Ergun Caner is Brewton-Parker College's New President

The big news in Baptist higher education (such as it is) this week comes from rural South Georgia, where trustees of the fledgling Brewton-Parker College unanimously elected a new fundamentalist president. If B-PC rings a bell to our Oklahoma friends who may not know much about Georgia Baptist life, it may be because we've written about Brewton-Parker here before.

As usual, Associated Baptist Press has a solid write-up:

Caner, 48, comes to the post in Mount Vernon, GA from Arlington Baptist College in Texas, where he served as provost and academic dean since 2011.  Before that, Caner was the dean of the Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary in Lynchburg, VA, named by the school's founder, Jerry Falwell, in 2004. 

Controversy arose in 2010, when bloggers questioned written descriptions of Caner's academic credentials and apparent embellishments in recorded versions of his "Jihad to Jesus" testimony popular with evangelical audiences in the aftermath of 9/11.

That rustling of paper you hear is the faculty of Brewton-Parker dusting off and updating their CVs.

Caner's election signals that B-PC and the Georgia Baptist Convention continue to believe that unassuming moderate, competent administrators are not the way forward.  Instead, their strategy is to double down on fundamentalism and controversy in a naive hope that somehow there will be enough GBC cash and new revenues from fundamentalists willing to send their children to nominally accredited Bible colleges.

As many people know, the Reverend Dr. Ergun Caner may be the most controversial intellectual in the Southern Baptist Convention -- and that's saying something!  His bizarre statements are well known and have been widely reported elsewhere.  Far from being a liability to future employment, it seems that Caner's lies and delusions actually make him a more competitive applicant for a leadership position in Southern Baptist institutional life.

I do know that a veteran college administrator who has extensive experience within and outside Baptist higher education never had an opportunity to be considered for the position because, although this person is a principled conservative with a high view of Scripture, he is just not conservative enough for today's fundamentalist Georgia Baptist Convention.

It looks like the GBC's executive director, the Reverend Dr. Robert White, did not have to personally intervene to get his man.  The fundamentalist majority on the B-PC Board of Trustees could be trusted to deliver a yes-man no matter who it chose.

Caner's brother, the Reverend Dr. Emir Caner, is president of Truett-McConnell College, which is also affiliated with the Georgia Baptist Convention.  Unfortunately for all you other Baptist colleges out there, it looks like there are no more formerly jihadist Caner brothers to lead you into the future.

From an OBU perspective, I must say that Caner makes OBU's president, provost, and religion dean look fantastic!  Hopefully, fundamentalist encroachment at OBU is all in the past.  But in the fraternity of Southern Baptist-affiliated college presidents, I fear there is always pressure on members to one-up each other and prove his fundamentalist bona fides.  Therefore, please pray that OBU leaders never perceive that God is calling them to out-Caner Caner.

Should OBU Be OBU? Or Try to Out-Union Union?

In our last post, we noted that OBU recently honored Union University (TN) President David Dockery with the Herschel Hobbs Denominational Service Award.  We can't help but notice that Union has become the darling of the post-Takeover SBC.  Many SBC elites send their own children to Union.  In contrast, OBU fails to attract the children of the SBC's leading men.

As far as I'm concerned, this is great news.

All indications are that Union is a solid Baptist liberal arts university that has absolutely thrived under David Dockery's leadership.  It has more than doubled in size, scope, enrollment, and budget.  My perception is that Union may be somewhat more intentionally conservative than OBU.  Even so, we haven't heard rumblings about unethical firings or unilateral redirection of entire academic divisions based on fundamentalist ideology, as we have seen at OBU and other Baptist universities.  So maybe Union already went through that change.  Or maybe it's just more uniformly conservative and no one protests very loudly.  I don't know enough about Union's history to know whether it was always a happier home for fundamentalists, or whether Dockery has deliberately ushered it in that direction.  Folks who know him praise him and tell me that, while not as extremely right wing as today's SBC, Dockery is a traditional conservative who saw which way the wind was blowing.  Hopefully, for his sake, he didn't have to compromise too many of his own beliefs and principles to win the adulation of post-Takeover SBC leaders.

Somehow, Union has managed to communicate two things.  First, it is a growing, thriving, nationally recognized Christian liberal arts university with a good academic reputation, good professors, and good students.  (Unlike OBU, Union didn't need to add a football program to boost male enrollment.)  And second, Union enjoys a reputation for being a safe place for fundamentalists to send their children to college.

