[Apologetics] Baptist Colleges Cut Church Ties

[Art Kelly]

July 22, 2006
Feeling Strains, Baptist Colleges Cut Church Ties 
By ALAN FINDER

GEORGETOWN, Ky. — The request seemed simple enough to
the Rev. Hershael W. York, then the president of the
Kentucky Baptist Convention. He asked Georgetown
College, a small Baptist liberal arts institution
here, to consider hiring for its religion department
someone who would teach a literal interpretation of
the Bible.

But to William H. Crouch Jr., the president of
Georgetown, it was among the last straws in a struggle
that had involved issues like who could be on the
board of trustees and whether the college encouraged
enough freedom of inquiry to qualify for a chapter of
Phi Beta Kappa. 

Dr. Crouch and his trustees decided it was time to end
the college’s 63-year affiliation with the religious
denomination. “From my point of view, it was about
academic freedom,’’ Dr. Crouch said. “I sat for 25
years and watched my denomination become much more
narrow and, in terms of education, much more
interested in indoctrination.’’

Georgetown is among a half-dozen colleges and
universities whose ties with state Baptist conventions
have been severed in the last four years, part of a
broad realignment in which more than a dozen Southern
Baptist universities, including Wake Forest and
Furman, have ended affiliations over the last two
decades. Georgetown’s parting was ultimately amicable.
But many have been tense, even bitter.

In Georgia and Missouri, disputes over who controls
the boards of Baptist colleges led to prolonged
litigation. In Tennessee, a clash over whether Belmont
University in Nashville could appoint non-Baptists to
its board led the Tennessee Baptist Convention to vote
in May to remove the entire board. Belmont’s trustees
are still running the university, and while
negotiations are continuing, the battle for control
could end up in court. 

“The future of Baptist higher education has rarely
been more fragile,’’ R. Kirby Godsey, the former
president of Mercer University in Macon, Ga., said in
a speech in Atlanta in June. The Georgia Baptist
Convention voted last November to sever ties with
Mercer.

The issues vary from state to state. But many Southern
Baptist colleges and their state conventions have been
battling over money, control of boards of trustees,
whether the Bible must be interpreted literally, how
evolution is taught, the propriety of some books for
college courses and of some plays for campus
performances and whether cultural and religious
diversity should be encouraged.

At the root of the conflicts is the question of how
much the colleges should reflect the views of their
denomination. They are part of the continuing battle
among Southern Baptists for control of their church’s
institutions.

More than 20 years ago, theological and cultural
conservatives gained control over moderates in the
Southern Baptist Convention, the denomination’s
broadest body, representing more than 16 million
worshipers. Similar shifts then occurred in many, but
not all, state Baptist conventions, which have
considerable independence.

The struggle has continued. Last month, the Southern
Baptist Convention elected a president who promised to
be “a big-tent conservative” and defeated candidates
supported by the convention’s establishment.

Southern Baptist colleges are affiliated with the
state conventions, and it does not make sense to many
members of the conventions to provide significant
annual subsidies to Baptist colleges that they view as
out of tune with conservative positions on central
religious tenets, including how to interpret the
Bible. “I did feel that Georgetown was not on the same
page as most Kentucky Baptists,’’ said Dr. York, who
was president of the Kentucky Baptist Convention last
year.

But efforts to rein in what many Southern Baptists see
as inappropriate departures from religious orthodoxy
have looked to many professors and college
administrators like efforts to limit academic freedom.

“The convention itself in its national and state
organizations has moved so far to the right that
previous diversity on the faculty and among the
trustees is no longer possible,’’ said Bill Leonard,
dean of the Divinity School at Wake Forest. “More
theological control of the curriculum and the faculty
has been the result.’’

David W. Key, director of Baptist Studies at the
Candler School of Theology at Emory, put it more
starkly. “The real underlying issue is that
fundamentalism in the Southern Baptist form is
incompatible with higher education,’’ Professor Key
said. “In fundamentalism, you have all the truths. In
education, you’re searching for truths.’’

The state conventions do not own the colleges, but in
most cases they approve trustees and provide annual
subsidies. Their power over the boards has often been
at the center of contention, with the stakes often
involving academic direction. 

“We don’t want to cut our ties,’’ said R. Alton Lacey,
president of Missouri Baptist University, which has
been fighting the Missouri Baptist Convention in court
since 2002 over who controls the university’s board.
“We just don’t want the conventions politicizing our
boards.’’

The Georgia Baptist Convention’s severing of ties with
Mercer University followed an unsuccessful effort by
the state convention, which did not have the authority
to appoint the university’s trustees, to gain that
power. Many Baptist leaders were also troubled by a
forum at Mercer on issues affecting gay men and
lesbians, Dr. Godsey, the university’s former
president, said.

Officials at Georgetown had long been concerned that
differences with state Baptists might become
irreconcilable. In 1987, college officials negotiated
an agreement with state Baptist leaders that allowed
either side to end the affiliation, with four years’
notice. Both sides said that they had wanted to
continue the relationship, but that the strains had
recently become acute.

Georgetown asked the Kentucky Baptist Convention two
years ago to allow 25 percent of the college’s
trustees to be non-Baptist, but the proposal was
rejected. Only about half of Georgetown’s students are
Baptist, and less than half of the alumni are Baptist,
Dr. Crouch, the college’s president, said. 

“I realized that our fund-raising depended on getting
non-Baptists on our board,’’ Dr. Crouch said. 

Then, a year ago, the Kentucky convention turned down
a nominee for Georgetown’s board for the first time.
Around the same time, Dr. York asked the college to
look for a religion professor who would teach
theologically conservative positions.

“You ought to have some professor on your faculty who
believes Adam and Eve were the first humans, that they
actually existed,’’ Dr. York said.

Dr. Crouch and Georgetown’s trustees decided it was
time to exercise their escape clause. The college and
the convention wanted to avoid the kind of contention
becoming common in neighboring states.

“I think the fear was that I was going to lead a kind
of takeover,’’ said Dr. York, a professor and
associate dean at the Southern Baptist Theological
Seminary in Louisville. “But I’m only going to fight a
battle that I can win and that I want to win.’’

Kentucky convention delegates voted overwhelmingly in
November to approve a separation; the group agreed to
phase out its $1.4 million annual contribution to
Georgetown over four years, and the college became
self-governing.

Dr. Crouch noted that some Baptist universities that
severed ties with state conventions in the late 1980’s
and early 1990’s have become essentially secular. He
hopes that will not happen at Georgetown. 

“We call ourselves a Christian college grounded in
historic Baptist principles,’’ he said.

Georgetown continues to pursue serious academic
ambitions, like pursuing a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa,
the college honor society. Only 270 colleges and
universities have Phi Beta Kappa chapters, and there
are rigorous standards for new ones. Among the most
important requirements are freedom of inquiry and
expression on campus, along with respect for
religious, ethnic and racial diversity.

A Georgetown requirement that tenured professors be
Christian could pose problems with the honor society.
The college must also improve on a number of specific
standards, including increasing the number of books in
its library and reducing professors’ course loads. Phi
Beta Kappa considers applications over a three-year
cycle, and Dr. Crouch hopes Georgetown will be ready
to reapply in 2009. 

“Phi Beta Kappa is the gold standard,’’ said Rosemary
Allen, the Georgetown provost.

Some of the few students on campus this summer said
they supported Georgetown’s decision to become
independent and to improve its academic standing,
although they acknowledged they had not followed
events closely.

“It’s good to go to a college that’s religious, but it
doesn’t really matter to me,’’ said John Sadlon, a
sophomore. “What matters to me is getting my
education.’’



                           
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