Abstract
Polarization in Baptist life has a long history. Baptists have had polarized relations with other competing religious groups and with themselves. Baptist focus on freedom, dissent, conscience, local church independence, among other foundational principles, render Baptists prone to diversity and disagreement. Diversity, salted by the absolute certainties of religious belief, easily translates into polarization. Triumphalism, fundamentalism, and other types of ironic dogmatisms formed in the context of freedom have produced polarized beliefs. Those religious beliefs, however, cannot be separated from the interplay of sources of power: class, gender, and race.
In the context of the United States, a discussion of Baptists cannot be separated from these power components, especially matters of race. Significantly, if not surprisingly, Baptists exported their racial, triumphalist identity and commitments abroad in their missionary endeavors. Brazilian Baptists, for example, heard the gospel from Southern Baptists, but they heard that gospel in a racialized form that was captive to Southern US racist culture. Southern Baptists shared the gospel, but they also resisted efforts by native Brazilians in The Radical Movement to indigenize their faith.
From the outset of their existence in the seventeenth century, the people called “Baptists” have contributed to a mosaic of religious polarization among Christians. In endless examples, Baptists have been a polarizing force in their relationships to others by bluntly and triumphantly telling others how they were heretical or sinfully resting in inadequate expressions of Christianity. Using the apocalyptic language common in religious England of the seventeenth century, Baptist pioneer Thomas Helwys described Christians who did not agree with him as “anti-Christ.” 1 Use of “whore” language, quoted from Revelation to describe religious opponents, was not rare. In the mid-nineteenth century, Northern Baptist pastor John Quincy Adams spoke only slightly less caustically when he asserted Baptists were the only thorough religious reformers and, thus, the only church that followed the ecclesial pattern found in the New Testament. 2 The popularity of the Landmark Baptist’s “Jesus-Jordan-John the Baptist” understanding of Baptist origins—that John the Baptist baptized Jesus in the Jordan River and thus established the Baptist church as the one and only New Testament church—resulted among Southern Baptists in the well-known “Whitsitt Controversy.” William Whitsitt, president of the only Southern Baptist theological seminary in existence at the end of the nineteenth century, resigned in 1899 to squelch the furor over his historical investigations that demonstrated Baptist origins were traceable to the seventeenth, and not the first, century. 3 Baptist history is replete with stories demonstrating that Baptists often were polarizing in the way they positioned themselves in relationship to other Christian bodies. The Baptist struggle to be ecumenical is rooted in such polarization.
While Baptists have initiated much of the polarizing religious activity that surrounds them, opponents of Baptists certainly contributed to this divisiveness and considered Baptists polarizing from their beginnings because of their beliefs or their identity. Anglican and Puritan opponents in mid-seventeenth-century England considered the earliest Baptists, themselves products of Puritanism, to be spiritual “gangrene” and threats to the stability of society. Opponents believed the radically dissenting act of believer’s baptism led to social anarchy or was itself an act of child abuse. They contended that the denial of infant baptism challenged and undercut the spiritual and legal cornerstone of a Christian “Holy Commonwealth” society, which was built on voting citizens’ being Christians and following biblical law. When Baptists advocated dissent rooted in free individual conscience, they committed the ultimate polarizing act against the church and community. 4 In colonial Virginia, Baptists likewise provoked polarizing reactions for dissenting from state-supported churches. One established minister compared Baptists to gnats, “little insignificant animals” whose gift was “to tease, to sting, and to torment.” Baptist methods of spreading or defending their faith and actions were disdained: “They cannot meet a man on the road … [but have to] ram a text of Scripture down his throat.” Unsurprisingly, Baptists, typically on the socio-economic margins of society, were considered the “the dregs of society.” 5
In the nineteenth century, when the young United States disestablished churches from government support and the country became a haven or a religious marketplace for denominational growth and competition, Baptist opponents found Baptists no less polarizing. The mid-nineteenth-century literary debate between Landmark Baptist J. R. Graves and Methodist William G. Brownlow captured the give-and-take of religious polarization. Graves politicized his religious assertions, linking orthodox Christianity to patriotism, or, more specifically, his sense of Americanism. He declared that Methodists followed John Wesley, who opposed the colonies’ battle for freedom in the American Revolutionary War and whose support for the hierarchical leadership of bishops was a hideous expression of anti-republicanism. How could anyone in the new country follow a hierarchical bishopric that was anti-democratic? “The Baptist churches are pure democracies, and the only form of purely democratic governments in the world,” Graves wrote. Brownlow responded to Graves with equally polarizing rhetoric. Writing in the 1850s, Brownlow suggested Graves was an abolitionist at heart, having come from Vermont to Tennessee. Graves was a follower of Roger Williams, “a religious bigot.” “Graves and friends are pirates of hell,” Brownlow argued. They “sail under the false flag of Christianity … they invite us to sand-banks of immersion, on which thousands have been eternally shipwrecked.” 6
Baptist historians long have cited the rambunctious nature of Baptist life, or at least the potentially polarizing tensions that have accompanied the Baptist journey. In 1972, Walter Shurden wrote the short but highly influential book, intended for both Southern Baptist laity and clergy, entitled Not a Silent People. Shurden begins with the assertion, “Baptists were born in the bosom of radicalism! They are born fighters because they were born fighting.” He continues, “They were the agitators of the seventeenth century,” considered a “base sect,” a “scab or error,” “a seduced and … schismatical rabble of deluded children, servants, and people.” 7
In perhaps his best-known book, Four Fragile Freedoms, Shurden describes the essence of Baptist life. His quadrilateral of soul freedom, Bible freedom, church freedom, and religious freedom acknowledged that the core of Baptist identity is freedom: voluntary faith. Such freedom is liberating, but it is not immune from polarizing misuse or abuse. In a little-known 2009 speech to the Whitsitt Baptist Historical Society, Shurden reiterated his love for foundational Baptist freedoms, but expanded on the related risks of those principles, including:
The risk of “emphasis on personal religious experience, so absolutely essential to vital and dynamic religion,” is spiritual narcissism.