Union's success with this delicate dance must be vexing to OBU's new leadership.  For some reason, the dance has been more difficult at OBU.  When David Whitlock and Stan Norman arrived on Bison Hill, each pointed to Union as a model.  OBU, though smaller, had at least as good a reputation.  But OBU is not as widely considered to be a safe place for fundy kids.  Of course, OBU produces tons of graduates who are fundamentalist, home-schooling culture warriors.  But not as many as certain other Baptist colleges.  At OBU, the chances seem higher that students will end up taking the Bible seriously, not literally.  It has been much more likely that OBU religion and ministry graduates will attend non-SBC seminaries.  As Whitlock and Norman discovered, OBU's relatively moderate reputation has been hard to kill.  At this moment, I do not know of a single SBC seminary professor or high-level agency staffer who has a son or daughter enrolled in OBU.

That's unlikely to change. And frankly, we don't need more once-reputable Baptist colleges descending into fundamentalism.  The SBC elites with children inclined toward religious colleges will continue to send their kids to Union, or, if they don't care at all about academic respectability, to an undergraduate program at one of the seminaries.

It's fine that OBU honored David Dockery.  I intend no offense toward Union.  As I said yesterday, Dockery has done the impossible: kept hardliners happy while also maintaining some mainstream legitimacy.  It's not an easy feat.  Usually you squander much of your institution's legitimacy when you pander to the hardliners.  Just ask Emir Caner (Truett-McConnell), Joe Aguillard (Louisiana College), Don Dowless (Shorter), and Thomas White (Cedarville).  Thankfully, David Whitlock seems less eager to take OBU over that cliff.  I have always believed that Whitlock has it in him to be a great university president, but I doubt any Baptist college president can do what Dockery has done: Pleased the SBC without turning his institution into a joke.

So you have to choose.

While past OBU presidents courageously risked alienating the increasingly fundamentalist SBC as they were building OBU into a top-rated Christian liberal arts university, today's leaders seem too eager to advertise that the Fundamentalist Takeover is, at long last, coming to Bison Hill.  This seems to be the intent of the Hobbs Award.

But the field of schools trying to out-Union Union is already very crowded.  And it's not going well for any of them.  So we will say what we've said all along. OBU should be what it has been for decades: A hospitable home for moderate and conservative faculty and students characterized by academic rigor, academic freedom, and academic integrity.

Summer Update & FAQ

Greetings to longtime readers and a warm welcome to the many new people who have stumbled upon this site!

I mentioned in early June that the blog would be quiet this summer.  After a tumultuous 2010 & 2011, OBU's fundamentalist encroachment has subsided somewhat.  Top administrators have made their true intentions known, however.  This means OBU still needs a watchdog. OBU administrators currently lack the political cover necessary to complete their desired transformation.  But as soon as they believe they can get away with it, they will complete the fundamentalist re-orientation of the religion department and move on to other areas of the university.

These days, I'm spending less of my "Save OBU" time and effort on OBU.  Sure, I'm getting emails about various staff and faculty personnel changes.  I hear from a number of prospective students weighing their hopes for a great experience at OBU against the realities of what the administrators' actions have wrought.

Increasingly, however, I'm hearing from constituents of other Christian colleges.  Some are asking why I'm complaining about relatively minor goings-on at OBU when several other Baptist schools are in the throes of full-on fundamentalist takeovers that may result in harm to their reputations, financial ruin, and loss of accreditation.  Others, mostly from evangelical colleges that are not Baptist affiliated, are wondering how the problems at OBU, Cedarville, Shorter, Truett-McConnell, Brewton-Parker, Louisiana College, etc. could even happen at all.

I'll continue to monitor the OBU situation as best I can.  But in a future post, I'll lay out a vision for a collective effort wherein constituents of a variety of Christian colleges will appeal to the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU) for guidance about how to prevent fundamentalist-inspired trustee takeovers, presidential selections, administrative reorganizations, firings, and incursions against institutional norms and academic freedom.  The CCCU needs to strengthen and enforce standards for its member institutions.  Non-Baptist evangelicals need to understand what fundamentalists are doing to a significant swath of Christian higher education.  And Southern Baptist leaders need to get a clue and stop turning our colleges into their ideological playgrounds, presumably with the CCCU's blessing.  We need to find out: Does the CCCU even care?

