Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Uneasy in Babylon Southern Baptist Conservative and American Culture by Barry Hankins Uneasy in Babylon: Southern Baptist Conservative and American Culture by Barry Hankins. AKA Barry Gene Hankins. Gender: Male Race or Ethnicity: White Sexual orientation: Straight Occupation: Historian. Nationality: United States Executive summary: Jesus and Gin. Father: Robert James Hankins Mother: Shirley Ruth Jackson Wife: Jennifer Ann Stubbs (m. 1978) Son: Dixon Jackson Daughter: Johanna Marie. Author of books: God's Rascal: J. Frank Norris & the Beginnings of Southern Fundamentalism ( 1996 , biography) Uneasy in Babylon: Southern Baptist Conservatives and American Culture ( 2002 , religion) The Second Great Awakening and the Transcendentalists ( 2004 , religion) Francis Schaeffer and the Shaping of Evangelical America ( 2008 , biography) American Evangelicals: A Contemporary History of a Mainstream Religious Movement ( 2008 , religion) Jesus and Gin: Evangelicalism, the Roaring Twenties and Today's Culture Wars ( 2010 , religion) Baptists in America: A History ( 2015 , religion) Uneasy in Babylon: Southern Baptist Conservative and American Culture by Barry Hankins. Barry Hankins, Uneasy in Babylon: Southern Baptist Conservatives in American Culture , Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2002. 344 pages. Reviewed by Justin Watson, Le Moyne College, for the Journal of Southern Religion . U neasy in Babylon: Southern Baptist Conservatives in American Culture , by Barry Hankins, who teaches history and church-state studies at Baylor University, is an excellent addition to what has become a growing body of scholarship on the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). Like much of this work, Uneasy in Babylon concentrates on conflicts within the SBC since the 1970s. But Hankins is less interested in telling us how the "Fundamentalists" of the SBC "took over" but more interested in examining why the leaders of that movement felt it necessary to do so. Hankins aims to provide us with "one interpretation of SBC conservatives, the first book-length, scholarly work about them." (12) " Hankins is going against the common notion that SBC conservatives are reasserting the southernness (read racism, patriarchy, and general backwardness) of the SBC. " Hankins�s title, Uneasy in Babylon , is a play upon Rufus Spain's At Ease in Zion (1967) which depicted the close relationship between Southern Baptists and southern culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By the late twentieth century, however, SBC conservatives perceived that this southern Zion was long gone and America had become Babylon, a secular culture hostile to faith. SBC conservatives elected to actively resist this culture and decided to begin by ousting those SBC moderate leaders who seemed too much at ease in Babylon. In other words, Hankins tells us that the conflict between SBC conservatives and moderates was based on contrasting perceptions of American culture. Hankins is going against the common notion that SBC conservatives are reasserting the southernness (read racism, patriarchy, and general backwardness) of the SBC. By examining the development and thinking of specific conservative leaders, such as Albert Mohler, Richard Land, and Adrian Rodgers, Hankins is able to demonstrate that important influences upon them were neither southern nor Baptist, but more broadly national and evangelical. In particular, the thinking of evangelicals Carl F.H. Henry and Francis Schaeffer provided SBC conservatives with a perception and analysis of American culture that has motivated and guided their movement. Rather than a reassertion of a traditional regional culture, the SBC conservative movement represents the nationalization of SBC identity and a continuing engagement with American culture, albeit usually in dissent. Hankins outlines the conservative outlook and its basic coherence in his initial chapters. The remainder of the book demonstrates how this outlook has operated in specific circumstances, such as at Southern Seminary in Louisville, or in the context of specific issues, such as church-state, abortion, and the role of women. Hankins devotes an interesting final chapter to SBC conservatives and race. "For conservatives," Hankins observes, "race is the one topic where progressives were right." (243) This stance is reflected in the 1995 convention's resolution on racial reconciliation and continuing efforts to increase African American SBC membership. "The question for conservatives then was not whether they would revert to such racism," writes Hankins, "but whether race would become a priority for them." (243) Most of my difficulties with this book are a specialist's quibbles over details that I will not mention here. I was disappointed, however, that the SBC's Disney boycott—fine example of cultural dissent that could have easily been the subject of a chapter—was mentioned in passing just once. A more serious difficulty is that as Hankins discusses specific issues we hear less and less from leaders, such as Adrian Rodgers, who articulate the conservative outlook in what Hankins calls a "populist" mode. This less nuanced and less coherent version of what the SBC conservative rank- and-file more often hear and read almost disappears in the later chapters. A more consistent inclusion of the populist version of the conservative message would have been helpful. Beyond the usefulness