The risk of “emphasis on biblical authority, so necessary to the renewal of the church in any age,” is a slouchy primitivism that ignores 2,000 years of the Christian tradition.
The risk of “emphasis on believer’s baptism by immersion, designed to lead us to a believer’s church, as an idea critical for a spiritual community,” is an ugly tribalism that suggests Baptists are God’s one family.
The risk of “emphasis on local church autonomy, so absolutely critical for a local body of believers desiring to live in obedience under Christ alone,” is tragic isolationism. 8
Bill J. Leonard, in his major historical survey of Baptists, Baptist Ways: A History, affirmed the foundational freedom in Baptist DNA, but he stressed the tensions found in dialectical relationships between often-highlighted Baptist principles. Six of those dialects are:
authority of Scripture and the liberty of conscience
the church: local autonomy and associational cooperation
ministry: laity and clergy
doctrinal statements: confessional, selectively creedal
religious liberty and Christian citizenship
diversity: theological and ecclesial.
Leonard concluded, “Theological diversity, congregational autonomy, and freedom of conscience created environments in which debate, controversy, and schism are not merely possible but inevitable. In a sense, Baptists created an ecclesiastical and theological framework that ensured controversy, dispute, and division.” Stated succinctly, polarization among Baptists was natural and inevitable. 9
In his recent work, Doug Weaver argues for the close interaction between Word, Spirit, and experience in the Baptist story. The three are so intertwined that distinguishing which comes first is difficult. The Word guides experience, and Spirit-led experience defines faith. Diversity of practice is the norm, not the exception. In such a Trinitarian pattern, doctrine is not ignored, but how experience is accepted or rejected can produce unity or polarized opposites. 10
Recent Baptist studies have rightly given significant attention to the long-standing divisions regarding race and gender. Coverage of racial and gender inequality and their relation to (white male) power necessarily highlight polarized narratives. Affirmations of slavery, segregation, and Anglo-Saxon superiority, all parts of the majoritarian white Baptist orthodoxy, produced polarized relationships with abolitionists, civil rights leaders, and African American churches. Women rarely found a place at the table of leadership in Baptist life. Exceptions, such as Helen Barratt Montgomery, who, in 1920, was the first woman leader of the Northern Baptist Convention, prove the rule. Churches discussed whether women could speak in church, in mixed public assemblies, or at conventions. In the 1920s, many Baptist men opposed “women preachers” by sexualizing the ministry of popular evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson (an ordained Baptist!). The situation had not changed significantly by 1983, when Southern Baptists claimed that women were “first in the Edenic fall” and thus ineligible for ordained pastoral ministry in Baptist churches. 11
This article extends the analysis of race, power, and polarization in another arena on the cutting edge of study: the impact of Baptist polarization on Baptists abroad. The examination of Baptist missions here pays particular attention to native reception of missionary activity in Latin America, specifically Southern Baptist activity in Brazil, the most important center of the Baptist missionary enterprise in the region. The polarizing conflict in this case was transnational, a feature of Baptist missions only rarely described in English-speaking Baptist literature. 12 Southern Baptist missionaries who had internalized the sensibilities of the Southern Confederacy and the Jim Crow South attempted to re-enact their racial dispositions wherever they went. Many native people were unwilling to accept the racial and nationalistic elements of Baptist missionary activity, however, and resisted.
Scholars who have analyzed missionary activity in Asia and Africa have at times portrayed missionaries as being more progressive than their denominational peers who lived and worked in the United States. The concept of a missionary idealtypus as a racially progressive individual, however, is unsustainable when examining Baptist activity in Latin America, and in Brazil specifically. 13 Unlike that of several Asian and African countries, Brazilian racial taxonomy significantly paralleled that of the United States. 14 In Brazil, as in the United States, whites were atop the privilege ladder, and blacks were at the bottom. Baptist missionaries found in Brazilian society an environment that was receptive to their sense of Anglo-Saxon superiority. When native Brazilians resisted Southern Baptist cultural/missionary efforts, missionaries in Latin America generally and conveniently kept reports of polarization from their supporters in their homeland. Missionary agencies did the same. In Baptist periodicals, one rarely finds traces of the polarizing missionary scandals present in private missionary correspondence and, in turn, missionary correspondence often omits counterproductive truths revealed only in the native tongue of inconvenient proselytes. A well-rounded understanding of Baptist polarization must involve an analysis of a wide range of sources produced in different languages.
Race, nationalism, and Baptist missions in Brazil
In Brazil, Baptist history is inseparable from the history of the US Civil War, because noticeable Brazilian Baptist life began among the thousands of Confederate exiles who migrated to Brazil after the Southern loss. Brazil remained a slave-holding country for twenty-three years after the Civil War, attracting Southerners who wanted a new home after their crushing defeat. 15 When these immigrants arrived in Brazil, they faced a society that, despite its slaveholding status, was more interactive along racial lines and less severe in its stance on racial mixing. This new reality encouraged creation of Confederate ethnic enclaves, and the first and second Brazilian Baptist churches formed in such enclaves. 16 These pioneer immigrant churches served as a transition point for a number of pioneer, late-nineteenth-century Southern Baptist missionaries to Brazil. This Confederate–Baptist connection marked Brazilian Baptist life from its very beginning, and the Lost Cause and Jim Crow mentalities that inhabited the postbellum US South also traveled to Brazil together with, and at times inseparably from, the Gospel of the missionaries.
The racialized prejudices of Southern Baptist missionaries manifested themselves in a number of ways. In intra-missionary relations, for example, some missionaries disliked working with their missionary colleague of Jewish background, Solomon Ginsburg. The continuous complaints in missionary correspondence about mixed-raced or dark-skinned Brazilians reveal the clear preference of missionaries for light-skinned proselytes. The dissemination of Lost Cause ideology in speeches, pamphlets, and periodicals written in Portuguese exposes the transnational power of missionary commitment, not only to the superiority of the United States, but also to Southern US white superiority. The aggressiveness with which missionaries used their institutions of cultural production (e.g., theological education/seminaries, publishing house, and periodicals) to implement their ideas about God, themselves, and individual and social behaviors reveals their difficulty with distinguishing between commitment to their culture and to the Gospel itself. What triggered one of the most polarizing native-missionary conflicts in the region, however, was the missionaries’ racially-informed unwillingness to share control of the Baptist denominational structure and leadership in Brazil, despite their rhetoric articulating the need for a transition of power to native people. The conflict, called The Radical Movement, split the denomination in Brazil for over a decade.
