John Clark, Billy Graham and Baptist Trends towards Cultural Legitimacy [microform] / Jimmy Thomas Davis.
By tracing and connecting significant shifts in Baptist political and theological rhetoric to trends within the larger culture, this rhetorical transformation can be seen as establishing and maintaining these groups as significant forces in American culture. Before 1800, Baptists were against infant...
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| Format: | Microfilm Book |
| Language: | English |
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1987.
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| Summary: | By tracing and connecting significant shifts in Baptist political and theological rhetoric to trends within the larger culture, this rhetorical transformation can be seen as establishing and maintaining these groups as significant forces in American culture. Before 1800, Baptists were against infant baptism, regarding baptism as a matter of individual choice. This privitized religion by emphasizing personal salvation, reflecting the individualism which was the foundation of their commitment to church/state separation. During the Great Revival of the early 1800s, Baptist views shifted from "Calvinistic" limited atonement to salvation for the asking, while retaining a heavy emphasis on God's sovereignty in all matters. At this time their rhetoric also moved away from political subjects such as church/state separation toward spiritual matters (salvation, questions of religious practice). These shifts reflected the rise of democratic individualism in Post-Revolutionary America, and the decline of church influence over civic matters. From 1800 to World War I, pressure for social and religious orthodoxy increased, especially in the South. This orthodoxy, accompanied by a defensive attitude toward the North, was perpetuated by the agrarian society of the South and the homogeneity of population characteristic of the region. Today, however, because of radical cultural changes in the 1960s and 1970s, this orthodoxy is challenged, and Southern Baptists face a stuggle between moderates, who appear willing to adjust their theology to meet the demands of contemporary culture, and hard-line fundamentalists, who insist on strict adherence to doctrine developed in an earlier era. (MM) |
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| Item Description: | ERIC Note: Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Speech Communication Association (Boston, MA, November 5-8, 1987). ERIC Document Number: ED290190. |
| Physical Description: | 15 pages. |
| Reproduction Note: | Microfiche. |
| Action Note: | committed to retain 20240101 20490101 Alliance Shared Trust https://www.coalliance.org/shared-print-archiving-policies |