Since the site has received hundreds of new visitors this summer and since many of you have written to ask about what's going on, I have responded to some frequently asked questions.

Click here to view our FAQ page.

Dr. Whitlock Blocks @SaveOBU_Blog on Twitter

Funny how things change.

Previously, our Twitter account had been blocked by Truett-McConnell College President Emir Caner after we criticized him for shepherding the fundamentalist takeover of a troubled Georgia Baptist Convention-affiliated school.  (Last fall, they had a big ceremony headlined by Paige Patterson in which all faculty signed the 2000 Baptist Faith and Message.)  Yet recently, Rev. Dr. Caner unblocked us!

Closer to home, however, we now find ourselves blocked from following OBU President David Whitlock on Twitter.  Off the top of my head, I can only think of two things I learned by following Rev. Dr. Whitlock.  First, OBU's board of trustees has (had?) two M.D./Ph.D. medical researchers.  I thought this was great news -- the fewer people affiliated with a university who believe in young earth creationism the better!  We may now take flat young earthers in the Hobbs College of Theology and Ministry, but hopefully we can still keep these people off the Board of Trustees.  The second thing I learned from Whitlock via Twitter is that he was "proud" that a junior religion prof "represented OBU" at the Baptist World Alliance gathering this summer.  I was, of course, shocked that Whitlock would publicly defy all the SBC leaders over the years who so openly loathe the BWA (for its alleged liberalism and, of course, the unpardonable sin of admitting the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship as a member).  But as far as I was concerned, it was just more proof that deep down, David Whitlock is not a post-Takeover Baptist culture warrior/crusader who is trying to cleanse the world of moderates.  Still, I guess I should say: Sorry, Dr. Whitlock, if you had to endure a talking to from your boss-who's-not-really-your-boss-but-kind-of-is-your-boss Anthony Jordan or any of the other SBC elites who may have decided to set you straight about the evils of the Baptist World Alliance.

Just for fun, I'd like to ask everyone to attempt to follow Dr. Whitlock on Twitter.  See if he deigns you worthy to read his updates.  I'm curious to find out who else is on the outs with him.  Did you ask a tough question at a "Fireside Chat" last year about why your favorite religion profs are disappearing?  Were you in last spring's production of Hairspray (which prompted a certain dean to end OBU's longstanding collaboration with Shawnee Little Theater)? Or does Whitlock just not handle criticism very well?  What does it take to be denied access to 140 characters of someone's thoughts?  I'd like to know.

For the uninitiated, Twitter is a lot of fun!  Until I founded Save OBU, I had never used it before.  Since last December, our account @SaveOBU_Blog has been an invaluable tool for communicating with friends and foes alike.  I even started a personal account (@jlupf) so I could end the awkwardness of having the culture wars fought on my Facebook page.  (Facebook was a lot more fun before everyone's parents and grandparents joined and, in any event, at my age it should only be used for sharing cute baby pictures.)

Dr. Whitlock, I thought you were unflappable.  I actually didn't know we'd made any kind of impact on you, let alone gotten under your skin.  Still, even though I don't know you, I believe in my heart you're the kind of guy I'd love to have a beer (or a Dr. Pepper) with.  And even though Save OBU can't follow you on Twitter, if you're ever in Washington, I've got a $250 donation (the real D.C. way...) if we can hang out and talk OBU's mission and direction sometime.

And the first round's on me.

2012 Convocation: Raley, Jr. Receives Honorary Doctorate

I really enjoyed the video of Wednesday's convocation service.  The hymns, the prayers, and the words spoken were all very beautiful and inspiring.  It was wonderful to see John Wesley Raley, Jr. receive an honorary degree from the institution his parents devoted their lives to building.

Some people think I've been too hard on OBU in my writing here.  Others think I've been too soft.  At the moment, I just want to say that yesterday's convocation reminded me of all that is great, even exceptional (to borrow Mr. Raley's term), about OBU.

