Religion: The Oldtime Religion

(See Cover) The deacon raised his hand, and Publius Decius stepped through the baptistry door. Standing waist-deep in the pool was Marcus Vasca the wood-seller. He was smiling as Publius waded into the pool beside him. “Credis . . . ?” he asked.

“Credo,” responded Publius. “I believe that my salvation comes from Jesus the Christ, Who was crucified under Pontius Pilate. With Him I die that with Him I may have Eternal Life.” Then he felt strong arms supporting him as he let himself fall backward into the pool, and heard Marcus’ voice in his ear—”I baptize you in the Name of the Lord Jesus”—as the cold water closed over him.

Gasping for breath, Thomas Dewey Davis, Jr., 25, of 6757 Dartmouth Avenue, Richmond, came up into the light and air again. He stood waist-deep in the electrically heated water of the tiled, floodlit baptismal pool. Above him was a stained-glass window showing Christ and John the Baptist. Next to him in the pool stood a friendly-looking, greying man—the Rev. Theodore Floyd Adams of Richmond’s First Baptist Church. There was organ music, and then both the pastor and the new Christian went to change into dry clothes.

Between these two baptisms—in Rome, A.D. 100, and in the U.S. last week—stretch nearly 20 centuries of Christian history. Through holy wars and heresies, corruptions and reforms, the triumphs of saints and the victories of skeptics, the little company of faithful has spread across the world. Christians have given themselves strange names and have worshiped the Father, Son and Holy Ghost with commissions and omissions that would have shocked Rome’s primitive Christians. The big brick church on Richmond’s statue-stippled Monument Avenue, where Thomas Davis was baptized last week, would not look to Publius like a church at all. But the ceremony was the same, and the first-century Christian, generally unaware of baptism by sprinkling or pouring, would likely feel at home at the immersion ceremony of the Baptists.

For Baptists try hard to carry on the faith and practice of primitive Christianity. To them, adult baptism is not merely a quaint traditional rite; it sharply points to their conviction that the Christian faith can be accepted only by one who can think and speak for himself.* Similarly, insistence on baptism by immersion, as it is presented in the Bible, fulfills the twin symbolism of washing from sin and of death and rebirth, as well as pointing to the Baptists’ conviction that Scripture is the complete and sufficient basis of the Christian faith. Orthodox Christian tradition regards the church as the institution established on earth by Christ to receive continuous revelation, but to Baptists the church is merely a fellowship of individual believers, no one of whom has any spiritual authority over another. Each individual is essentially free to interpret Scripture for himself.

Thus the Baptists mark probably the sharpest dividing line in Christendom.

“There ought to be but three denominations in the world,” an Episcopal bishop once said: “the Catholics, standing on one side for the authority of the church, the Baptists, standing on the other side for the authority of the Bible. All the other denominations should be united, for the difference between them is that between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.” Christian history knows the Baptists as a dissident people—crotchety, intransigent, sometimes rude, if not downright dangerous in the eyes of the orthodox.

Yet in the 20th century no Protestant group has been more successful. In the U.S. today, the 18.4 million Baptists form the country’s largest, fastest-growing Protestant denomination. And in all the U.S., no minister of his church is more widely respected than Richmond’s Theodore Floyd Adams.

Boom in Russia. In Washington last week. Pastor Adams met with members of the executive committee of the Baptist World Alliance, of which he has been president since last summer, to make plans for his five-year term, and to consider the state of Baptists throughout the world. The picture before the committee was impressive. In Asia there are now close to 650,000 Baptists, in Africa 223,000, in South America 134,000, in Central America and the West Indies almost 100,000. In Europe there are approximately 1,100,000 Baptists, 500,000 of them in Russia, where their movement is booming. But it is in the U.S. that the Baptists have really come into their own.

There are about two dozen recognized Baptists bodies in the U.S., which add up to about one in every three Protestants in the country and one in five Christians.* They include: 1) the American Baptist Convention (which the Northern Baptists began calling themselves in 1950, numbering 1,600,000); 2) two principal Negro Baptist denominations, the National Baptist Convention U.S.A., Inc. (4,500,000) and the National Baptist Convention of America (2,600,000); 3) the Southern Baptist Convention, with 8,200,000 members, which is by far the biggest and most lively Baptist group in the U.S. The Southern Baptists have broken the steady, onward-Christian-soldiers march of U.S. churches and are moving forward on the double. Items: ¶ In the last five years, they have baptized an average 1 ,000 new members a day.