of Uneasy in Babylon in understanding SBC conservatives, Hankins provides a sound model for the study of controversial movements, movements that inspire strong feelings about important issues. While Hankins identifies himself as someone who generally sympathizes with SBC moderates and travels in moderate circles, he tells us, "I can only say that my goal in this book is to understand and explain the conservatives and not to refute them." (12) He hears his subject out but he seldom lets them get away with anything. Rather than sounding an alarm against the advancing barbarians, Hankins's attempt to understand and explain, not refute, is meant to move the scholarly discussion, not a partisan or ecclesiastical agenda, forward. Justin Watson, Le Moyne College. � 1998-2003 by The Journal of Southern Religion. All rights reserved. ISSN 1094-5234. Mohler’s turn to Trump is the crowning flip-flop of his career. Many, including Mohler’s friends and colleagues, have pointed out that his decision to favor Trump is consistent with a career marked as much by ambition as conviction. (RNS) — One of the most prominent evangelical leaders in the #NeverTrump movement has defected to the Trump loyalist side. After breaking ranks four years ago with fellow evangelical leaders and calling Trump a “sexual predator” who “fails the baseline test of character,” Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President Albert Mohler announced via video this week that he had changed his mind. Mohler said he has decided to vote for Trump in November and plans to vote for Republican presidential candidates for the rest of his life, given the party’s views on issues like abortion and Supreme Court justices. Mohler even offered a mea culpa for his previous opposition, saying, “In retrospect, I made my vote of minimal importance … There’s a bit of regret in that.” The leader’s about-face has mystified many, given that none of his current justifications for endorsing the president address his previous criticisms. But others, including some of Mohler’s friends and colleagues (full disclosure: I have known Mohler since childhood), have pointed out that his decision is consistent with a career marked as much by ambition as conviction. As a fresh-faced student at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, in Louisville, Kentucky, in the early 1980s, Mohler hardly cut the figure as a paragon among far-right conservatives. As Bill Leonard, Mohler’s church history professor at SBTS reflects, “In my experience and the experience of others, he was mostly an academic and not a part of the conservative contingent at the school. There was no sign that he was going toward the hard right.” But Leonard, founding dean and professor of divinity emeritus of Wake Forest University School of Divinity, says that Mohler’s theology quickly evolved in the ’80s when theological conservatives moved to take over the Southern Baptist Convention. Mohler pivoted to the right just as it became clear that conservative factions were going to win. “I think you can make the case that there was an expediency to Al’s hard-right turn in those days,” says Leonard, author of “Baptist Ways: A History.” “He saw where things were headed in the denomination and turned toward it.” One of Mohler’s most stunning theological flip-flops came at the denomination’s gathering in Kansas City in 1984, when SBC conservatives introduced a resolution declaring that only men were qualified to serve as church pastors and that women should instead concern themselves with the “building of godly homes.” His opposition was so strong that he helped purchase an ad in the Louisville Courier-Journal declaring that God is “an equal opportunity employer.” The resolution passed despite Mohler’s fierce opposition (though he later preferred to say he merely “took umbrage”). Rather than fight on, Mohler simply changed his position on women in ministry. His capitulation paid off. In 1989, the new conservative ascendancy appointed Mohler editor of The Christian Index, the official newspaper for Georgia Baptist Convention, where he “showed himself to be an incisive and aggressive crusader for biblical orthodoxy and conservative social policy,” according to historian Jeffery L. Sheler. In 1993, Mohler became president of his alma mater at 33, and, despite his age, set about purging theological moderates from the faculty and reshaping the institution into a redoubt of right-wing evangelical theology. But Mohler’s aspirations stretched beyond the borders of the seminary’s 100-acre campus. In the decade that followed, Mohler launched a conservative talk radio show, published right-leaning opinion columns in secular news outlets and became a regular defender of traditional values on “Larry King Live” and other TV talk shows. The profits he reaped from his industry are a matter of conjecture, since he funneled them through a corporation, registered at the seminary, called Fidelitas, Inc., which doesn’t disclose its revenues. Barry Hankins, chair of Baylor University’s history department, who interviewed Mohler extensively for his book, “Uneasy in Babylon: Southern Baptist Conservatives and American Culture,” said, “I’ve always believed (Mohler) wanted to be president of Southern Seminary and the SBC’s most influential theologian. The problem is he’s spent way more time on culture wars over the past 20 years than on theology.” Randall Balmer, a Dartmouth University historian of American religion, quoted