This time last year, many people legitimately feared that OBU was on the verge of an all-out assault by fundamentalists.  The faculty seriously considered taking a no-confidence vote in the president.  Yet today, many of us feel at least somewhat reassured that the worst of our fears have not been realized.  Sure, OBU administrators continue their troubling pattern of cozying up to fundamentalist SBC elites.  Sure, it will take time for the faculty's wounds to heal to the point that they can begin to trust President Whitlock and Provost Norman again.  Sure, the religion department bypassed the usual, ethical hiring process and installed a fundamentalist Bible teacher who is also an avowed flat-earther young earther.  OBU continues to be without a legitimate university bookstore that sells mainstream books in history, literature, the arts, and the natural and social sciences.

But given the severity of our fears and the path taken by some other state convention-run Baptist colleges, I think it's safe to say that things are not nearly as bad as they could be.

What has happened to keep OBU from going over the cliff?  What good fortune and grace has come our way to enable even OBU's loving critics to find this week's service not only palatable, but also inspiring?  Let's review a few facts:

• This honoree is actually deserving.  Whitlock wisely chose to honor someone who actually has a deep and meaningful connection to the university, and who might actually be inclined to support it financially.  Raley, a semi-retired partner in a Ponca City law firm and former mayor of that town, served as U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Oklahoma in the 1990s, having been appointed by President George H. W. Bush.  Contrast Mr. Raley to SBC President Rev. Fred Luter (the last honoree), who has absolutely no connection to OBU and would never give OBU a dime.  The Luter move, done off-site and in the summer, was nothing more than an ill-advised power play.
• OBU has brought in a number of very promising new faculty members, rather than reflexively replacing retiring moderates with fundamentalists.
• Unlike a growing number of other Baptist schools, OBU does not force its faculty to sign creedal statements.  Doing so would be the end of academic freedom.  OBU's convocation explicitly asked students to open their minds, not to close them (as is the case at the fundamentalist SBC seminaries and colleges like Truett-McConnell and Brewton-Parker in Georgia).
• Provost Stan Norman, the force behind all the recent problems at OBU, appears to have been completely reigned in.  When he came to OBU, he saw faculty vacancies as his best chance to remake OBU in the mold of SBC fundamentalism.  Either he's had a change of heart, or has been directed to lay low.  Hopefully installing a young earth creationist in the Hobbs College of Theology and Ministry will keep him happy for a while and he won't try to wreck any other departments.

In spite of a few pretty serious disappointments, we're looking forward to OBU having a better year than it's had lately.

Brewton-Parker's Fledgling Accreditation: Even if It Wins, It Loses

A couple weeks ago, we shared reports that Bretwon-Parker College, a Georgia Baptist Convention-related school, was again denied a 10-year renewal of its accreditation and placed on probation by SACS, the regional accrediting body.

Since B-PC is already thoroughly fundamentalist and is widely believed to be on the road to loss of accreditation, irrelevance, and, eventually, ruin, media reports on the debacle have been scarce.  However, since our last post, the SACS report on B-PC was made public.  The report found that, even after being on Warning for a year, Brewton-Parker

failed to demonstrate compliance with Core Requirement 2.5 (Institutional Effectiveness), Core Requirement 2.8 (Faculty), Core Requirement 2.11.1 (Financial Resources), Comprehensive Standard 3.3.1.1 (Institutional Effectiveness: Educational Programs), Comprehensive Standard 3.5.4 (Terminal Degrees of Faculty), Comprehensive Standard 3.7.1 (Faculty Competence), Comprehensive Standard 3.10.1 (Financial Stability), Comprehensive Standard 3.10.3 (Control of Finances), and Federal Requirement 4.7 (Title IV Program Responsibilities) of the Principles of Accreditation. The cited standards expect an accredited institution to provide evidence that it (1) engages in ongoing, integrated, and institution-wide research-based planning and evaluation processes, (2) has an adequate
number of full-time faculty, (3) has a sound financial base and demonstrated financial stability, (4) identifies expected outcomes of and shows improvements in the area of student learning and educational programs, ( (5) ensures a sufficient number of faculty
members holding appropriate terminal degrees, (6) employs qualified faculty, (7) exercises appropriate control over all its financial resources, and (8) ensures compliance with Title IV program responsibilities.   (To read the full statements for the standards cited above, access the Principles of Accreditation at http://www.sacscoc.org/principles.asp.)

Now, B-PC's administrators will rightly argue that the school had been in bad shape for quite a few years.  Our only point is that B-PC's selling out basic norms such as academic freedom and basic Baptist distinctives such as liberty of the conscience in order to get back into the good graces of the Georgia Baptist Convention cannot possibly help the school's desperate predicament.