¶ Their 30,000 affiliated churches in 24 states, the District of Columbia, Mexico, Hawaii and Alaska own properties valued at approximately $1.2 billion, up from $276 million in 1945. Yearly contributions amount to about $305 million.

¶ Sunday school membership gained 597,-361 last year for a total 6,356,489.

¶ They currently support 30 colleges and universities, 22 junior colleges, six seminaries, eight academies and four Bible schools. Total enrollment: 50,080.

¶ They run 33 hospitals, 23 newspapers.

Changing Pattern. Who are the people who have built this record? Are they back-country farmers with a Bible-banging, hellfire preaching kind of religion that snaps its galluses loudly and contemptuously at other Protestants, all liberals and the Pope? Theodore Adams is one of their most noted pastors, yet he never flails the air with more than a finger when he preaches to his congregation, which includes young executives and their wives, painters, postmen and the managers of chain stores. Are they diehard Confederates to whom a Northerner is necessarily a Yankee and a Yankee is always unnecessary? Pastor Adams is one of the most influential men in the South, but he was born in New York and raised in Oregon and Indiana.

Perhaps the most typically Baptist thing about Pastor Adams is that he does not conform to the Baptist pattern. And the pattern itself is changing.

The Bible Belt. Baptist Christianity, like many another dissident religion, found a happy home in the U.S. Its fierce egalitarianism, its jealous separation of church and state, its warm, free form of worship—all had strong appeal for the kind of man most likely to succeed on the new continent. And so the cantankerous, nonconformist, freedom-worshiping Baptists and the cantankerous, nonconformist, freedom-worshiping Americans took to each other and grew up together.

On the new continent in the 17th century, it was not love at first sight, as is shown by the case of Roger Williams, who founded America’s first Baptist church (though he abandoned the Baptist persuasion within a few months to become a “Seeker” or Independent). He landed in Boston in 1631, having come from England under the impression that he was a Puritan, but almost at once he was at loggerheads with Boston’s Puritan clergy.

Before long, Roger Williams was convicted of having “erroneous and dangerous” opinions before he escaped and founded the town of Providence (“for a shelter for persons distressed for conscience”).

In Virginia the Episcopalians had their try at stamping out the Baptists. When two Baptists were mobbed and brought to trial for disturbing the peace (“They cannot meet a man upon the road,” said the prosecuting attorney, “but they must ram a text of scripture down his throat!”) a young Episcopal lawyer named Patrick Henry rode 50 miles to defend them.

“For preaching the gospel of God!” he stormed to the court. “Great God! Great God! Great God!” As the frontiersmen pushed west into the new land, Baptist preachers were never far behind them, scriptures in their saddlebags. After the Civil War, which caused a split in the denomination that has never fully healed, the Northerners settled themselves in the big cities to tend their machines, and the number of Baptists among them began to stabilize.

But in the rural South they kept right on increasing. They baptized in rivers and creeks and cow ponds. They worshiped in barns and splinterboard churches and held great sin-chasing revivals in tents.

They kept a firm hand on manners and morals: dancing, drinking, smoking were Baptist sins, and horse racing was almost as bad as horse stealing. When the Bible needed explaining, the Baptists were not afraid to do it by sheer lung power; when it needed defending against the eggheads of evolution they were ready to do that, too (six Baptists were on the Scopes trial jury). Neither priest nor church nor neighbor might come between a Baptist and his God. This could lead to a deep personal religion, and it could also produce a welter of small, off-beat sects, e.g., the Duck River, General Six-Principle, Primitive or Hard Shell, and Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit Predestinarian Baptists. And all this spiritual nonconformity was often matched by an ironbound, triple-riveted social conformity, designed to keep everything and everybody in its place—especially the Negro.

This was the Bible Belt, but it is no longer. Two generations of Southerners have been moving into cities; the tiny sects have been drying up, and old hellfire revivals are fewer and farther between in the highly organized world of Billy Graham, Oral Roberts and TV. Southern Baptism today is bigger, busier and a lot better than ever. For a case in point, there is Pastor Ted Adams and Richmond’s First Baptist Church.

Offer in Toledo. In booming 1928 First Baptist (founded in 1780) built itself a big $400,000 Georgian building, which covers most of a block on Monument Avenue. But in depressed 1935 the deacons were desperate. Interest payments on the building debt were barely being met, and the congregation had been without a regular pastor for 14 months.

