Baptists

Baptists from great city congregations, from lonely mountain missions and from comfortable smalltown pastorates, gathered in Washington last week for the Northern Baptist Convention. They gathered to state opinions that were burning within them and to ask questions that had been troubling their reins this long time. And they gathered in pity and fear, for they faced a problem that might rive their church to its foundations.

Fundamentalism. A most elementary and powerful tenet of the Baptist faith insists that, to be received into the fold, an applicant must be completely immersed in holy water. Yet certain churches--most particularly the Park Avenue Baptist Church of Manhattan, pastored by Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick, attended and largely financed by John D. Rockefeller Jr.--have formed a practice of admitting members from other denominations without immersion, accepting a profession of faith as an equivalent of the ordered cleansing. "Let us read these churches out of the faith," fundamentalists have insisted through their leaders, Dr. John Roach Straton of Manhattan and Dr. William B. Riley of Minneapolis. Prolonged applause hailed every fundamentalist speaker. "Praise the Lord," shouted the delegates. The modernists, themselves true and loyal brethren, sat silent. Clearly the fundamentalists had a majority. On the third day excitement reached its height. Yet when the count was taken, it was found that the fundamentalists had more cheers than votes. They were beaten, 2,020 to 1,084. Mr. Rockefeller's church could stay in the faith.

Yet there was many an unmeasured invective hurled at Mr. Rockefeller personally. He was the bogeyman of the fundamentalists. The week before this convention the fundamentalists, unrestrained by any show of amity, had met, also in Washington, at the Baptist Bible Union of North America.

"Can we not get a test from Heaven so that God will destroy the enemy?" one cried.

The enemy was Mammon incarnated for the moment's argument --"capitalized with the wealth of Rockefeller coin and the aid of Marshall Field and others in order that Mammon may win the battle [for modernism]. . . . The establishment of Chicago University was the beginning of Rockefeller wealth to mammonize the Baptist Church." The works of these philanthropists were "the works of the Devil." So the flaying went on.

When another, Dr. J. Frank Norris of Fort Worth, Texas, a stanch American, cried, "we want Rockefeller to keep his bloody money," the Bible Unionists applauded. Yet in the larger convention the vote was cast and for the next twelvemonth Mr. Rockefeller and the other modernists may pass their way before the contemning eyes of the fundamentalists.

President. The man chiefly responsible for bringing about this quasi trust (it will endure for at least the next six months) was Dr. James Whitcomb Brougher, the retiring pastor of the Temple Baptist Church of Los Angeles, now pastor of the First Baptist Church of Oakland, Calif. All last year he traveled about the country presenting his address "Play Ball." Baptists of all shades of doctrine grew to admire him, came to call him "the Baptist unifier," even though they disagreed with his efforts to reconcile the parties. Last week he was elected President of the Northern Baptists.

Politics. The delegates scored Governors Smith of New York and Ritchie of Maryland; loudly applauded a speaker who declared that neither could ever be President of the U. S.. . . The entire convention called on President Coolidge* and posed for a photograph with him, which included 5,750 faces.

Significant Utterances:

"Leave a man alone with the New Testament and let him be uninterrupted and he will come out a Baptist."--Dr. Frank M. Goodchild.

"There is too much oil in the Baptist Church today."--Dr. John Roach Straton.

"Those wet bills have no more chance than a crippled grasshopper in a pen of turkeys."--Wayne B. Wheeler.

*The President politely ignored a Bible Unionist slur: "Mammonism has gained hold of the United States today. It strikes from the legislatures of the states. It rises from the congressional halls and in the Congressional Record. It blackens the family life of a President of the United States [pause]--I mean the Cabinet life."--Dr W. A. Matthews of Los Angeles.