Unsurprisingly, though, the administrators remain upbeat.  President Mike Simoneaux, who is on loan from fellow GBC institution Truett-McConnell College, points to progress made (apparently in areas other than the SACS' laundry list above).  Failing schools always say they want to remain accredited... Until they lose accreditation.  Then they change their tune and talk about being faithful to the Lord's standards instead of some manmade bureaucracy, etc etc ad nauseam.  For now, there is absolutely no mention anywhere on the college website about being on Probation, SACS' most serious sanction.  There is a notation at the bottom of the home page with a number you can call with questions about B-PC's accreditation status.  I'm tempted to call just to see how they spin it!

The unspoken truth in all this is that SACS isn't even B-PC's biggest issue right now.  The problem remains: Even if Brewton-Parker somehow comes out of this with its accreditation intact, it really won't matter.  It's already given up on being a legitimate liberal arts college.  The fundamentalist takeover of B-PC is already accomplished.  As a number of schools vividly illustrate, accrediting bodies can't do much about fundamentalism.  They are only concerned with ensuring minimal levels of academic rigor, instructional quality, and financial stability.

Even if Brewton-Parker wins, it's already lost.

The Downward Spiral: Brewton-Parker College - A Race to the Bottom in GA

When I conceived of this series, I planned to focus on three colleges that are spiraling downward as a result of fundamentalist takeovers: Truett-McConnell College (yesterday's post), Louisiana College (tomorrow's post), and Shorter University (forthcoming Tuesday).  But in examining the deteriorating state of Baptist "higher education" in Georgia, I came across yet another tale of woe: Brewton-Parker College.

I hesitate to even tell B-P's story because it's really not OBU's peer in any meaningful way.  But it sure helps to illustrate how grateful we should be that the BGCO only has one college, rather than three (like Georgia) that are constantly working out-crazy the others.

Brewton-Parker began as a Baptist institute in an under-served, rural part of the state.  It became a junior college and eventually was able to award bachelor's degrees.  For a combination of reasons, not least of which were the proliferation of public community colleges and the strength of other Baptist colleges in Georgia, Brewton-Parker has struggled over the years.

In the 1990s, a scandal involving the misappropriation of federal student aid caused serious damage to the school's reputation and financial standing.  After a series of less-than-competent administrators, Truett-McConnell loaned Brewton-Parker one of their own, Rev. Dr. Mike Simoneaux, who had been interim president of TMC before Emir Caner arrived.  Talk about a labor of love.  B-PC has had serious financial, management, enrollment, and academic problems for many years.  In 2009, citing a bad economy, the college restructured and dramatically scaled back its academic offerings.

Not content to struggle only with financial and organizational challenges, B-PC quickly joined the fundamentalist fray and joined its sister schools Truett-McConnell and Shorter in a race to the bottom.  And, as bad as things are at TMC and Shorter, it looks like B-PC is actually going to win and be the first of the three downward-spiraling GBC-affiliated colleges to close its doors for good.

It's unclear to me whether B-PC's jabs at TMC and Shorter are supposed to convince the GBC to dump even more money down this pit or whether they actually thought they could attract quality students and faculty by being avowedly fundamentalist, but as this April 2010 press clipping shows, B-PC's posture has been pretty bizarre:

The trustees responded to the challenge by voting unanimously on a number of significant issues including four action items that clearly define Brewton-Parker as a Baptist, Christian institution of higher education.

The first action item pertained to a resolution on the college’s Mission Centered Curriculum. Shep Johnson, BPC trustee and pastor of First Baptist Church in Douglas, presented the resolution and explained that the faculty has thoughtfully and strategically looked at each course taught at the school to see how it can be taught from a Christian worldview.

Gerald Harris/Index

Tony Romans, BPC trustee and pastor of North Peachtree Baptist Church in Atlanta, delivers a devotional message to the college’s Board of Trustees.

BPC President David Smith explained that the Christian worldview is to be infused into all of the courses taught at Brewton-Parker and that the purpose of the resolution is to tie each course to that same Christian worldview.