Even with sporadic resistance on the part of natives, Southern Baptist missionaries in Brazil sustained their denominational control generally unburdened from the beginning of missionary presence in 1881 until the 1920s. In the 1920s and 1930s, a group of Brazilian Baptists, mostly in the northeastern region of the country, challenged the supremacy of denominational institutions. The group, who exposed the dominating postures present in missionary behavior, became known as the Radical Movement—a polarizing epithet given by missionaries and their supporters. The story of the Radical Movement demonstrates how entrenched Baptist missionaries were in their presuppositions of Anglo-Saxon superiority and, in turn, how Baptist polarization transcended the supposedly more theologically-informed struggles US Baptists faced in their homeland.
The Radical Movement erupted as a reaction against missionaries whose racial consciousness was mostly formed in a Southern US environment, where white cultural domination was maintained in several ways, such as white supremacist educational practices, ritualized practices of violence (e.g., lynching), and exclusion. 17 In terms of Christian practice, “white southern religion all but unanimously supported the imposition of white supremacy rule and for a very long time offered very scant resistance to its continuation.” 18 These stances were not aggressively challenged by a Brazilian dominant culture that had its own forms of white supremacist tendencies. 19 Consequently, Southern Baptist missionaries in Brazil developed strategies to maintain control of the denomination that reflected their deep-rooted attitudes of white supremacy. At the same time, their public stances gave most natives the impression that missionaries genuinely imagined the possibility of equality. Racial dynamics were not always explicit in the disputes energized by the dissenting Radical Movement, but polarizing racial foundations informed the attitudes and decisions of both missionaries and natives.
Southern Baptist leaders and missionaries revealed their white supremacist tendencies broadly and reflected the general sensibility of Southern US culture. Southern Baptist missionary literature is full of examples that illuminate the shape of missionary whiteness in the first decades of the twentieth century. One way in which the racial sensibilities of white southerners appeared in Southern Baptist missionary literature was through a romanticized, nostalgic narrative of slavery that praised the “Negro” commitment and loyalty to the honorable Confederacy. 20 This commitment to white supremacist positions was also present in the memorialization of Confederate morality. Southern missionaries globalized these attitudes in their missionary activity in Brazil. 21 The way they showed love for other races was not through arguments for equality, but through the preaching of a gospel they conceptualized according to their racial imagination. If the “affection” they showed other races was already complicated by their white supremacist commitments, their sentiments toward a particular animal whose heretical creation was a result of too much approximation between distinct races—the person of “mixed blood”—was even more problematic.
The person of mixed blood was abundant in Latin America, and, if the humanity of the black person was already diminished by the violent self-aggrandizement of whites, the person of mixed blood stood as an aberration that was even less human, if human at all. In the first decades of the twentieth century, Southern Baptist ideas regarding people of mixed race varied, but most institutional leaders and intellectuals were avid defenders of their segregationist agendas that saw racial intermingling, especially sexual contact, as an aberration and disgrace. 22
The reaction against the racially-informed, dominating tendencies of Southern Baptist missionaries undergirded the Radical Movement. Brazilian nationalism was an element in the struggle; native nationalism, however, was a nationalism that reacted against a missionary posture committed to Anglo-Saxon rule of Brazilian denominational activity. Sympathizers of the Radical Movement were not always aware of or willing to name the polarizing racist culture that informed the missionary drive for domination, but, in the first decades of the twentieth century, a Southern white who was not racist, foreign missionary or not, was a rare exception, and exceptions did not hold institutional power in 1920s Brazil.
The Radical Movement: A brief history
On October 28, 1922, the Southern Baptist missionaries of the North Brazil Mission received a letter from fifteen Brazilian ministers from the state of Pernambuco, an act that would advance the movement that split the Brazilian Baptist Convention for over a decade. The letter, “Memorial dos Pastores Baptistas do Campo Regional aos Missionários Baptistas da Região” (Memorial from the Baptist Pastors of the Regional Field to the Baptist Missionaries of the Region), 23 was the immediate cause for the rupture between the North Brazil missionaries and the majority of native Baptist pastors in the region. The main concerns expressed by the native leadership of the Regional Convention of the larger Brazilian Baptist Convention were strategic and administrative. Native leaders wanted a stronger emphasis on evangelism, rather than Southern Baptist informed theological education, and they wanted to have more control of the administration of funds to ensure that evangelism was prioritized. Native leaders were aware, however, that fulfilling their goals required a shift of denominational power from the missionaries to the natives and that a transition of power was necessary to achieve the “urgent need for a greater, friendlier, more intelligent, and impartial cooperation.” 24
The Southern Baptist missionaries responded quickly and decisively, not only demonstrating clearly their unwillingness to consider the natives’ requests, but also pointing out what they saw as the inconsistency of Brazilians who had denied a similar request from Portuguese Baptists who also wanted more independence from the Brazilian-controlled mission in Portugal. 25 The missionaries failed to mention, however, that Brazilian Baptist activity in Portugal was influenced by the Foreign Mission Board (FMB) of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), and, as such, imitated Southern Baptist missionary methods. In addition, a number of missionaries already had given the Baptists of north Brazil as much autonomy as they were willing to give. For instance, W. C. Taylor stated, as evidence of their willingness to support native autonomy, that the great majority of pastors in the region were natives, not missionaries. 26
Missionary conceptualizations of denominational cooperation abroad, however, were conflicted. M. G. White, a missionary in Bahia, shed light on the competing views of missionary leadership abroad, highlighting four Southern Baptist missionary perspectives:
Major churches should have missionaries as pastors, and such missionaries should have veto power over the deliberations of native pastors of smaller churches.
