Battle for the Minds.

SOUTHERN BAPTISTS ON PBS 

Lipscomb's 'Battle for the Minds'

Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, founded 1859, is one of the jewels in the crown of Louisville, Kentucky, my home town. Even when I was growing up Catholic in the fifties, I was aware - it must have been through osmosis - that Southern was the cynosure of the Baptist seminaries, their Harvard, their collegium sacrum, their West Point or Sandhurst. Hey - my first date, age twelve, was with the daughter of a guy who taught there; maybe I'll tell you someday about the turmoil that (alas, disastrous) date caused in my large, fiercely papist, Baptiphobic family.

But now, I just want to explain to you why Steven Lipscomb's brilliant documentary, "Battle for the Minds," which chronicles the recent takeover of Southern by intransigent and unforgiving fundamentalists, is so personally poignant. It airs on PBS on June 10 (check local listings), another splendid addition to the P.O.V. series of documentaries which for a decade now has graced public television with so much intelligence. It's the story of the death - or at least the serious wounding - of a grand institution. It's the tale of a takeover and a subsequent purge. It's a parable about the relationship of doctrinal authority and individual conscience.

It's about women.

Lipscomb decided to make this film because his mother was trying to get ordained in the Southern Baptist Convention. And she couldn't. In his attempt to find out why, he discovered a secret history that is the real story of his film, and that applies, scarily, to belief-systems far removed from the Southern Baptists.

Well, not all that secret, really. Southern Baptism is still the largest Protestant denomination in the country, and politically the most hefty: Clinton, Gore, Gingrich, Thurmond, and Jesse Helms are all in its communion. Its doctrines are, to a large extent, antidoctrinal. As Harold Bloom observes in The American Religion, and as a number of interviewees in the film say, in its origins the denomination was ferociously dedicated to the authority of the individual conscience, the individual's own "walk with Jesus."

But - as the earlier PBS history of fundamentalism, "With God on Our Side," makes clear - around the mid-seventies of this century, the churches began to realize how much heft they did wield; and the fundamentalists, perhaps because of the soundless depth of their conviction, realized it most acutely. At any rate, as "Battle for the Minds" documents, by the Southern Baptist Convention of 1979, the fundamentalists had positioned themselves to take control of the major offices of the denomination - led, in large part, by Paige Patterson, who is now president of Southeastern Seminary. And on their agenda, besides the inerrancy of Scripture, was the impossibility of ordaining women.

By 1984, at the convention in Kansas City, they were strong enough to pass a resolution to the effect that no woman could ever serve as a deacon in a Southern Baptist church. Objections from the convention floor were ignored or ruled out of order; and sometimes, as the film shows, floor mikes were simply turned off. It was, as many respondents in Lipscomb's movie say, a remarkable invasion of magisterial authority into a denomination that, tracing its beginnings to the noble Roger Williams, had set itself squarely against magisterium. By 1995, at the convention in Atlanta, a resolution was passed that not only women could not serve as pastors, but that teaching the pastorate of women was verboten, and grounds for dismissal.

Things, in other words, had gotten pretty Orwellian for Louisville.

Now 1995 is the key year for "Battle for the Minds," because, at least according to Lipscomb's version of history, that was the year that Southern Baptism came apart.

By '95, Southern, the citadel of liberal Baptism, had fallen. Its president was Albert Mohler, Jr., formerly a liberal but now a deep-dyed conservative. (You're right: "Battle for the Minds" is happily and unabashedly parti pris, and Brother Mohler is its Designated Bad Guy. Come on, you're going to talk about religion and not take sides?) And the most popular and beloved professor of theology at Southern was a liberal and feminist named Molly Marshall.

So you can write the rest of the plot. Rumors and letters were circulated to the students that Molly Marshall was outside the Baptist convenant, even outside Christian belief altogether, and in 1995, according to her, Mohler told her that she could either resign or be fired. She resigned, and the student protest rocked the seminary, drove away other talented faculty and students, and - at least if this documentary is to be trusted - compromised the school's preeminence perhaps permanently.

It's a bitter little tale Lipscomb tells, with political ambition, professional careerism, religious absolutism, and personal moral conviction all mixed together in an especially distasteful stew. And he tells it well. From the beginning, he intercuts color footage of the student protests over Molly Marshall, meetings of the Southern Baptist Convention, and press conferences by the seminary administrators, with black-and-white, head-shot commentary by the major players - including a lot of Marshall. And he has the great good sense to use, as his opening and closing theme, the rock group REM's wonderful song, "Losing My Religion": Now that's a smart guy!

Besides the brilliance and inherent interest of the film, though, I wonder if it isn't an especially arresting one for Catholics - at least for Catholics troubled by recent pronouncements about the role of women in the church, and especially Catholics concerned with the whiff of sexism in traditional Christian belief as it has come down to us.

Southern Baptism, anti-authoritarian and deeply private, is almost a fun-house mirror image of Catholic belief. And yet its recent history, at least according to this film, seems to have brought it to the same crisis currently possessing the older church. Is a patriarchal system the only way of church governance? And if so, why? Can a brilliant woman not serve as pastor instead of a dull male? And if not, why not?

Al Mohler is still president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Molly Marshall, as of the time of the film, is still looking for a job.

Anybody interested in the future of American religion should watch this film: It's a cautionary tale.