The pulpit committee, unable to agree on any candidate, appointed a five-man subcommittee under the chairmanship of Lawyer T. Justin Moore. “I told them I’d take it,” Moore recalls, “only if they’d authorize us to go out and hire the best Baptist preacher in the U.S., regardless of where we found him.”

They found him in Ohio. Pastor Adams of Toledo’s thriving Ashland Avenue Baptist Church was a Northerner of Northerners, and more surprised to be getting their call than the Southerners were to be giving it to him. When he heard what they wanted, he immediately asked that his wife, Esther, sit in on the discussion. “The only argument that seemed to have any weight,” Chairman Moore remembers, “was that the First Baptist Church of Richmond had great influence in the South. One of the committee members put it pretty bluntly: Baptists in the South, he said, suffered from a much too narrow point of view, and here was a chance for Adams to do something about it.”

Ted and Esther Adams thought it over, casting up the account of their ministry together.

Beginning in Palmyra. It had hardly ever occurred to Ted Adams that he could do anything else but serve God full time.

His first memory is of sitting with his mother in the little Baptist Church in his native Palmyra, N.Y. “and looking out there and seeing my father in the pulpit, preaching to the congregation, and thinking what a wonderful thing that was.”

When he was five the family moved to his father’s second pastorate in the little (pop. 6,635) town of McMinnville, Ore. One Sunday there, Ted sat in church listening to an evangelist his father had invited to preach. “He finished, and he asked for true believers to come forward,” says Adams. “Without even knowing I was doing it, I stood up and I saw my father standing there waiting. It was only three or four steps up there, but even as a six-year-old I thought to myself that they were terribly important steps. If I had waited 50 years more I could not have made a truer commitment than I made that day as a child.” Afterward, his father warned him that some of his playmates might tease him about it. “If they do,” he advised, “tell them Yes, I’ve been baptized, and I only wish you had been, too.” Decision in Hammond. The Adams family moved to a pastorate in industrial Hammond, Ind. As a high-school student there, Ted found his life work. “I was reading, of all things, the life of Billy Sunday. When I finished, I went upstairs to think about what I had read.

And while I sat there, the Lord asked clearly: ‘Do you want to be a preacher?’ and I answered: ‘My Lord, if that’s what you want me to be, that’s what I will be.’ So the decision was made that afternoon, and I never doubted it again.” When Ted graduated from high school, he decided to wait a year to be able to go to college with his younger brother, Earl.

At his mother’s behest, he spent the year in Chicago becoming a chiropractor. (Today Ted Adams’ family boasts that he is the best neck-snapper and vertebrae-cracker in the Baptist ministry.) In 1921 Ted and Earl (now an official of the National Council of Churches) graduated as Phi Beta Kappas from Ohio’s Denison University, and Ted immediately enrolled at Colgate-Rochester Divinity School, where his father had studied. His first call was to the Cleveland Heights Baptist Church, and within a year 26-year-old Pastor Adams had married Esther Josephine Jillson, a small, energetic girl from Beaver Dam, Wis. Three years later, he moved to Toledo, where the delegation from Richmond found him.

Though they had no intention of accepting the offer, the Adamses felt they must pay First Baptist the courtesy of a visit. The pulpit committee put its best foot forward with a bang-up dinner at Richmond’s Hotel John Marshall. The customary blessing was followed by fresh grapefruit, which, to everyone’s horror, turned out to be liberally spiked with liquor. Ted Adams (who has never taken a drink) merely laughed, and everyone managed to get it down. When the dessert appeared, it turned out to be fruit floating in rum. Says Esther Adams now: “We thought it was a wonderful joke.” When they got home to Toledo, neither of them was yet convinced that they should move south. Three or four nights later Ted Adams was in his study when “suddenly I knew I just had to go.” He went upstairs at once and told his wife.

“Yes,” she said quietly, “I’ve known it since yesterday.” Success in Richmond. In the 19 years and nine months since Adams preached his first sermon in Richmond, the First Baptist Church has come far and fast, Membership has grown from about 1,600 to almost 4,000—and these are not occasional Sunday worshipers. About 3,500 of them attend Sunday school, more than 3,000 regularly pledge specific portions of their income, nearly 1,000 tithe. The building debt has long since been paid off, and First Baptist has become one of the biggest givers in the entire Baptist world, contributing to, among others, the Red Cross, the YMCA World Service Fund, Korean Relief. When Pastor Adams arrived, contributions to First Baptist totaled approximately $71,000 for 1936.

