionalized denomination. To review Weibe, "America during the nineteenth
century was a society of island communities. . . . The heart of American democracy was
local autonomy."14 Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, the Convention would campaign
for the support of these local ministers and congregants. Enlistment of the local churches
in centralized denominational work mirrored trends Weibe describes within larger late-
nineteenth century culture: "By contrast to the personal, informal ways of the community,
the new scheme was derived from the regulative hierarchical needs of urban-industrial
And yet most white Baptists in the South were far-removed from the values and
practices of "urban-industrial life" in the late-nineteenth century. Given the rurality and
localism of Southern Baptists in the 1880s and 1890s, the Convention rhetoric about
"reclaiming" the South is misleading, for it suggests that a Southern Baptist
denomination already existed and need only be reclaimed from Northern influence. In
actuality, such a denominational consciousness did not significantly exist during this
period and would have to be created in order to establish institutional control by the
Convention. Creating denominational consensus was a campaign led by editors of
Baptist newspapers, educated ministers of large urban churches, leaders of the Women's
Missionary Union, and Baptist seminary professors, aimed at the "uplift" and
accompanying enlistment of their more rural brothers and sisters. Campaign methods included
sending Convention-sponsored missionaries throughout the South, distributing free
Sunday school materials to encourage rural churches to begin Convention-sponsored
Sunday school programs, and building mountain schools to educate rural white children.
Paul Harvey's study of white and black Southern evangelicals from
1870-1930 considers the ways in which denominational campaigns such as that of the
Southern Baptists were coercive attempts by middle-class leaders to establish more
"intelligent worship" practices among rural Southerners. His article considers "the
effects of denominationalists as part of a broader, relatively unified effort to implant a
Victorian middle-class decorum in a region still dominated by rural plain folk living and
worshipping in relatively traditional ways."16 Harvey offers a compelling portrait of the
constituency that Convention leaders would attempt to enlist:
"Despite the rapid urbanization of the south in the period from 1880 to 1930, the vast
majority of southern churches were in rural areas. Throughout the region, farmer-
preachers of little formal education exhorted from oral traditions in small, scattered rural
churches. Congregants narrated meaningful conversion experiences in emotional public
testimonies. Physical tactility (hugging, footwashing) and kinetic spiritual expressions
(ring shouts, spiritual dancing) characterized worship gatherings. In short, public
spiritual expressiveness derived from the interaction of whites and blacks in churches,
camp meetings and revivals remained a vital part of southern religious life.
During the 1880s and 1890s, Southern Baptist Convention leaders believed that
these country churches must be brought under the influence of the Convention, both to
strengthen the Convention and to impart a middle-class standard of culture to their more
backward brethren. In its report of 1892, the SBC's Home Mission Board identified the
white Baptists of the Mountain District (including West Virginia, and parts of Virginia,
Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama) as the Board's most
important mission field:
"Our [Home Mission] Board has no where a broader or more inviting field than this, none whose needs for
culture are more urgent. Its present population is largely Baptists. The work of
evangelization among them has been chiefly done by men, who though thoroughly
devoted to the Master's work, and deserving of all praise for what they have
accomplished under so many disadvantages, have not sought to lead their converts to the
higher realms of truth or the broader fields of christian activity. Their churches have
been content to be centers of local influence, seeking for nothing beyond the conversion
of the children of their membership and of those immediately about them. They cherish
no broad ideas of Christian obligation, have never entered into sympathy with the design
of our Redeemer to give the gospel to all the world, and are for the most part living upon
the lowest plane of christian life. . . . [The Baptist missionaries currently in the Mountain
region] are mostly men who are reared among them, have no higher conceptions of
Christian duty and no broader ideas of Christian progress than those among whom they
have lived. Evidently they are inadequate to the task of lifting these people to a higher
level of Christian life."