The missionary of a given field is the official pastor of all churches, and native pastors are his assistants.
The missionary is not a pastor of a church, but the superintendent of the field and has veto power over native decisions.
The missionary is a helper and advisor of natives and offers suggestions based on his superior preparation and experience. 27
These different conceptualizations of ideal native autonomy ranged from more to less explicit forms of domination. Even the fourth viewpoint that understood the missionary as “helper and advisor,” held by White and others, faced two particular impediments to realization. First, as White himself later wrote in a report to the FMB, such a stance was contingent upon missionary perceptions regarding the maturity of natives, 28 but leading missionaries in North Brazil thought of the Brazilian denomination in general as an adolescent denomination. 29 Second, as the development of the Radical Movement revealed, when missionary suggestions were not well received by the native workers, missionaries generally implemented them regardless.
When the fifteen native leaders who signed the 1922 “Memorial from the Baptist Pastors” met to produce the document, the accumulated frustrations of missionary domination, unmet nationalistic anxieties, perceived mistreatment of native-favorite missionary D. L. Hamilton, 30 and differences regarding the future of the work took strategic and symbolic form. After lively discussion, the pastors sent the missionaries the document, 31 and, although the missionaries denied the natives’ requests, the Regional Convention approved the plan they had suggested to the missionaries. That the natives had no support from the Mission only widened the gap between the two factions. When the native Baptists decided to appeal to the FMB in Richmond, Virginia, they received a response that made clear the FMB’s support of the missionaries. The response insisted on a proportionality criterion for the boards of the Brazilian Baptist institutions in which the missionaries should outnumber the natives. 32
The FMB letter of February 8, 1923 warned against post-war WWI “unnatural and anti-Christian racial pride that would put a stop to the missionary work that we are doing,” 33 but it did recognize explicitly that the administration of the FMB’s resources should serve missionary interests and the interests “of the freedom of our people here [in the southern US].” 34 At the same time, the FMB’s response acknowledged that missionaries had written damaging material about Brazilians that was published in US periodicals, and the leaders in Richmond assured Brazilians that the board condemned such actions insofar as they were maliciously written, which they thought was often not the case. 35 For white missionaries and Southern missionary agencies, white supremacy was not malice; it was, however, a way of life!
While the FMB answered directly the concerns of Brazilians, they reaffirmed the position espoused by missionaries: Americans were better prepared to lead; the funds had to be used efficiently according to US standards; and the proportion of Brazilian leadership should match the proportion of their financial contribution. 36 The answer was consistent with the missionary-dominated North Brazil Mission’s response to the election of Baylor University graduate, Adrião Bernardes, to the position of Corresponding Secretary of the Regional Convention—the first native to hold the position. Unlike the North Brazil Mission, the Regional Convention had strong radical tendencies, and the Corresponding Secretary was historically the person who managed the evangelization efforts in the North Brazil region. Upon the election of Bernardes, the North Brazil Mission created a new, overlapping position of Missionary to the Field, to continue exerting control over evangelistic strategies.
In response to the FMB letter and the creation of a position to undermine the native Corresponding Secretary, the radicals expelled several missionaries from churches and disciplined several others via their native pastors—a response that led missionaries to start pro-missionary churches. A pamphlet distributed in 1922 in Recife, capital of the state of Pernambuco and heart of the North Brazil Mission, reveals tension created already in the early stages of the Radical Movement. W. C. Taylor, a leading missionary scandalized by the public advertisement of what he saw as a rabid anti-missionary sentiment, transcribed the full pamphlet and, correctly, framed it as a fair representation of the spirit of the radical group he saw as anti-missionary:
To the Public: The people should not mistake as evangelicals the group of Americans that want to start, in the Zumby neighborhood, a pseudo-Baptist church. Americans W. C. Taylor, E. Hayes, and L. L. Johnson were kicked out of the Baptist churches to which they were affiliated. They abused the proverbial hospitality of their Brazilian hosts and began to treat (native) Baptists as if they were slaves, and because these protested against this abuse of their liberty, they offered desperate resistance. They rebelled against the Regional Convention, legitimate representatives of the Baptist churches in the states of Pernambuco, Paraiba, and Rio Grande do Norte; they followed an identical procedure toward the administrative boards of the American Baptist School and the Baptist seminary in this city because they were not allowed to fire three Brazilian professors of the institution of theological education. They closed the seminary building and left the administrative board and the students on the street. […] we need foreigners who will come to help us grow our beloved country, but whoever wants to de-nationalize us in order to dominate us will be resisted; let these Americans know that we do not sell ourselves. To react against these false preachers of the Gospel, these nosy Americans, is not to react against evangelical religion, but it is a patriotic duty. Unfortunately, there are Brazilians who are fooled and follow them, however, they will soon open their eyes and see what these individuals really want.
37
What was once implicit in missionary practice in Brazil became explicit. Missionaries began threatening natives with the withholding of funds in case they cooperated with native, rather than missionary, institutions. Missionaries also began accusing native radicals of being mercenaries. Absolute loyalty to the North Brazil Mission became the litmus test for missionary assistance. A supporter of the natives’ quest for autonomy, Southern Baptist missionary David Hamilton, thought the notion of framing radicals as “native mercenaries” was absurd. He wrote:
It is unthinkable that these pastors and deacons, and even laymen, want to wrong us in any way. They have always received us with open arms. They are the product of our work during the last thirty years. They are representative preachers of the Gospel, worthy deacons and faithful laymen. The sacrifices they made, financially and otherwise, put us to shame as to our own efforts and fill us with hope for the future of this country. Who then could imagine they had mercenary designs upon our money? I contend that if we had tried as we ought to have done at the proper time we could have established a plan of cooperation safe and sound, practical and Biblical, that would have entirely satisfied every desire of the natives.