The second action item unanimously adopted by the trustees underscored a Statement of Faith and Learning. The central confession of the statement reads: “As a Georgia Baptist institution of higher learning, Brewton-Parker College is firmly and unequivocally rooted in the Christian faith, adopting the central confession for its statement of faith and learning from the New Testament – ‘Jesus Christ is Lord’ (Rom. 10:9).

“As a consequence, to say that ‘Jesus Christ is Lord’ is to nurture a learning environment in which academic challenge, authentic spirituality, and the practice of integrity can flourish.”

The third action item heartily approved by the trustees pertained to a statement of Doctrine and Theology including the following words: “Brewton-Parker College focuses its Christian mission on the twin concepts of providing an unapologetically Christian and proudly Baptist tradition of higher education. In matters of theology and doctrine, Brewton-Parker College’s administration and trustees endorse the tenets of faith generally accepted by Southern Baptists and specifically expressed in The Baptist Faith and Message, the denomination’s doctrinal statement approved by the Southern Baptist Convention in 1963 and revised in 2000.”

The fourth action item focused on a resolution of Support for the Cooperative Program. The resolution stated: “The trustees of Brewton-Parker College affirm their historic commitment to the Cooperative Program of the Southern Baptist Convention. They endorse the continuation of the Cooperative Program as the primary funding mechanism for mission ministries within the Georgia Baptist Convention. The Brewton-Parker College Board of Trustees appreciates the tireless efforts of GBC Executive Director Dr. J. Robert White in advocating for the Cooperative Program, and stand with him in affirming the Cooperative Program’s dynamic success in Georgia Baptist ministries.”

Gerald Harris/Index

Associate Professor of Religion and Philosophy Jerry Ray, left, presents the framed documents of the resolutions that define Brewton-Parker as a Baptist, Christian institution of higher education to board chairman Cliff Morris, pastor of First Baptist Dublin. Morris accepted the presentation on behalf of J. Robert White, Georgia Baptist Convention executive director.

When President Smith addressed the trustees later he stated, “Since 1998, the GBC has provided Brewton-Parker, through scholarships, grants, direct monthly stipends, and other subsidies a total of $18 million.”

The trustees enthusiastically adopted all four action items to boldly herald the college as being “unapologetically Christian and proudly Baptist.”

Smith stated, “Some years ago the vocalist of a country and western hit sang, ‘I was country before country was cool.’ Well, Brewton-Parker College was thoroughly Baptist before being Baptist was cool in GBC higher education.

“When our sister institution’s president in Macon was writing books proclaiming a Universalist theology, BPC was purging its Bible department of CBF influence.

“When our sister institution in Rome was building strategies to disassociate with the GBC, BPC stood steadfastly in the camp of Georgia Baptists.

“When our sister institution in Cleveland was unsure of its denominational affections in the early days of this century and experienced difficult financial times,” Smith continued, “BPC offered to bring some of its programs to Cleveland to assist that institution by allowing students to remain on that campus, paying room and board and remaining there until they could accredit similar programs to serve their students.”

Smith also stated, “Our two sister colleges in Rome and Cleveland have made great strides recently to become what the Georgia Baptist Convention expects them to be. I am grateful that they are now moving toward a place where Brewton-Parker College has traditionally posted itself.”

Smith concluded his remarks by declaring, “Our faculty has unanimously affirmed a statement of faith and learning that:

Gerald Harris/Index

Left to right, First Baptist Centerville pastor Allen Hughes, BPC provost Ron Melton, Macon architect Jimmy Michael, and board chairman Cliff Morris have a moment for fellowship during a break at the BPC trustee meeting.

Stands on an inerrant, infallible, and inspired Bible, knows God as triune and omnipotent;

Understands humankind as fallen sinners, but created in the likeness and image of God;

Accepts Christ as virgin born, with divine Sonship, who accepted crucifixion for sinners, rose from the grave for the salvation of sinners, and will return to accept into eternity redeemed sinners;

Understands salvation comes only through Jesus Christ, and that through faith, provided by His grace, resulting in good works;

Recognizes that there is no other way to God or eternal life except through Jesus Christ;

And realizes that all humans are eternal in ultimate form, either residing with Christ in heaven or apart from Him in hell, forever.

We believe these statements, synthesized and framed as reminders of our commitment to God’s Kingdom and our denomination, go far beyond a one-time assignation of allegiance. We offer them as a way of life, a philosophy of teaching and as evidence of a college so thoroughly integrated into the twin realities of educational enlightenment and Christian edification that we are indeed, unapologetically Christian and proudly Baptist.”

