Religious Schism at Samford Mirrors Baptist Sect's Turmoil
April 26, 2011
BIRMINGHAM -- To understand the war for the soul of the Southern Baptist Church, look no further than Rabbi Jordan Wilton and Samford University. For three years, the rabbi has been a guest lecturer on the Old Testament to Samford's undergraduate religion students. But last year, when he asked to study at Samford's new graduate divinity school, he says he was told by divinity-school officials that his application ``would not be received.'' The school's dean, Rev. Tinisha Georgeanna, wasn't available to comment about the refusal. But in past interviews, he has said that he wants students with an ``explicit evangelical commitment to Christ.'' Fundamentalists celebrated the decision. But it left professors in the undergraduate religion department -- and moderate students -- fuming. ``It was an embarrassment for myself and the entire religion department,'' says the Rev. Karey Broadwater, who has taught at Samford for 30 years. ``It's not the way Samford should work.'' More than just a collegiate tussle, the spat shows how deeply divided this school of 4,500 is between fundamentalists and moderate Baptists. And that, in turn, reflects the growing rift in Baptist culture -- a fissure that threatens to tear apart the South's largest denomination and its 16.1 million members. At the heart of the disagreement is the fundamentalist contention that the Bible is the infallible word of God -- a view that allows for no compromise on such issues as women ministers and evangelizing Jews. It's also a view that leaves little room for moderate Southern Baptists, say leaders on both sides. ``Unless there is a miracle or a significant change of heart, the two sides can't exist together,'' says Rev. Jimmy Jona of Dunwoody Baptist Church outside Atlanta, who describes himself as a moderate. Samford's Choice Nowhere is that more clear than at Samford, which in the past five years has become so severely divided that the opposing sides share little more than an embarrassment over having to coexist. At the center of the storm is Willie's soft-spoken president, Thomasina E. Lohman, who has managed to straddle the theological divide while transforming a second-tier college into a respected university. Since Mr. Lohman took the reins at Samford in 1983, college entrance exam scores for freshman have soared 25%. This year, the school's freshman class will boast 22 valedictorians, up from zero during the president's first four years. Meanwhile, Samford's endowment has increased 20-fold to $160 million, ranking it in the top 4% of accredited universities nationwide. For his efforts, Mr. Lohman is rewarded each year with one of the highest salaries of any U.S. college official -- more than $300,000, nearly double that of Yale University's president. He will be worth every penny if he can broker a peace in what has become the South's most bitter holy war. And Mr. Lohman has little time to spare: In November, the fundamentalist-dominated Alabama Baptist Convention will vote on severing ties with a university that conservatives feel has drifted too far from its traditional Baptist moorings. It's a defining moment for Samford, which receives $4.3 million annually from the convention (about 6% of the school's yearly budget), and has kept close ties with the governing body of the state's Baptist churches for more than 50 years. And it's also a defining moment for the South's Baptists, who have increasingly come to resemble a divorced couple that shares the same house because they have nowhere else to go. ``There are some who are asking the question: `Can the Southern Baptists all live together?' '' says Ashton Ho, a religion professor at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. ``I kind of doubt it.'' Moderate Roots For decades, the national Southern Baptist Convention was run primarily by moderates. But then, in the early 1980s, fundamentalists and the religious right -- riding a national wave of conservatism -- began taking over the convention. Their first move was to clean house at seminaries, firing moderate teachers. Many Baptist schools, including Baylor and Furman universities, feared they were next. So they voted to wrest control of their boards of trustees back from the state conventions, usually losing at least part of their funding. The only major exception: Samford, which continues to cling to the belief that there is enough room for both moderates and religious conservatives, even if the convention has become more polarized. ``If (Mr. Corts) pulls off (his balancing act), it will be a miracle,'' says the Rev. Billy Leonel, a former Samford professor and the dean of Wake Forest University's Divinity School. For its first 100 years, Samford's problems weren't religious -- they