38
The absurdity of missionary charges against natives was, for Hamilton, evident in inconsistent administrative practices by missionaries. He wrote, “Now it is true the Cor[responding] Sec[retary], when he was a missionary selected by the Mission, handled all the funds for general evangelization, both the part contributed by the native churches and the part appropriated by the Mission. But when a native was chosen it was declared he wanted to take foreign money and administer it.” 39 Rather than doubting the character of the natives, Hamilton suggested that the financial records of the Mission should be audited in order to account for the Mission’s mishandlings. 40 When Hamilton went to the United States on furlough in 1923, FMB Secretary T. B. Ray wrote him a personal letter, asking him to resign. 41 Hamilton did resign in April 1924, after he concluded that his repeated pleas for investigations and audits would receive inadequate responses.
Between 1923 and 1925, the antagonism between natives and missionaries grew, and the polarizing conflict strengthened. The radicals expelled more missionaries from their churches, founded an alternative theological seminary, created an alternative regional convention, and established a new partisan periodical. 42 The missionaries planted new pro-missionary churches. The FMB missionaries did not want to negotiate further with the natives, because they thought the natives’ initiatives would soon die for lack of financial support. The natives, however, were firm in their conviction that “[missionary] money will not buy us, even because money is not our objective.” 43 When the Brazilian National Convention met January 19, 1925, the Pernambuco mission was divided between missionaries, with their respective churches, publications, convention, and seminary, and natives, who had their own institutions, as well as one missionary, D. L. Hamilton.
The polarizing struggle for the Brazilian Baptist soul in the 1920s also became a fight for the correct interpretation of authentic Baptist belief and practice. The pro-missionary side of the struggle added their new periodical, the Correio Doutrinal, to disseminate its anti-radical propaganda. The pro-missionary establishment also connected radical dissent against missionary rule to heretical movements from the first century. For instance, an article entitled, “O Movimento Anti-Missionário do Primeiro Século” (“The Anti-Missionary Movement of the First Century”), drew correlations between the radical movement and the characters who resisted Paul and John in biblical narratives. 44 Another article compared the radicals with the heretics at Munster, who were disliked by both Protestants and Catholics. 45 According to the Correio Doutrinal, the radical movement was also suspect because its leaders reached out to the Landmark Baptist Texas Baptist Association for support in defiance of the FMB. 46
At the 1925 national meeting of the Brazilian Baptist Convention (BBC), convention leaders adopted a plan, the “Bases of Cooperation,” to address the conflict revolving around the Radical Movement. The committee that produced the document was composed of members of both parties, missionaries and radicals. The document highlighted the autonomy of churches and boards, as well as the cooperative spirit between the BBC and the FMB, 47 and it clearly was a victory for the missionaries. The “bases” specified that boards with pre-determined quotas, mostly composed of missionaries, would govern schools and seminaries. Two recommendations were aimed particularly against the radicals: (i) the seminary recently founded in Recife was to be dissolved; and (ii) the editor of the Jornal Batista, a periodical that often supported the radicals, did not have to be Brazilian. Furthermore, the natives who were part of the Radical Movement were not elected or re-elected to any relevant board in the BBC. 48
The radical leaders who attended the convention took the “Bases of Cooperation” document back to their churches, and a regional committee was put in place to analyze the proposal. 49 The most powerful radical churches of the region unsurprisingly did not accept the proposal. In June 1925, due to the polarizing disagreement between the missionary and radical factions, another national body was created: the Brazilian Baptist Association. 50
The creation of an alternative national denominational body was a symbolic marker of the consequences of the missionaries’ unwillingness to grant the natives the level of autonomy they desired. For thirteen years, the two national denominational bodies operated separately from each other, dividing Brazilian Baptists between two polarized conventions. Adrião Bernardes’ presidential address during the 1926 annual meeting of the Brazilian Baptist Association shed light on the persistence of the radicals’ criticism against the missionary establishment. Bernardes argued that their reaction against foreign rule pointed to the strength of native Baptist work in Brazil, not its weakness.
51
Native dissent from missionary rule revealed the true motives of the missionary establishment in Brazil. According to Bernardes, “It now came to light what was already in the feelings and actions of those who, by the power of the gold, wanted to reduce their brothers and companions to a condition of mere robots and imbeciles who do not know how to act and how to direct their lives without foreign direction.”
52
In his intense focus upon the missionaries’ demand of native submission, Bernardes recognized that missionaries misled natives by their constant allusions to an always-future transition of power. Bernardes claimed that Brazilian Baptists “lived and moved by the sweet touch of the confidence in the promises made by those who were leaders by divine right,”
53
but for missionaries, “just unreserved submission”
54
was in reality sufficient. He continued, mocking missionary self-perception in a caricature that reflected native perceptions of missionary demeanor toward Brazilians:
If [the missionaries] were human creatures like us, vulnerable to errors, suspicions, misunderstandings, faults, and sins, we would have a common base with which we could work: but they are extraordinary creatures, sui generis, infallible, invulnerable, and even imponderable and inaccessible with authority superior to that of the churches of Christ, escaping even their administration. What can we do with such creatures?
55
Bernardes recognized the importance of denominational institutions, but he emphasized what he saw as the exaggerated authoritarianism of Southern Baptist missionaries, as well as the disrespect with which missionaries approached native dissent. “Our supposed guides,” he wrote, “assumed a paternalistic attitude and said: ‘come here inexperienced boys, confess that you were wrong. We did nothing. Besides, was it not us who gave you the Gospel?’” 56 Bernardes told his native audience that when native dissidents did not reconcile according to missionary terms, missionaries threatened them with financial sanctions and called them “thieves, robbers, players, and liars.” 57 In Brazil, the principle of denominational work had been “whoever pays, rules,” but he argued that they were no longer willing to abide by that principle.
Between 1925 and 1936, the missionaries and their supporters became more willing to accept what seemed inevitable—relinquishing explicit and rigid denominational control. This willingness to cooperate was heavily informed by the financial strain caused by the Great Depression. This crisis era affected the FMB’s ability to send new missionaries to Brazil, and a significant number of missionaries who went on furlough to the United States in the mid 1930s could not return due to lack of funds. 58 In this context of deep financial hardship, a new initiative to foster unity, represented by a document called “The New Bases of Cooperation,” gave articulation to this shift. The document addressed a number of radical concerns and was worked out between pro-missionary and radical factions. Soon after the approval of the “New Bases of Cooperation” by the Brazilian Baptist Convention, the great majority of radical churches that did not cooperate with the BBC returned to the BBC fold, and eventually the need for a national radical convention ceased to exist.