1892 Home Mission Board Report
The Convention's work among the rural churches of the South, therefore, was
both a campaign for support and a policy of uplift. These two purposes went hand in
hand, for those churches that most stubbornly protected their local autonomy and
traditional worship styles were the same churches that opposed mission work, the sole
ostensible purpose of the Convention's existence. As Harvey explains:
"Among whites, churches in Appalachia and the southern upcountry
best preserved customs derived from the camp-meeting era of the early nineteenth
century, the time of a democratic explosion of Protestant plain-folk fervour. Anti-
mission traditions deeply rooted in these areas resisted the modernizing efforts of
denominationalists. Not coincidentally, these regions, heavily populated by poorer white
farmers, historically were strongholds of unionism, Republicanism and agrarian
Many of these mountain churches would never affiliate with the Convention and would
come to be known as Primitive Baptists. But based on the statistic that only 12% of
white Baptists in the South were not affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention as of
1890, the Primitive Baptists and other unaffiliated Baptists did not make up a significant threat to Convention
affiliation. The Progressive regionalists that made up the Convention's leadership
would come to find that their greatest challenges came from among churches,
associations, and state conventions that did affiliate with the Southern Baptist
Convention, but on their own terms. Much of the best-documented resistance to the
progressive, business-oriented efforts of denominational leaders would come from within
Based on annual reports from the Southern Baptist Convention's meetings during the 1880s and 1890s, arguably the two most transformative decades in the Convention's history, controversies abounded. Ranging from doctrinal controversies to opposition to the creation of new denominational boards, these conflicts actually resemble one another in that they surfaced during the period of the Convention's greatest growth. As such, these "growing pains" during the 1880s and 1890s represent the push and pull that was occurring between local autonomy (sometimes called "religious states' rights" 14 ) and centralized denominational power.
Both sides claimed a number of victories during the period. Denominationalists successfully established the Sunday School Board and Women's Missionary Union, while the "religious states' rights" contingency successfully removed an unorthodox seminary President from office by withholding their Convention dues.15 Given the individualist theology of Baptists and the democratic structure of the Convention, dissenters within the organization could always resist the Convention's corporate decisions, whether by ignoring Convention directives within their own churches and state conventions or by campaigning on the Convention floor to sway a vote in their direction. Baptists who favored local autonomy and state power would continue to be heard within the Convention throughout this era, but the denominationalists would ultimately determine the Convention's future course.
This trend toward centralized bureaucracies was one of the defining features of America in the Gilded Age, and it informs the central argument in Alan Trachtenberg's The Incorporation of America. In his Preface, Trachtenberg argues that the Gilded Age (known in this project as the era of the New South) can be understood, in part, by focusing on the changing nature of the term "corporate." His description of this new corporate model -- in which a small group of managers acts on behalf of a larger corporate body in order to achieve more "far-reaching" ends -- strangely resembles Southern Baptists' move toward denominationalism for the sake of the "far-reaching" goal of evangelizing the world:
"The Gilded Age marked a significant increase in the influence of business in America, corresponding to the emergence of the modern corporate form of ownership. Based on minority ownership -- that is, on the legally established authority of a small group of directors and managers to act in the name of a larger, amorphous body of otherwise unrelated stockholders -- the corporation provided capitalists with a more flexible and far-reaching instrument than earlier forms of ownership such as simple partnerships and family businesses."
Trachtenberg compares this modern form -- corporate ownership of for-profit enterprises -- with the pre-industrial association of "corporate" with religious and communal organizations.
"[Corporation] refers to any association of individuals bound together into a corpus, a body sharing a common purpose in a common name. In the past, that purpose had usually been communal or religious; boroughs, guilds, monasteries, and bishoprics were the earliest European manifestations of the corporate form."
Trachtenberg's argument, by focusing on religion solely as a pre-industrial (outmoded) corporate form and by disregarding religion in his otherwise detailed study of Gilded Age cultural transformation, misses what was perhaps the best evidence for the validity of his argument in the South. Note the similarities between W.W. Barnes' use of the term "denominationalism" and Trachtenberg's term "incorporation" in describing the ways in which some people resisted change:
"The Convention was a new sort of organization within Baptist life and was certain to meet decided opposition from those who were not thoroughly committed to genuine denominationalism."