a Southern Baptist friend who put it more succinctly: “Al Mohler is a soundbite in search of a theology.” One of Mohler’s chief foils in this period was Bill Clinton, whom Mohler called “a living demonstration of the fact that character matters and that a lack of character can be fatal for leadership” and relentlessly attacked the president as morally unfit to lead. (No wonder Mohler stated flatly in 2016, “If I were to support, much less endorse Donald Trump for president, I would actually have to go back and apologize to former President Bill Clinton.”) All the while, Mohler was quietly expanding his denominational influence. He engineered the appointment of two of his employees to the presidencies of other Southern Baptist seminaries. His long-time protégé, Russell Moore, now heads the SBC’s public policy arm, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. Other former students now serve as the presidents of LifeWay Christian Resources, the SBC’s publishing wing, and the convention’s two primary evangelistic efforts, the North American Mission Board and the International Mission Board. In November of last year, Mohler grasped the last position of power that had eluded him, as he accepted a nomination to be elected SBC president at the denomination’s annual meeting in June. As much as he’d already made the SBC into his own image, 2020 was shaping up to be the dawn of a new Mohler era. Then the coronavirus struck. The June meeting was cancelled for the first time since World War II, and North Carolina pastor J.D. Greear’s current term as president was extended for another year. The postponement introduces uncertainty into Mohler’s plans. While Donald Trump’s performance has led to divisions in the denomination that mirror America’s wider rifts, his anti-Trumpism in an election year would almost certainly imperil his profile in the SBC. In February, a pro-Trump splinter group, the “Conservative Baptist Network,” formed to fight what they believe is creeping liberalism in the denomination. Members have decried “woke” efforts to promote racial justice and other “democratic socialist” issues, and they have suggested that leaders such as Russell Moore, who remains anti-Trump, be reprimanded or removed. The SBC may be understood to be, as Duke Divinity School’s Baptist studies professor Curtis Freeman put it, “the party of Trump at prayer.” In another sense, however, Mohler’s belated reconciliation with the Trump majority is representative of his movement’s own cultural clashes, its anti-Clintonian moral stand in the ’90s and its submission to Trump. It reads like a case study of 21 st -century evangelicalism. For Mohler, it must feel like the 1980s all over again. He finds himself out of step with a convention rushing to the right, on the record in an October 2016 Washington Post oped lambasting Trump for “racial signaling” and “crude nationalism.” His summation of the infamous Hollywood Access tape’s “horrifying statements” and “objectification of women” seems to impugn the moral judgment of the very people he needs to vote for him next summer. With an increasingly “militant right flank in the SBC,” said Heath Carter, professor of American Christianity at Princeton Theological Seminary, Mohler “sees the way the winds are blowing in the Convention and decides this is not his fight anymore.” The only real casualty in this fiasco is Mohler’s legacy. As long as he remained a Never Trumper, he might have been able to refute attacks against his integrity; his flip to Trump robs him of this last dignity. In a 2016 interview with Don Lemon, he warned fellow Christians who would compromise their convictions for political expediency: “Long term, I am afraid people are going to remember evangelicals in this election for supporting the unsupportable and defending the absolute indefensible.” Mohler’s right about that. Years from now, people will remember. Uneasy in Babylon: Southern Baptist Conservative and American Culture by Barry Hankins. Barry Hankins, Uneasy in Babylon: Southern Baptist Conservatives in American Culture , Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2002. 344 pages. Reviewed by Justin Watson, Le Moyne College, for the Journal of Southern Religion . U neasy in Babylon: Southern Baptist Conservatives in American Culture , by Barry Hankins, who teaches history and church-state studies at Baylor University, is an excellent addition to what has become a growing body of scholarship on the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). Like much of this work, Uneasy in Babylon concentrates on conflicts within the SBC since the 1970s. But Hankins is less interested in telling us how the "Fundamentalists" of the SBC "took over" but more interested in examining why the leaders of that movement felt it necessary to do so. Hankins aims to provide us with "one interpretation of SBC conservatives, the first book-length, scholarly work about them." (12) " Hankins is going against the common notion that SBC conservatives are reasserting the southernness (read racism, patriarchy, and general backwardness) of the SBC. " Hankins�s title, Uneasy in Babylon , is a play upon Rufus Spain's At Ease in Zion (1967) which depicted the close relationship between Southern Baptists and southern culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By the late twentieth century, however, SBC conservatives perceived that this southern Zion was long gone and America had become Babylon, a secular culture