The main points of “The New Bases of Cooperation” represented a qualified victory for the radicals, who gained a level of official denominational autonomy unprecedented in the history of the denomination in Brazil. First, the system of quotas that ensured missionary dominance in denominational boards was eliminated. No minimum number of missionaries was required for any board. Second, any impediment for the nomination of native leaders to the presidency of major denominational institutions, such as seminaries and publishing houses, was removed. Finally, an executive commission was created to coordinate, together with the FMB, the strategy of future missionary efforts. 59
In the elimination of quotas guaranteeing a majority of missionaries on BBC boards, the commission that delivered the report of “The New Bases of Cooperation” to the 1936 national meeting was abundantly clear in its strong break with past practices: “The commission proposes the elimination of the percentage between missionaries and Brazilians in the constitution of the boards of the Brazilian Baptist Convention, and all the boards are to be immediately dissolved so that new ones can be elected according to our new resolution.” 60
The boards of the national convention, already in the 1936 meeting, counted on an unprecedented representation of native leadership. 61 After 1936, the North Brazil Baptist Theological Seminary (NBBTS) had its first native president, and the number of native professors gradually grew in proportion to the faculty appointments of missionaries born in the United States. The changes at South Brazil Baptist Theological Seminary (SBBTS) paralleled those in the NBBTS, as native presidents and provosts were appointed. The rate of native faculty appointments at SBBTS also grew to unprecedented levels. The apparent universal and joyful unions that the official documents conveyed, however, were at odds with the reluctant nature with which Southern Baptist missionaries approached the new denominational arrangement. The reunion of missionaries and radicals generated their own tensions, and the resolution of these tensions in the following decades would require missionaries to be more efficient and less direct in their strategies of denominational control.
Conclusion
In 2010, Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell wrote American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, and commented at the outset, “Polarization and pluralism are the principal themes in the recent history of American religion.” 62 Most analysts would agree that rampant polarization characterizes contemporary religious dialogue as part of the larger polarized culture wars. In much of US religion, especially in Baptist life, that polarization has a much longer history. As noted in the introduction, Baptists have had polarized relations, with other competing religious groups and with themselves. Scholars have correctly diagnosed that Baptist focus on freedom, dissent, conscience, local church independence, among other foundational principles, render Baptists prone to diversity and disagreement. Diversity, salted by the absolute certainties of religious belief, easily translates into polarization. Triumphalism, fundamentalism, and other types of ironic dogmatisms formed in the context of freedom have produced polarized beliefs. Those religious beliefs, however, cannot be separated from the interplay of sources of power: class, gender, and race.
In the context of the United States, a discussion of Baptists cannot be separated from these power components, especially matters of race. Without difficulty, one might argue that the “original sin” of US religion is race. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his now-classic “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” told his Birmingham ministerial colleagues that African Americans could no longer wait for justice; they had been waiting 340 years, a length of time students of US history can trace back to the introduction of slavery in 1619. 63 E. Luther Copeland, in his provocatively titled, The Southern Baptist Convention and the Judgment of History: The Taint of an Original Sin, applied the concept of race to the 1845 split of Baptists, north and south, and the subsequent history of the Southern Baptist Convention. 64
In this article, a case study of disunity among Baptists points to a variety of divisions and disagreements best described as polarization. Significantly, if not surprisingly, Baptists exported their racial, triumphalist identity and commitments abroad in their missionary endeavors to Latin America. Brazilian Baptists heard the gospel from Southern Baptists, but they heard that gospel in a racialized form that was captive to Southern US racist culture. Analysts of Southern Baptists have demonstrated that Southern Baptists were captive to their Southern US culture and “at ease in Zion” in their cultural and social attitudes. 65 More recent works, however, have noted that Southern Baptists were not only captive to their culture, but helped mold their Southern culture as well. 66 This interactive phenomenon, being captive to Southern culture yet contributing to that culture, was the approach Baptist missionaries took to Brazil. They shared the gospel, but they also resisted efforts by native Brazilians to indigenize their faith. Paternalism, triumphalism, culture captivity, and racist prejudices all mixed together to highlight how Baptist polarization went viral, to Brazil, and, no doubt, to other places on the world map.
Footnotes
1.
Thomas Helwys, A Short Declaration of the Mistery of Iniquity, ed. Richard Groves (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1998), 96, 111, and throughout.
2.
John Quincy Adams, “Baptists,” in The Only Thorough Religious Reformers (1876), The Baptist Distinctives Series 52 (Paris, AR: The Baptist Standard Bearer, 2008).
3.
William H. Whitsitt, A Question in Baptist History: Whether the Anabaptists in England Practiced Immersion Before the Year 1641? (Louisville: Chas. T. Dearing, 1896).
4.
C. Douglas Weaver, “Early English Baptists: Individual Conscience and Eschatological Ecclesiology,” Perspectives in Religious Studies 38 (Summer 2011): 151–58. The reference to gangrene is on p. 156.
5.
C. Douglas Weaver, In Search of the New Testament Church: The Baptist Story (Macon: Mercer University Press, 2008), 73, 99.
6.
J. R. Graves, The Great Iron Wheel; Republicanism Backwards and Christianity Reversed (Nashville: Graves & Marks, 1855), 311; William G. Brownlow, The Great Iron Wheel Examined; or, Its False Spokes Extracted and an Exhibition of Elder Graves, its Builder (Nashville: Published for the Author, 1856), 95, 326–27.
7.
Walter Shurden, Not a Silent People (Nashville: Broadman, 1972), 1–2.
8.
Walter Shurden, “Baptist Pavement, Baptist Potholes, and a P.S. Concerning Baptist Freedom,” Whitsitt Journal 17, no. 2 (Fall 2009): 1, 4–6.
9.