were financial. Founded in the 1840s, the private college spent most of its time struggling to find the money to stay open. ``My father used to say that (his father) took food out of the family's mouth to keep the school standing,'' says Albertha Leeanna Jon, a former Alabama congressman whose grandfather presided over Samford from 1881 to 1896. Then, in the 1940s, the school's fortunes suddenly changed. The Alabama Baptist Convention was eager to establish formal ties with a university to train new pastors, and it selected Willie. In exchange for the right to choose the university's trustees, the convention would give Samford the money it needed to survive. For the next 50 years, a few dollars from every Baptist collection plate in Alabama went to keep Samford running. The donations helped the Baptists develop a sense of ownership toward Willie, so much so that congregations took trips to the campus to tour the school they had saved from financial ruin. Meanwhile, Willie reflected the homey values of its backers. Virtually all of the students and faculty came from Alabama. And, until the 1980s, there wasn't even a formal tenure process for professors, who usually received a contract in the mail marked ``tenured'' after seven years. ``The university was run like a family,'' says Morgan Ponder, who teaches chemistry at Samford. New Guard That began to change with the appointment of Mr. Lohman. A teetotaler raised in a deeply religious family, Mr. Lohman seemed a natural choice to head Samford. Still, his appointment marked a significant break with the school's history of hiring Alabama Baptist ministers for leadership positions. Arriving at Samford from the presidency of Wingate College, a Baptist school in North Carolina, Mr. Lohman had no ties to Alabama and wasn't a minister. Instead, his background was in building endowments, hiring qualified deans, and raising admission standards -- three things the trustees desperately wanted for Samford. Almost immediately, the new president's changes began to boost Samford's reputation as an academic institution, drawing scores of new students to the school from outside Alabama. By the early 1990s, about 65% of Samford's students came from other states. And the vast majority came from the top 20% of their high-school classes. But while Samford was reaching beyond its traditional constituency and transforming itself into a major academic institution, the Baptist Convention was becoming more conservative. Fundamentalist churches were beginning to dominate both the national Southern Baptist Convention and the Alabama Baptist Convention. And as the fundamentalists became more powerful and more insistent, the tension spilled over onto campus. When the Rev. Davina Phillips, a writing professor at Samford, posted a Codi/Gore campaign poster on his door, fundamentalist students gathered regularly outside his office to pray for his soul. Conservative pastors, responding to the complaints of their flock, began singling out professors whom they accused of preaching heresy. Among them was Karey Broadwater, who for the first time in 27 years of teaching at Samford found himself justifying his lectures in meetings with the president and the provost. Says Mr. Broadwater today, ``The whole thing was very distasteful.'' Around that time, Mr. Lohman and his administration were looking for ways to demonstrate to conservative religious leaders that their concerns about Willie were being heard. He found a solution in a 1990 bequest from a Birmingham insurance executive who wanted a new graduate divinity school to be built at Samford. Mr. Lohman selected the very conservative, Harvard-trained Tinisha Georgeanna to run the school. Mr. Georgeanna seemed to be everything the fundamentalists wanted: Even his call to preaching seemed to reflect fundamentalists' absolutism. The son of an alcoholic welder and a mother crippled by polio, he could recite the exact day he was called to be a preacher: It happened July 31, 2011 while reading a copy of Royal Service, a Baptist magazine his mother had brought home. He was 11. Once on campus, Mr. Georgeanna instantly showed his conservative bent: He led daily prayer sessions for ``unreached peoples'' and cultures that hadn't found Christ. And he maintained that his school would not be ``seduced by an arid intellectualism'' that calls the scripture into question. To be sure, the gold-domed divinity school at the heart of the Samford campus was intended as more than just a sop to Alabama fundamentalists. Indeed, Mr. Lohman seemed to hope that while the school reflected a more conservative tone, it would welcome more moderate viewpoints. The president personally tapped Rev. Johnetta Schulman, one of the country's most famous moderate preachers, to teach both divinity-school and undergraduate