aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Saturday, November 26, 2005

Baptist losers

In the Mercer/Baptist split over the Triangle Symposium, I think the Baptists should reconsider. It looks to me like they’re bound to be the losers.

I’ve spent the morning with Guidestar, looking at Mercer University’s tax return. Out of a fund balance of $241,840,697 last year, a total of $17,697,816 came from direct public support. There’s no line item for Baptist contribution (duh!) but The Macon Telegraph reports that “the Georgia Baptist Convention currently gives Mercer about $3.5 million a year to fund scholarships.” The AJC says the 7,000 student campus “receives about $2.4 million a year from the Georgia Baptist Convention.”

That looks like a drop in the bucket to me. (And the reporters’ discrepancies suggest they haven’t done a much better job than me at tracking down the Baptist contribution. We don’t know and probably won’t know precisely what it is, but in relative terms it ain’t that big!)

Meanwhile, protests that there is no “national movement or trend” aside, this sure reads like one:

If Southern Baptists and their Baptist-run colleges are a family, that family appears to be splintering all over.

Tuesday, the same day that the Georgia Baptist Convention moved to part ways with Mercer University, Kentucky Baptists voted to loosen their ties with, and gradually reduce their funding to, Georgetown College.

And the next day, the Tennessee Baptist Convention voted to cut off funding for Belmont University in Nashville.

In the past 20 years, several other historically Baptist universities - such as Stetson in Florida, Wake Forest in North Carolina, Furman in South Carolina, Baylor in Texas - have either cut ties to their Baptist state conventions or become more autonomous.

Those splits, observers say, have been driven by the same issues that drive most family disputes: money, faith, politics, power and sometimes sex. And they have changed the face of academia in the Southeast.

William Brackney, director of Baylor’s Baptist Studies Program, says, “One of the largest denominational empires in higher education has been disintegrating rapidly in the last decade and a half.”

The chicken/egg question here is who’s leaving whom? Or, more importantly, who loses what in the breakup?

Some Baptist schools, such as Stetson, Furman and Wake Forest, gained complete independence and receive no support from their state conventions.

Baylor’s Brackney said, “There certainly doesn’t appear to be any scarring for the schools, all of them seem to have prospered. They’ve redefined themselves and gone on, and the Baptist movement has written them off.” [...]

For those schools that cut ties altogether, said Stetson’s Reddish, “Obviously, you lose some financial support, and you feel it, but you can also recoup it through increased alumni giving.”

Stetson lost about $1 million a year, he said, revenue that was gradually replaced.

“There may have been a slight downturn in enrollment,” he said, “but not much.”

More significant, some say, is the change in a school’s self-image. [...]

“History suggests that those colleges that have loosened their ties have a more difficult time maintaining their Christian identity,” said Duke’s Freeman. “They tend to grow more and more secularized. Some say that’s a good thing; some say it’s a bad thing.”

As an advocate of gay inclusion in religious life - even as I don’t identify as a capital “C” Christian - I see this as a bad thing. I’d like to see Baptist moderation and these schools are a moderating influence.

Evidently, the Baptist Conventions see that too. So they’re severing ties, and with that, losing the disproportionate influence their 1% contribution buys them.

RELATED: It may get worse before it gets better:

In December, Mercer trustees are expected to name Bill Underwood, the current interim president at Baylor University, as the school’s new president.

The 2006 edition of the Princeton Review’s “The Best 361 Colleges” ranked Baylor third among 20 schools listed as “Colleges with a Low Acceptance of Gays.”