hostile to faith. SBC conservatives elected to actively resist this culture and decided to begin by ousting those SBC moderate leaders who seemed too much at ease in Babylon. In other words, Hankins tells us that the conflict between SBC conservatives and moderates was based on contrasting perceptions of American culture. Hankins is going against the common notion that SBC conservatives are reasserting the southernness (read racism, patriarchy, and general backwardness) of the SBC. By examining the development and thinking of specific conservative leaders, such as Albert Mohler, Richard Land, and Adrian Rodgers, Hankins is able to demonstrate that important influences upon them were neither southern nor Baptist, but more broadly national and evangelical. In particular, the thinking of evangelicals Carl F.H. Henry and Francis Schaeffer provided SBC conservatives with a perception and analysis of American culture that has motivated and guided their movement. Rather than a reassertion of a traditional regional culture, the SBC conservative movement represents the nationalization of SBC identity and a continuing engagement with American culture, albeit usually in dissent. Hankins outlines the conservative outlook and its basic coherence in his initial chapters. The remainder of the book demonstrates how this outlook has operated in specific circumstances, such as at Southern Seminary in Louisville, or in the context of specific issues, such as church-state, abortion, and the role of women. Hankins devotes an interesting final chapter to SBC conservatives and race. "For conservatives," Hankins observes, "race is the one topic where progressives were right." (243) This stance is reflected in the 1995 convention's resolution on racial reconciliation and continuing efforts to increase African American SBC membership. "The question for conservatives then was not whether they would revert to such racism," writes Hankins, "but whether race would become a priority for them." (243) Most of my difficulties with this book are a specialist's quibbles over details that I will not mention here. I was disappointed, however, that the SBC's Disney boycott—fine example of cultural dissent that could have easily been the subject of a chapter—was mentioned in passing just once. A more serious difficulty is that as Hankins discusses specific issues we hear less and less from leaders, such as Adrian Rodgers, who articulate the conservative outlook in what Hankins calls a "populist" mode. This less nuanced and less coherent version of what the SBC conservative rank- and-file more often hear and read almost disappears in the later chapters. A more consistent inclusion of the populist version of the conservative message would have been helpful. Beyond the usefulness of Uneasy in Babylon in understanding SBC conservatives, Hankins provides a sound model for the study of controversial movements, movements that inspire strong feelings about important issues. While Hankins identifies himself as someone who generally sympathizes with SBC moderates and travels in moderate circles, he tells us, "I can only say that my goal in this book is to understand and explain the conservatives and not to refute them." (12) He hears his subject out but he seldom lets them get away with anything. Rather than sounding an alarm against the advancing barbarians, Hankins's attempt to understand and explain, not refute, is meant to move the scholarly discussion, not a partisan or ecclesiastical agenda, forward. Justin Watson, Le Moyne College. � 1998-2003 by The Journal of Southern Religion. All rights reserved. ISSN 1094-5234. Uneasy in Babylon: Southern Baptist Conservative and American Culture by Barry Hankins. Uneasy in Babylon: Southern Baptist Conservatives and American Culture . By Barry Hankins. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002. 344 pp. $54.50, cloth; $17.95, paper. Founded in 1845 to allow slaveholders to receive appointment as missionaries, Southern Baptist Convention was a product of the antebellum South. Along with Methodists and Presbyterians, who also split over slavery, the creation of the Southern Baptist Convention foreshadowed the national split that led to the Civil War. The convention kept some of that split alive, remaining a separate entity after the war ended and becoming more deeply a part of southern religious culture. Southern Baptists could be found at every social level of the white American South, from the yeoman farmer the deep South to the merchant on the seaboard to the planter culture. In the twentieth century, the schismatic southern churches began conversations with their northern counterparts about reunion. Methodists took the lead in 1939. Presbyterians discussed the issue longer, reuniting in the late 1970s. Baptists north and south also had discussions and signed comity agreements, promising not to encroach the other's territory, but Southern Baptists by the end of the 1950s were firmly committed to a separate and distinct identity. By the 1970s, the Southern Baptist Convention had millions of members in all fifty states. The convention pursued a national identity, hoping not to merge with the Baptists of the north, but to overtake them. In addition to the mother seminary, the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in the border state of Kentucky, Southern Baptists had a seminaries in Texas, North Carolina, and Louisiana. However, they also had seminaries in non- southern Kansas and in