This year Ted Adams asked the congregation for a cool $300,000, and last Sun day they raised it.

This is how First Baptist ran the yearly “every-member canvas.” In aisle seats at the beginning of the 9 a.m. service sat some 300 male volunteers, each respon sible for half of two pews. At a signal from Pastor Adams, each volunteer rose and distributed pledge cards. While the congregation was filling in its cards, the volunteers and Pastor Adams filled in theirs (Adams’ salary: $15,000). Then, marching two by two down the aisle in step, the workers brought the cards to the “Lord’s Table.” The process was repeated at the 11:00 a.m. service.

As the last service ended, the volunteers gathered in the church basement for a quick lunch, while other workers continued to sort the pledge cards alpha betically, matching them with file cards for every church member, coded to show their location in Richmond. By 1 p.m.

each volunteer was out in a Richmond district rounding up those who had not been reached, and by 3 o’clock the only members of First Baptist who had not been tapped were the sick, the out-of-town or the out-of-pocket. Pastor Adams never knows any figure but the total. “I don’t know what any member of my church gives,” he says. “That’s something they have to settle between themselves and the Lord. It’s a wonderful thing not to know who your church’s biggest contribu tors are.” The Watch. Richmond’s First Baptist, the Christian Herald once wrote, “is a church that seems to have everything; it ticks like a ly-jewel watch.” Spreading out from its air-conditioned “sanctuary,” the actual place of worship, is a steadily expanding network of 150 hard-worked rooms. Here Sunday school is conducted on what is virtually a cradle-to-grave basis. An antiseptic 20-bed nursery, staffed by volunteer registered nurses, cares for infants, and in the toddlers’ playroom a loudspeaker softly plays hymns. By the time a youngster is three, he is an old hand at Sunday school, and in the classroom next door his mother and father may be studying the application of the Bible to child-rearing, and next door to that his grandmother may be studying the problem of missionaries in Korea. A well-equipped gymnasium is in constant use by local teenagers, and the lights burn late each night for meetings, discussion groups and social services.

To keep the watch ticking smoothly.

First Baptist employs a staff of two associate pastors, an assistant pastor and social-service director, a full-time child expert, an organist-music director, an assistant music director, a day-nursery director, a building superintendent, three janitors, a full-time hostess, four secretaries and assorted part-time help.

But the mainspring is Ted Adams—he is made of such finely tempered steel that he can work all day, seven days a week, and still be the most relaxed man in Richmond. His day begins at 7 a.m., in the Adams’ comfortable red brick house on Matoaka Road. After a leisurely breakfast with his wife and her mother, Mrs.

Selma Hopf Jillson, Adams ambles upstairs to his study where he broadcasts over Station KRNL ten minutes each morning—a word on the news or the weather, a passage from Scripture, occasionally a poem on a religious theme.

If possible, he spends an hour or two on his sermon (he devotes his yearly six-week vacation to blocking out his sermons for a year in advance), then drives to the church in his 1953 Mercury, for a round of meetings, reports, pastoral counseling.

One appointment he keeps whenever he can is his 6 p.m. romp with his two-year-old granddaughter, Tedde, daughter of his 28-year-old daughter, Mrs. Frank Thompson. (His two sons, Ted in the Chesapeake & Potomac Telephone Co., and Bob at Denison University, are unmarried.) After dinner there is more work: meetings at the church, civic committees and visiting ill parishioners. He has no hobbies—apparently he needs none. The gentle calm in his blue-grey eyes, in his slow, broad smile, in his unhurried passage through a 16-hour day, baffles those who know him only casually. Says he: “Calmness is rooted in faith in God, in yourself, and in the ultimate triumph of justice.” Melting Pot. Richmond’s First Baptist Church is not average: it is too big and too prosperous for that. But its energy and efficiency are typical of the Southern Baptist Convention today. From Kansas City, Mo., where Baptists have a $70,-ooo revolving fund to buy sites for new churches, to Texas, where they are adding an average of two new churches to their rolls each week, the denomination is ticking as busily as Ted Adams’ own church. “If you see a new building going up,” says a real-estate man in Little Rock, Ark., “you can be sure it’s either a new supermarket or a Baptist Church.”

