Brownwood: Southern Baptist Rhetoric

Southern Baptist Rhetoric
Stephen J. Pullum 

Carl Kell and Raymond Camp.  In the Name of the Father:  The Rhetoric of the New Southern Baptist Convention. Carbondale, Ill: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999.  vii + 176 pages.  $34.95. 

If people have been wondering what exactly has been going on in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) over the past twenty years, reading this book will put an end to their questions. Carl Kell and Raymond Camp contend that, since 1979, "the South has been the scene of a rhetorical civil war . . . for the hearts and souls of fifteen million people" in the world's largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Church.  This "war" has raged between "those persons loyal to the exclusively male pulpit autocracy in Nashville, which is the home of the male-dominated denominational Executive Committee, and those dissidents organizationally confederated in Atlanta, Richmond, and elsewhere in the South" (1).

The authors argue that the "climate [of the SBC] is fundamentally repressive" in that it "neither allows for nor encourages dissent among or within member churches" (4).  Since the 1979 takeover of the SBC by "loyalists," the all-male oligarchy has preached a "rhetoric of fundamentalism," a "rhetoric of inerrancy," and a "rhetoric of exclusion" wherein "attack," "exposition,"  "expulsion," "fear," "blame," and "accusation" are commonplace (5).  All of these rhetorics are propelled primarily by the oral word through pulpit sermons, beginning with the presidents of the SBC and trickling down to local congregations.  As a consequence of these rhetorics, suggest Kell and Camp, the denomination is "a failed communication system" that "does not encourage . . . open and free communication" or "spirited dissent."  Moreover it does not use the pulpit "to diminish the rifts among its followers," nor does it offer members "the option to adopt varying choices in their theological beliefs and yet remain within the denomination" (7). 

source: http://www.natcom.org/pubs/ROC/one-one/pullum.htm