quite non-southern San Francisco. This geographical diversity reflected something of a social and theological diversity among Southern Baptist leaders and laity. The convention had a few liberals, largely in the east and in some urban areas, a large number of fundamentalists, and large number in the middle. Holding the denomination together was a "Grand Compromise," a unifying theme of missions and Southern Baptist identity that united disparate parts as Southern Baptists. Regardless of one's individual theology, Southern Baptists had a shared language and shared identity that allowed liberals, conservatives, and people in between to unite. The compromise was certainly tested significantly in the twentieth century, with Southern Baptists arguing about many of the same issues that divided Presbyterians and Northern Baptists. Southern Baptists alone did not divide. For the Baptists of Dixie, the fracturing would not begin until 1979, when theological conservatives launched a movement to reshape the convention in a more uniformly conservative manner. Like Baptists and Presbyterians of the north, Southern Baptists would split. Unlike these denominations, which saw conservatives depart, the Southern Baptist Convention became dominated by the conservative faction and many of the supporters of the "Grand Compromise" departed. Such is the context necessary to follow Barry Hankins' well-written study of the theology and social view of the conservative leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention. No shortage of books exists on the takeover (the non-fundamentalist term) or conservative resurgence (the term of the current leadership). Hankins has not given us another book detailing the takeover. There are plenty of these books and many of them are strident and hortatory, either celebrating the protection of the convention from a slid into mainline liberal decay or decrying the theft of the denomination by fundamentalists masquerading as true Baptists. The goal with both of these is to convert people to the moderate or conservative cause, perhaps a noble cause, but of little value to those who seek to understand the nature of Southern Baptist conservatism. Barry Hankins' work stands outside this genre and joins a small but growing number of mainstream studies published by university presses that analyze developments in Southern Baptist life from the perspective of the trained professional historian. Hankins aims to describe the theological background and social view of SBC conservative leaders, contrasting that with the background of the former leaders. He contends that the conservative leaders, themselves a diverse lot, are less insular than the earlier regime of Southern Baptist life. Their "openness" comes from their embrace of the evangelical subculture. Hankins points out that men like Al Mohler, Richard Land, Adrian Rogers, Timothy George, and Paige Patterson, all have affinities with the type of Christianity embodied in the National Association of Evangelicals. All of these men, likewise, have either pastoral or educational experiences outside the region of the SBC and the institutions of the SBC. In this sense, the new SBC has a brand of ecumenism of the right, while the old SBC was in many ways its own entity with little dialogue outside its own world. The new conservatives, though, do possess a certain insularity or isolation (my words, not Hankins). Therein is his thesis. Southern Baptist conservatives "are convinced that American culture has turned hostile toward traditional forms of faith and that the South has become more like the rest of the United States than ever before. . . . [T]hey are seeking to put America's largest denomination at the head of what they perceive to be a full-scale culture war." According to Hankins, the South has changed along with Southern Baptists. Once at ease in Zion, as the title and thesis of Rufus Spain's 1967 book on Southern Baptists proposes, the denomination was at home in a Southern culture that it reflected and reinforced. Moderates were very much part of that southern culture and promoted a Southern Baptist insularity. There was plenty of irony in this insulation. By remaining in a Southern Baptist cocoon, the Southern Baptist leaders were able to bring some mainline type perspectives into the denomination. Theological and social conservatives in the denomination became increasingly frustrated and sought ways to counter what they perceived as liberal drift. Their contacts outside the Southern Baptist world in the arena of the conservative evangelical subculture provided these leaders the tools the needed to win the support of many rank and file Southern Baptists. The conservatives claimed that their views were the historic Baptist views and that moderate views were shaped by culture and then baptized into religious language. Once in power, Southern Baptist conservatives claimed that the Baptist tradition had always been counter-cultural. With the denomination firmly in the shadow of conservative evangelicalism, Southern Baptist leaders began addressing social views such as abortion, race, religious liberty and church-state separation, and women in ministry in ways that ran against the dominant views of American culture. The old Southern Baptist Convention reflected the world that was its home, the American South. The new Southern Baptist Convention challenged that world. According to Hankins, Southern Baptists were now part of American evangelicalism, the