Bill J. Leonard, Baptist Ways: A History (Valley Forge: Judson, 2003), 6–9; Leonard’s list includes eight dialects, the additional two being (i) regeneration: dramatic event and sustaining process, and (ii) ordinances: sacraments and symbols.
10.
C. Douglas Weaver, “Baptists and the Interplay of Word/Spirit/Experience,” Perspectives in Religious Studies 45 (2018): 239–49.
11.
For articles on women and race in Baptist studies, see Paul Harvey, Redeeming the South: Religious Cultures and Racial Identities Among Southern Baptists, 1865–1925 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); John A. Broadus, “Should Women Speak in Mixed Public Assemblies?” (Louisville: Baptist Book Concern, 1880), accessed April 26, 2019, 
; “McPhersonism? Aimee Semple McPherson and her Baptist Opponents (and Supporters),” Perspectives in Religious Studies 42 (Summer 2015): 127–42; Elizabeth H. Flowers, Into the Pulpit: Southern Baptist Women and Power Since World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Kendall Mobley and Helen Barrett Montgomery, The Global Mission of Domestic Feminism (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2009).
12.
For one examination of missions and race, see Robert Nash, “Anglo-Saxon Supremacy and the Foreign Mission Board of the SBC,” in Distinctively Baptist: Essays on Baptist History: Festschrift Walter B. Shurden, ed. Marc Jolley and John Pierce (Macon: Mercer University Press, 2005), 137–50.
13.
For examples of works that focus on Asia and Africa, see Hilde Nielssen, Inger Marie Okkenhaug, and Karina Hestad Skeie, eds., Protestant Missions and Local Encounters in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Unto the Ends of the World (Leiden: Brill, 2011); Afeosemime U. Adogame and Shobana Shankar, eds., Religion on the Move! New Dynamics of Religious Expansion in a Globalizing World, International Studies in Religion and Society 15 (Leiden: Brill, 2013); Scott W. Sunquist and Mark A. Noll, The Unexpected Christian Century: The Reversal and Transformation of Global Christianity, 1900–2000 (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2015); Elaine Padilla and Peter C. Phan, eds., Christianities in Migration: The Global Perspective, Christianities of the World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Miriam Adeney, Kingdom without Borders: The Untold Story of Global Christianity (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2009); Calvin F. Parker, The Southern Baptist Mission in Japan, 1889–1989 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1990); Travis Collins, The Baptist Mission of Nigeria (Ibadan: Associated Book-Makers Nigeria, 1993); Alan Scot Willis, All According to God’s Plan: Southern Baptist Missions and Race, 1945–1970 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005); Li Li, “From Southern Baptist Identity to Chinese Baptist Identity, 1850–1950,” in Baptist Identities: International Studies from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Centuries, ed. Ian M. Randall, Toivo Pilli, and Anthony Cross (Milton Keynes, UK: Paternoster, 2006), 241–56.
14.
Thomas E. Skidmore, Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993): 44–46; Graziella Moraes Silva and Marcelo Paixão, “Mixed and Unequal: New Perspectives on Brazilian Ethnoracial Relations,” in Pigmentocracies: Ethnicity, Race, and Color in Latin America, ed. Edward Telles (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 181–85; Anthony W. Marx, Making Race and Nation: A Comparison of South Africa, the United States, and Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Micol Seigel, Uneven Encounters: Making Race and Nation in Brazil and the United States (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2009); Edward E. Telles, Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014).
15.
Célio Antonio Alcantara Silva, “Confederate and Yankees under the Southern Cross,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 34, no. 3 (2015); Judith Mac Jones, Soldado Descansa! Uma Epopéia Norte-Americana Sob Os Céus Do Brasil (São Paulo: Fraternidade Descendência Americana, 1998); Laura Jarnagin, A Confluence of Transatlantic Networks: Elites, Capitalism and Confederate Immigration to Brazil (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2008), 25–27; Cyrus Dawsey and James M. Dawsey, eds., The Confederados: Old South Immigrants in Brazil (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998), 18–19.
16.
Silva, “Confederate and Yankees,” 379; Charles Willis Simmons, “Racist Americans in a Multi-Racial Society: Confederate Exiles in Brazil,” The Journal of Negro History 67, no. 1 (1982): 35–37.
17.
White supremacist tendencies were so deeply entrenched in Southern life that even the curriculum of white schools included explicit apologies for white superiority. In other words, white supremacy was part and parcel of schooling. Kristina DuRocher, Raising Racists: The Socialization of White Children in the Jim Crow South (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011).
18.
Mark A. Noll, God and Race in American Politics: A Short History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 71.
19.
See Skidmore, Black into White; Telles, Race in Another America; Silva and Paixão, “Mixed and Unequal.”
20.
For examples, see J. B. Cranfill, “Our Brother in Black,” Home and Foreign Fields VIII, no. 8 (1924): 23–24; W. P. Price, “The Ministry of the Home Mission Board,” Home and Foreign Fields X, no. 1 (1926): 10; G. S. Dobbins, “Our Debt to the Negro,” Home and Foreign Fields VIII, no. 8 (1924): 9.
21.
Rosalee Mills Appleby, Rainbow Gleams (Nashville: Sunday School Board, 1929), 17; Rosalee Mills Appleby, Orchids and Edelweiss (Nashville: Broadman, 1941), 34.
22.
For treatments of racial mixing in the US in general, see Tyrone Nagai, “Multiracial Americans Throughout the History of the US,” in Race Policy and Multiracial Americans, ed. Kathleen Odell Korgen (Bristol, UK: Policy, 2016), 13; Greg Carter, The United States of the United Races: A Utopian History of Racial Mixing (New York: NYU Press, 2013), 108–13; Jon M. Spencer, The New Colored People: The Mixed-Race Movement in America (New York: NYU Press, 2000), 1–5. For specific Southern Baptist reactions to “mixed-blood” people, see B. C. Hening, “The Separation of the Races,” Home and Foreign Fields VII, no. 2 (1923): 29; Victor I. Masters, “The South’s Human Problems,” Home and Foreign Fields II, no. 8 (1918): 15; G. S. Dobbins, “Race Prejudice,” Home and Foreign Fields XIII, no. 3 (1929): 17; John R. Sampey, “The People of Brazil: Potentialities, Problems, and Needs of This Great Growing Nation,” Home and Foreign Fields X, no. 1 (1926): 12–13.
