May 27, 2002
U.S. Baptists said surprisingly nice things about Hitler
___By Loyd Allen
___McAfee School of Theology
___Have you ever thought about Baptists' seeming reluctance to speak out on larger issues of the world's economic, social and political scene? Baptists' reluctance--particularly Baptists in America and most especially white Baptists from the American South--was due in part to a frontier personal piety, a mass evangelism theology and the remnants of a fabricated cultural superiority.
___I came to this conclusion while writing an article on the Baptist World Alliance congress in Berlin in 1934. An immense Nazi flag, hung where the congress met, was a vivid reminder of the bloody purge executed only a few weeks before by anti-Semitic fascists.
___Most of the BWA delegates spoke out for soul liberty, the kinship of all humanity and the separation of church and state, but too many Baptist leaders did not. Indeed, a number of U.S. Baptists wrote sympathetically of Hitler's Germany.
___John Sampey, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, cautioned against hasty judgment of a leader (Hitler) who had stopped German women from smoking cigarettes and wearing red lipstick in public.
___The Watchman-Examiner carried a letter by Boston pastor John Bradbury. Of the congress, he wrote, "It was a great relief to be in a country where salacious sex literature cannot be sold; where putrid motion pictures and gangster films cannot be shown."
___This focus on personal piety resulted partially from a frontier religious ethic. On the American frontier, where Baptist strength arose in the Second Great Awakening, the most crucial ethical decisions were personal--alcoholism, spousal abuse and violence. Few complex social structures existed on the frontier to attract a sustained moral critique. Baptists equated eliminating the sins of the flesh with Christian living.
___Mass evangelism was a second factor in Baptist blindness to the Nazi evil. Some Baptists believed that evangelism and the world order were two circles that never intersected.
___F.M. McConnell, editor of the Baptist Standard at the time, complained that the BWA congress program gave "too much attention ... to economic and social and political matters." He believed it "far more important that the people ... should get our reasons for worldwide evangelism," according to a 1934 Standard article.
___A delegate from Montgomery, Ala., wrote, "Evangelical Christianity transcends all political and social systems," according to an Alabama Baptist article that appeared that same year. As long as governments, even fascist governments, did not interfere with soul-saving, they could be tolerated.
___This segregation of religious and political realities allowed for violent, racist nationalism. According to the BWA Official Congress Report, German Baptist Paul Schmidt argued that stronger races forcefully overcoming weaker ones is an expression of natural law that Jesus would not have his followers alter.
___This type of argument must have sounded familiar to the slavery-rooted Southern Baptist denomination. On one page of the Alabama Baptist, the 1934 editor praised his home association for having "the purest Nordic blood among a larger proportion of its people than any other county in the state."
___Southern Baptist Convention President M.E. Dodd of Louisiana defended Hitler's persecution of the Jews. He wrote that though Jews "were not to be blamed for the intelligence and strength, so characteristic of their race, which put them forward," they could be blamed for using those characteristics to get influential positions "for self-aggrandizement to the injury of the German people." Besides, Dodd continued, most of the 200,000 Jewish refugees who went to Germany from Eastern Europe "were communist agitators against the government."
___Small wonder the 1948 Jewish declaration of independence drew little or no comment from Baptists.
___
___Loyd Allen is professor of church history and spiritual formation at the McAfee School of Theology. His column is distributed by EthicsDaily.com, an online publication of the Baptist Center for Ethics
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