The Southern Baptists of 2018 are not the same as their counterparts a half-century ago, when I was born to Southern Baptist parents and began my immersion in the church. They’re still overwhelmingly white, of course, and still concentrated in the South and Southwest (the Bible Belt and the Sun Belt). But there are immense critical differences. One of the most important of these is today’s SBC’s wholesale embrace of complementarian gender dogma and the concomitant view that a wife should “submit herself graciously” to her husband’s leadership and authority, as a declaration written up and adopted at the SBC meeting in 1998 put it. That was only 20 years ago; there was no such official Southern Baptist statement prior to that time.
The Baptists of my southern childhood did not see female submission as a doctrinal issue. In fact, members of my church and of the denomination as a whole held a wide spectrum of views. My mother, a lifelong Baptist and highly active member of Chattanooga’s First Baptist Church, was a feminist who helped found the city’s first chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW). She did not, then or ever, see the slightest contradiction between her devout religious convictions and her belief in basic, commonsense gender parity in the public and private spheres, views shared and supported by my (then Republican) father and the ministers on the church staff. Some of Mom’s friends were more conservative and suspicious of feminism as a movement, but I’m pretty sure that if you’d suggested in 1970 that they should submit to their husbands, graciously or not, those steel magnolias would have laughed you right out of the narthex.
Baptists at that time certainly appeared to see abortion as a women’s issue. When the Supreme Court decriminalized abortion in 1973’s Roe v Wade decision, Southern Baptist leaders appeared to support access to abortion, at least under circumstances with which they could sympathize. Ninety percent of Texas Baptists surveyed in 1969 had affirmed that their state’s abortion laws should be loosened. A 1970 poll by the Baptist Sunday School Board suggested that 70 percent of SBC pastors upheld a right to abortion to safeguard the mother’s health, 64 percent in situations of fetal deformity, and 71 percent for pregnancies occurring from rape. In 1971, SBC messengers (the mix of members and pastors who vote at conventions) passed a resolution affirming “the sanctity of human life, including fetal life” while also calling on Southern Baptists “to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother”—a rather capacious formula. After the 7-2 ruling in Roe was announced, W.A. Criswell, one of the denomination’s most prominent and respected leaders, praised the court’s decision, publicly asserted his view that abortion is not murder, and argued that “what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.”