"[E]conomic incorporation wrenched American society from the moorings of familiar values . . . the process proceeded by contradiction and conflict. The corporate system in business, politics, and cultural institutions engendered opposing views, however inchoate and incomplete that opposition remained."
The South does not figure into Trachtenberg's study of Gilded Age America. He considers it an exception to the trends he sees affecting the rest of America at the end of the nineteenth century. His argument that the South was "underdeveloped" and was a "satellite" of the industrialized North is valid, but his assumption that the South's different economic status is sufficient to assume it did not take part in cultural change is a mistake.20
This project began with Trachtenberg's dismissal. It seemed to me that the cultural trends of the late nineteenth century (toward incorporation, secularization, professionalization, business efficiency, etc.) may be working differently in the South, but must surely be working in some way. The region's continued reliance on agriculture and lack of corporate capital well into the twentieth century led me to look beyond the industrial sector for evidence of Trachtenberg's argument in other areas of Southern life. It was in the growth of the Southern Baptist Convention that the business and cultural trends of late nineteenth and early twentieth century America found form. Southern Baptist churches had the rare ability in the South to generate capital from within the region in the form of offerings (and, after 1891, from the proceeds of Sunday School Board publications), and a portion of this money would be forwarded to state conventions and the regional Southern Baptist Convention, thus providing a financial base that would grow as the Convention expanded its reach throughout the South. This may seem an insignificant source of capital until we consider the fact that Southern Baptists by 1919 conducted a campaign to raise 75 million dollars over a 5-year period, by no means an insignificant sum, particularly in the still underdeveloped South.
The movement to build a Baptist denomination in the South was, in fact, a product of late nineteenth century trends toward centralized bureaucracies. Nothing like it had existed in Baptist life before the late nineteenth century. In this case, rather than seeing religious bodies as a pre-industrial form of organization, this particular religious body was very much a part of all that was taking place around it.
The progressive regionalists who wanted the Convention to be a distinctly Southern denomination touching all parts of Baptist life saw their dreams become reality through the work of the Boards that they fought with their resistant brethren to establish: the Home Mission Board, Woman's Missionary Union, and Sunday School Board. As the twentieth century neared, the Convention had grown beyond needing its leaders to justify its existence. It was now securely established in enough of the South for its denominationalist leadership to take further steps toward efficiency and standardization. The Woman's Missionary Union would establish standards of achievement for its local mission organizations, and the Sunday School Board would inaugurate a teacher-training system and would greatly expand its publication enterprise. These are only a few examples of the many ways that the denomination's leadership gave new meaning to the term "gospel of efficiency." From the perspective of these progressive regionalists, the business model was the best, most "efficient" way to do the work of the Kingdom.
This section offers historical background by providing an overview of the early Southern Baptist Convention before 1880. All other parts of this web project focus on the period 1880-1920.
This section looks at the re-establishment of the Home Mission Board in 1882. The leader of the new Board, I.T. Tichenor, was a former Baptist minister turned progressive industrialist, and the ideology of the New South strongly influenced the Convention's home mission work.
This section traces Southern Baptist women's mission work through two generations of women. It examines the appeal of missions to Southern Baptist women and argues that the Woman's Missionary Union played a central role in the Convention's growth.
This section traces the Sunday School Board from its controversial 1891 establishment to its campaign for support in the South, culminating with the Board's early twentieth century focus on business efficiency and religious orthodoxy.
This section ultimately argues that the Sunday School Board, more than any other Convention venture, unified white Southern Baptists in support of an increasingly corporate Southern Baptist Convention.
In 1919 Southern Baptists embarked upon a path breaking campaign to raise $75 million for the Convention's work. Not only was the financial goal unprecedented, but the way in which the proceeds were allocated by the Convention marked a permanent step toward denominationalism (or incorporation).
This section also considers the significant effects of World War I and other outside pressures that contributed to the fervent fundraising campaign.