South was less Southern, and Southern Baptists were waging a culture war in the world but not of the world. Hankins also demonstrates that Southern Baptist identity is more nuanced than one might suspect. The conservatives are themselves diverse. He points out that the banner of inerrancy, the talisman that conservatives used to oust moderates, has multiple meanings among their tribe. For the average Southern Baptist supporter, the populist, the term means a literalist hermeneutic that demands a young Earth, biblical incompatibility with evolution, rejection of female ordination, and a reading of the Bible that dismisses higher criticism. However, this populist understanding is not, Hankins proposes, the definition of inerrancy actually embraced by many of the conservative leaders. Their understanding of the word and the populist understandings of the word differed. Their use of the word united these groups. Hankins also challenges some non-conservative, moderate Baptist interpretations of the conservative takeover of the denomination. A classic charge of moderates against the conservatives is that they have departed from Baptist distinctives. They are, in fact, not real Baptists. Hankins not only avoids these types of conclusions, he challenges them. He argues that the conservative movement does stand in a certain tradition of Baptist life that extends back to the 1600s. They are not the only piece of the Baptist quilt or the only stream that flows into the Baptist lake, but they are a part. Hankins goes to great lengths in his chapter on conservatives and religious liberty to argue that the rejection by conservatives of strict separation as the one and only historic Baptist position does have some historical basis. There is no single Baptist metanarrative that either conservatives or moderates can claim. What both can claim is that they stand in one of several historic Baptist traditions, and Hankins makes this point well. Hankins clear arguments are based on numerous primary documents of moderates and conservatives alike. His bibliography not only supports his text, it will be of great assistance to other scholars who will explore this yet-to-be exhausted topic. The great strength of his sources can be found in the numerous interviews that Hankins conducted with large numbers of conservative leaders. For several years, Hankins gathered oral histories of important figures in the conservative movement of the convention. These interviews are the heart of his study. Uneasy in Babylon has continued the conversation about developments in the nation's largest protestant denomination. Several questions, not answered in the book, are raised by my reading of the book. I do want to know to what extent the Southern Baptist Convention is a national movement and to what extent the conservative leadership reflect non-southern identities. There is little doubt that the denomination is geographically national and that the new leadership has embraced an identity with the non-southern evangelical subculture. I wonder, though, what motivated the majority of Southern Baptist Convention messengers from 1979-1990 to vote for movement conservatives as convention president. What did the conservative movement have that appealed to these people? Were the supporters of the conservatives attracted to them because the leaders had ties to non-southern conservative religious movements? Or were they attracted to the conservative leadership because they suspected the old guard leadership had left the southern ways? I suspect it was the latter. Religious conservatives, with their ties to non-Southern Baptist conservatives, tapped into southern nostalgia. The conservatives gained control because they were more southern than the moderates, not less so. The Southern Baptist Convention's conservative shift under the rubric of inerrancy has often been compared with the rise of conservatives under the same rubric among the Missouri Synod Lutherans. I think this comparison has limited value, but I do think the convention needs to be examined in the light of larger trends in religious life. The larger trends, though, may be issues connected to southern culture. There was another schism in religious life that parallels the time of the Southern Baptist Convention conflict, but is rarely compared. In the late 1970s, when northern and southern Presbyterians reunited, large numbers of southern Presbyterians formed the Presbyterian Church in America, concerned that the northern branch was too liberal for the faith. The growth of this denomination in the South during the 1970s and 1980s parallels much of the successful growth of the conservative movement in the Southern Baptist Convention. Certainly there is something quite southern about religious conservatism of the Baptist and Presbyterian variety. Uneasy in Babylon is the latest of several studies of Southern Baptist life. This book is the second contribution made by the author. Hankins 1996 study of early twentieth century Baptist fundamentalist, J. Frank Norris, was a revision of his dissertation. David Stricklin's 1999 examination of the Southern Baptist Left, A Genealogy of Dissen t (University of Kentucky), applied the same objective-leaning approach to the other wing of Baptist life. These non-polemical studies are adding to our understanding of the complex world of Southern Baptist identity and assessing that institution's place in the larger world of American religion and culture.