Back-country preachers still thunder against the evils of rum, Romanism and romance on the dance floor, and even sophisticated city preachers goin for melodramatics; when Joseph Stalin died, Pastor Wayne Dehoney of Birmingham’s Central Park Baptist Church hauled a coffin into his sanctuary and preached a sermon on the evils of dictatorship (in newspaper ads he labeled it “Stalin’s funeral oration”). But, on the whole, it is the new facts rather than the old, familiar figures of Southern Baptism that are important.

Among the new facts are new faces. In New Mexico, for example, the Baptists have won masses of converts among technical workers from the North, Spanish-American immigrants, Indians. Working through motorized revival teams, cowboy camp meetings, and the world’s largest outdoor religious encampment (at Glori-eta), New Mexico’s Baptists often achieve a melting-pot atmosphere. Of a recent service, the Rev. Lewis Myers of Laguna says: “I was the preacher; the girl at the organ was Navaho; a Spanish woman led the singing, and in the congregation there were a number of Anglos and Laguna Indians, all sitting together, praying together and loving the Lord together.”

Respectable Sin. The New Mexico experience is still far from typical over the South as a whole, but it is a sign that the oldtime isolation is breaking down. Perhaps most significant, it is breaking down in theology. For decades, while liberal theology was fashionable, the Baptists were considered hopelessly backward. Now Baptists themselves have become more liberal —notably in accepting more and more of a social gospel that includes everything from soup kitchens to safe-driving campaigns—but it is really the rest of Protestant Christianity that has moved the Baptists’ way. For in the ‘305 began a new theological climate in which original sin was respectable again and fundamentalism was no longer a laughing matter. An old Baptist doctrine known as Landmark-ism,— which holds that man is helpless to save himself and must depend entirely on the grace of God, is re-emphasized in the writings of Swiss Theologian Karl Earth.

Other Protestant theologians have reasserted the importance of baptism (either in the Baptist or in other versions) as a Christian sacrament.

Along with theological isolation, geographical isolation is breaking down.

Southern Baptists still give the ecumenical movement and international organizations a wide berth. But Southern Baptists have ventured into Ted Adams’ Baptist World Alliance (an international fellowship without power over its members), and they have become far more interested in their brethren abroad. Adams himself went to Russia this summer.

The Fact Remains. Probably the gravest problem facing Southern Baptism, and the area where change is slowest, is the segregation of the Negro. For all practical purposes, Southern Baptism is strictly black and white. There are cases of Baptist preachers being fired for daring to speak out against segregation.

“I had to learn a whole new set of heroes when I came south,” says Ted Adams, but Jim Crow never became one of them. It is on this subject that Adams’ views differ most deeply from the majority of his fellow Southern Baptists. The Wor’d Alliance is on record as saying: “Discrimination and segregation … are ethically and morally indefensible and contrary to the Gospel of Christ.” But Ted Adams knows that such ringing phrases from the leadership are largely ignored by the rank and file. Like many another Southern church leader, he is careful not to push the burdened Baptist conscience too hard. “I am perfectly aware that there are complex and emotion-packed problems which must be solved as the races are integrated. My responsibility is not to dispute the fact that there are such problems. My responsibility is to preach the kind of Gospel that will bring people to a solution.”

The sun shines bright on Southern Baptism. It is making the tough transition from hot-hearted particularity to large-scale stewardship, and still not losing the essence of primitive Christianity. But the transition is far from over.

Says Lawyer Justin Moore, the man who found Preacher Adams for Richmond: “Ted Adams is probably regarded by a vast majority of Southern Baptists of every political persuasion as the finest Baptist preacher in the world. But the fact remains that he could never be elected president of the Southern Baptist Convention.”

* Over the centuries, many groups upheld this view (as against infant baptism, which became generally accepted in Christendom), among them the 3rd century Donatists, some of the 12th century Petrobrusians and Waldensians, the 15th century Bohemian Brethren. It was not until the Reformation that the issue really became heated, with the rise in the 16th century of the Anabaptists (literally, Re-Baptizers), a collection of sects that all opposed the baptism of infants, but that also opposed, variously, oaths, military service and the holding of public office. The sects were ruthlessly put down, but some (the Mennonites and Hutterites) regained strength in the 17th century and after. * Some of the U.S.’s better-known Baptists: Harry S. Truman, John D. Rockefeller Jr., Harold Stassen, Billy Graham, Estes Kefauver. * For its adherents’ frequent reference to “the old landmarks.”