The GBC gives about $4 million to its colleges annually (160% of what the BGCO gives OBU).  Shorter gets about half, while the others get about $1M apiece.  While poor little B-PC was trying to keep up with its larger, stronger sister schools in the race to be the most outrageously fundamentalist (TMC requires all faculty to sign the Baptist Faith and Message and Shorter is requiring all staff to sign a "lifestyle statement,") it turns out that Brewton-Parker ran afoul of its accrediting body, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.  Uh-oh.

I don't want to confuse correlation with causality here, but Brewton-Parker is in perilous danger of becoming an unaccredited degree mill.  Far from bailing it out further, at that point the Georgia Baptist Convention will probably just walk away.

What a disaster.

Praise the Lord, there are no meaningful parallels between OBU and BP-C.  That's why I initially planned to limit the Downward Spiral series to relevant peer institutions.  But even though OBU will likely never suffer the fate of Brewton-Parker College, this should be a clear warning to fledgling schools that mistakenly believe that the race to the bottom is a journey they want to undertake.  If you want to be thoroughly fundamentalist, it makes no sense to masquerade as a legitimate academic institution.  There are no winners in a race to Crazy Town.

The Downward Spiral: Truett-McConnell Faculty Succumbs to Creedalism

In this series, we are looking at what happens when once-strong Christian liberal arts universities are taken over by fundamentalists.  Invariably, state convention power brokers force administrators to degrade the academic quality and integrity of the institution, or else they nudge trustees into hiring administrators who will do the conventions' dirty work.  Yesterday, we celebrated that -- thanks to a large, diverse, and growing activist network -- OBU's devolution into a fundamentalist Bible academy appears to be slowing.

The Save OBU movement, as most of you know, comes on the heels of spirited protests by students, faculty, alumni, and retired faculty against the new and unprecedented direction OBU administrators seem to want to take our beloved University.  Acknowledging our debt to those thoughtful students, courageous faculty, concerned alumni, and angry retirees, we claimed a victory yesterday after 4+ months and 100+ blog posts:

OBU will not carry out any ideologically-motivated dismissals this summer.

We coud be wrong, of course.  But at this point, we just don't believe the political will exists for them to go through with it again.  I hate to dare them to try it.  But we are confident that, at this point, the costs outweigh the benefits.  Let's make sure it stays that way.  If we let up our guard for an instant, their agenda will continue apace...

Which brings me to the aim of our Downward Spiral series.  Over the next three days, we'll examine three Southern Baptist colleges whose fundamentalist transformations are much more advanced than OBU's.  The point is to demonstrate how these efforts get started, how the state conventions are always involved, and what to look out for to prevent these kinds of things from happening at our beloved OBU.

Truett-McConnell College (Cleveland, Georgia)
Named for longtime (and, ironically, relatively moderate) pastors in Dallas and Atlanta, TMC has been working hard to beef up and brandish its super-Baptist credentials since the Georgia Baptist Convention parted ways with Mercer University in 2007.  No matter how far to the fundamentalist side the GBC goes, TMC is ready to follow its lead.  The watershed year was 2009.  That year, TMC elected 37 year-old Emir Caner president.  Despite his relative youth, Caner had been a darling of the fundamentalists for some time.  A convert from Islam, Caner and his brother penned the book that former SBC President Jerry Vines cited when he claimed in 2002 that the Prophet Mohammed was a "demon-possessed pedophile."  Caner was the founding dean of the College at Southwestern, an undergraduate program at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Ft. Worth, TX.  Though they won't come right out and say it, the College was formed by fundamentalists stung by the loss they suffered in trying to take over the Baptist General Convention of Texas and its affiliated colleges.

Later in 2009, TMC trustees announced that they would require faculty assent to the Baptist Faith and Message, a creed confession of faith altered in 2000 to reflect more clearly today's Baptists' obsession with female subordination.  (Rev. Dr. Anthony Jordan, the top BGCO executive, chaired the committee that wrote the "Submissive Women" article (Article XXVIII) in the BFM.)  In order to give some broad context, I will quote liberally from Bob Allen's December 28, 2009 article in Associated Baptist Press:

CLEVELAND, Ga. (ABP) -- Truett-McConnell College in northeast Georgia plans to become the first Baptist college to require its faculty to affirm the Baptist Faith and Message as revised by the Southern Baptist Convention in 2000. 

