RT Article
T1 “To Form a More Perfect Union”: The Moral Example of Southern Baptist Thought and Education, 1890-1920
JF Religion and American culture
VO 8
IS 2
SP 179
OP 204
A1 Heffron, John M.
LA English
PB Cambridge University Press
YR 1998
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1761400185
AB Conservative politically, inured to the new empiricism, and yet the least secularized of the Protestant ideologies, Southern Baptistism was a “guiding light” in the ascendancy of southernness in American education. Its primitivist Christian values—a Christology in which the God of Scripture and the God of Nature were united in the person of Christ (and in the Community of all persons) - tended to reinforce the atavistic, agricultural values of the Old South while blocking the encroachment of avowedly more modern urban-industrial ones. Its appropriation of the rhetoric of nineteenth-century evidentialism added credence to credulity, substituting rational belief for narrow sectarianism. Its ethic of hard work, temperance, and self-sacrifice was bound to the soil and rooted in the southern country and mission school, where agricultural and religious instruction were the traditional mainstays.
DO 10.1525/rac.1998.8.2.03a00020