23.
“Memorial Dos Pastores Baptistas Do Campo Regional Aos Missionários Baptistas Da Região,” Correio Doutrinal I, no. 2 (1923).
24.
“Memorial Dos Pastores Baptistas,” 9–10.
25.
“Memorial Dos Pastores Baptistas,” 10–11.
26.
W. C. Taylor, “Amostra Da Propaganda Radical,” Correio Doutrinal I (1923): 5.
27.
M. G. White, “The Dawning of a New Era in South American Missions,” Home and Foreign Fields I, no. 11 (1917): 7.
28.
M. G. White, “North Brazil Mission,” in Seventy-Sixth Annual Report of the Foreign Mission Board, 1921, 245.
29.
S. L. Watson, “Baptist Progress and Opportunity in South Brazil,” Home and Foreign Fields IX, no. 6 (1925): 24–25.
30.
D. L. Hamilton was the most respected missionary among those who came to be identified with the Radical Movement. He was the only missionary to remain with the radical position. Hamilton had been demoted from his position in the NBBTS in 1920 and, since that time, most natives think the other missionaries did an injustice to Hamilton.
31.
Antonio N. Mesquita, História Dos Baptistas Em Pernambuco (Recife: Typografhia do CAB, 1930), 216–17; Mário Ribeiro Martins, “O Radicalismo Batista Brasileiro” (Master’s thesis, Seminário Teológico Batista do Norte do Brasil, 1972), 23. The original documment is not easily available. Mesquita, who wrote eight years after the event, reproduced the document in its entirety. Martins had access to the document through the personal collection of denominational leader Antônio Simões, and his extended quotation of the document matches Mesquita’s version, despite Martins’ updating of the language to contemporary Portuguese.
32.
“Resposta Da Junta de Richmond a Junta Regional,” Correio Doutrinal I, no. 2 (1923): 12, 15, 17–18.
33.
“Resposta Da Junta de Richmond a Junta Regional,” 12.
34.
“Resposta Da Junta de Richmond a Junta Regional,” 15.
35.
“Resposta Da Junta de Richmond a Junta Regional,” 15.
36.
“Resposta Da Junta de Richmond a Junta Regional,” 17–18.
37.
“Ao Publico,” Correio Doutrinal I, no. 2 (1923): 18–19.
38.
From D. L. Hamilton to J. F. Love, February 17, 1923.
39.
From D. L. Hamilton to T. B. Ray, February 21, 1923.
40.
From D. L. Hamilton to T. B. Ray, February 21, 1923.
41.
From T. B. Ray to D. L. Hamilton, June 20, 1923.
42.
The best treatments of these developments are Martins, “O Radicalismo Batista Brasileiro;” Mesquita, Historia Dos Baptistas Em Pernambuco; Flavio Monteiro, “Radicalism in Pernambuco: A Study of the Relationship between Nationals and Southern Baptist Missionaries in the Brazilian Baptist Struggle for Autonomy” (PhD diss., Baylor University, 1991); Zaqueu Moreira de Oliveira, Panorama Batista Em Pernambuco (Recife: Junta Evangelizadora de Pernambuco, 1964).
43.
Adrião Bernardes, “Manifesto Aos Baptistas Brasileros (Nossa Atitude),” (1925): 1.
44.
“O Movimento Anti-Missionário Do Primeiro Século,” Correio Doutrinal I, no. 2 (1923): 4–5.
45.
José Alves Ribeiro, “Que Patriotas Quereis Acompanhar?” Correio Doutrinal I, no. 9 (1923): 8.
46.
W. C. Taylor, “A Propaganda Radical Em Texas,” Correio Doutrinal 2 (March 21, 1923): 2.
47.
Minutes of the Brazilian Baptist Convention, 1925.
48.
Minutes of the Brazilian Baptist Convention, 1925.
49.
Mesquita, Historia Dos Baptistas Em Pernambuco, 90.
50.
Monteiro, “Radicalism in Pernambuco,” 104.
51.
Adrião Bernardes, “A Situação Actual Dos Baptistas No Brazil,” Speech at the Meeting of the Brazilian Baptist Association, July 28, 1926, 3.
52.
Bernardes, “A Situação Actual Dos Baptistas No Brazil,” 3–4.
53.
Bernardes, “A Situação Actual Dos Baptistas No Brazil,” 5.
54.
Bernardes, “A Situação Actual Dos Baptistas No Brazil,” 6.
55.
Bernardes, “A Situação Actual Dos Baptistas No Brazil,” 7.
56.
Bernardes, “A Situação Actual Dos Baptistas No Brazil,” 18.
57.
Bernardes, “A Situação Actual Dos Baptistas No Brazil,” 19.
58.
The strong effect of the Depression on the daily operations of missionary-dominated Baptist institutions in Brazil is most clearly expressed in the correspondence between missionaries in the Brazilian field and their superiors in Richmond. For examples, see From T. B. Ray to H. H. Muirhead, May 6, 1932; From H. H. Muirhead to T. B. Ray, February 17, 1932; and From C. E. Maddry to H. H. Muirhead, May 13, 1933.
59.
Annals of the Brazilian Baptist Convention, 1936.
60.
Annals of the Brazilian Baptist Convention, 1936.
61.
“Convenção Batista Brasileira,” O Jornal Batista XXVIII (July 9, 1936).
62.
Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010), 6.
63.
“Letter from Birmingham Jail,” in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. James M. Washington (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986), 289–302.
64.
E. Luther Copeland, The Southern Baptist Convention and the Judgment of History: The Taint of an Original Sin, rev. ed. (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2002).
65.
John L. Eighmy, Churches in Cultural Captivity: A History of the Social Attitudes of Southern Baptists (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988); Rufus Spain, At Ease in Zion: Social History of Southern Baptists, 1865–1900 (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1967).
66.
Harvey, Redeeming the South.