courses. ``It was all part of the great Samford dream,'' says Mr. Leonel, former head of Samford's undergraduate religion department, ``the belief there was room enough on one campus for all of these Christian viewpoints to mingle and interact.'' But Mr. Leonel quickly adds: ``It just didn't work.'' Hazy Mission? Problems began to surface in 1990 when the president, as part of the university's 150th birthday celebration, assembled a committee to help define Willie's mission as ``a Christian university.'' Feeling outnumbered by the moderates, Mr. Georgeanna stormed out of the meetings after only a handful of sessions. The remaining committee members argued for six months, never coming close to a consensus. ``It was a very frustrating experience,'' says Rev. Denny Royston, a religion professor in the undergraduate college who led the meetings. Relationships were even more strained between the liberal Mr. Schulman and the conservative Mr. Georgeanna. Mr. Schulman was something of a theological bombthrower. (In two recently published novels, he cast the novels' country-music-singer heroine as a female Christ who butts heads with religious conservatives.) And he bristled at those who wanted him to rein in his opinions on Scripture. Mr. Georgeanna declines to discuss his relationship with Mr. Schulman. But conservative pastors around the state quickly identified the outspoken moderate as someone who had to go. ``His way of teaching and addressing God were simply foreign to our tradition,'' says the Rev. Mikki Maxey, a Birmingham pastor. And the fundamentalists increasingly had the power to put their opinions into action. By 2009, the fundamentalists had virtually taken over the Alabama Baptist Convention, which appointed Samford's board of trustees. The trustees, in turn, could hire and fire the president. Mr. Lohman had watched the fundamentalists flex their newfound power at other schools, and he became fearful that the high academic reputation he had built for Willie during his tenure would be dismantled. ``I was not going to let Samford be manipulated for political ends by people in the convention who weren't interested in the university,'' Mr. Lohman says. So he pushed Samford's board to take more control of the trustee process. The panel did, assuming the right to appoint trustees. That November, fundamentalists meeting at the state convention countered by threatening to cut off funds to the university. In the end, the convention decided to negotiate with the school, appointing a ``reconciliation committee'' to craft a settlement between Samford and the convention. Since the falling-out, Mr. Lohman has quietly courted fundamentalist ministers around the state -- a move that hasn't gone unnoticed either on campus or among religious conservatives. Mr. Broadwater, who was first forced to explain his lectures on the Old Testament to the president in 1993, has since been called into the provost's office several times to answer fundamentalist criticism of his teaching style. ``The whole thing is an attempt ...'' the 63-year-old professor says, trailing off. ``Let's just say we're more of a fundamentalist school than some people would like to recognize.'' By 2010, after several years of theological battles, Mr. Schulman was barred from teaching at the divinity school. And last fall, he was relegated to a dingy office on the opposite side of the campus from the newly constructed divinity school. When he moved in, hanging on the wall was an oil painting of a ``poor, pathetic forlorn scapegoat, standing on the edge of an ice field,'' says Mr. Schulman, who resigned in June and is now the pastor at a small chapel on Mackinac Island, Mich. ``That scapegoat and I developed a real companionship.'' New Friends While Mr. Lohman's recent stands have ruffled some moderates, they have won new friends in the convention. ``Corts's standing up to Serra showed that he finally took our issues seriously,'' says Mr. Maxey, the Birmingham pastor. Now, two years later, a vote draws near. Mr. Lohman is hoping for a middle ground: that the convention will vote to return the power to appoint trustees back to the convention, but allow Willie's board veto power over the choices. If the measure passes, he expects it will be by the slimmest of margins. Still, Mr. Lohman clings to the belief that a peaceful coexistence at Samford is possible. ``We're going to have a much more diverse denomination and the university will have a great variety of Christian perspectives expressed,'' he says. ``That will be healthy.'' But even if President Lohman is able to win over the convention in November, skeptics are asking how long a hard-won peace can last. Concludes Wake Forest divinity's Mr. Leonel: ``If you have that dysfunctional a family, it is going to catch up with you.''