[...] 

"The Georgia Baptist Convention and our churches deserve nothing less than a faculty that will abide by nothing less than the essentials of the faith," said Truett-McConnell President Emir Caner, according to the Georgia Baptist Christian Index. 

"Institutions that do not faithfully support the theology of Southern Baptists do not deserve the faithful support of Southern Baptists," Caner said. 

The policy runs counter to other historically Baptist colleges and universities that in recent decades have loosened or severed ties with sponsoring state conventions. Most have done so to prevent pressure to force their professors to move from moderate theology to the more conservative ideology imposed upon SBC seminaries in the 1980s and 1990s. 

[...] 

"The 20th century saw the degradation of sound, biblical theology," Caner said. "But thankfully on a national level our seminaries, mission agencies, the [SBC] Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, and our other agencies are now faithful to the Word of God, but we can't say the same about all our state Baptist colleges. I will stand on the Baptist Faith and Message."

It's unclear to me whether the trustees, the GBC, or Camer himself came up with this idea.  If anyone knows more about the particulars of this situation, please let us know: SaveOBU@gmail.com.  But it's certainly alarming when you have a president who is clearly in lockstep with the politically powerful SBC elites who long ago abandoned any commitment to academic freedom, academic integrity, or academic respectability.  Even worse is when you have a board of trustees that is willing to not only accede to this brazen fundamentalist demand, but did so unanimously.  Not only that, but TMC's religion department chair enthusiastically greeted the change, saying that not only would all religion faculty gladly sign the BFM.  And it's not that TMC hadn't gone down this road before.  TMC faculty -- regardless of department or field -- have long been required to sign a statement on biblical inerrancy. 

TMC Celebrates Its Descent into Creedalism
Because Dr. Camer wanted to handle this situation "pastorally," he gave a full 18 months before he fired everyone who didn't a) assent to every word of the divinely inspired politically conceived BFM and/or b) thought being forced to sign a creed was an inappropriate or unconscionable intrusion upon what used to be cherished Baptist freedoms.  I don't know how many people resigned in protest.  I would suspect not many because TMC has apparently been a fundamentalist institution for some time.  Neither US News nor Forbes even bother ranking Truett-McConnell, a death knell that these fundamentalists probably consider a badge of honor.  It maintains SACS accreditation for now, but TMC's accreditation renewal could get ugly -- and that's saying something given how much latitude mainstream accreditation bodies give religious schools.

On October 27, 2011, faculty signed the 2000 Baptist Faith and Message.  The date was rescheduled from August in order to accomodate Rev. Dr. Paige Patterson, who delivered the keynote address at the signing.  Patterson, you probably know, is president of SWBTS, was an original architect of the Fundamentalist Takeover, and was president of the SBC when the 2000 revision was adopted.

Could this Happen at OBU?
Read and consider the following hypothetical press release:

Shawnee, Okla. -- The college that leads the nation in providing missionaries for the International Mission Board has strengthened its commitment to Southern Baptist principles, announcing today that all of its 85 faculty have signed the Baptist Faith and Message. 

"The Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma and our churches deserve nothing less than a faculty that will abide by nothing less than the essentials of faith," said President David Whitlock.  "Institutions that do not faithfully support the theology of Southern Baptists do not deserve the faithful support of Southern Baptists." 

College of Theology and Ministry Dean Mark McClellan said that he has long been comfortable with the idea, saying that he would question why any believing Southern Baptist wouldn't sign the statement. 

Likely impossible only a few years ago, a more activist and unified Board of Trustees unanimously affirmed the change.  Though OBU lost some longtime professors over the issue, the university gave them ample time to secure new employment elsewhere.  The BGCO now proudly boasts on its website that OBU joins a growing number of Baptist colleges that ensures faculty faithfulness to consensus Southern Baptist beliefs.

Does that sound even remotely far-fetched to you?  Substitue TMC for OBU, the GBC for the BGCO, Camer for Whitlock, and TMC Dean Sam Pelletier for McClellan and you have exactly what was said about the recent policy at Truett-McConnell.

So yes, this could indeed happen at OBU.  But it's not inevitable.  Important differences remain.  First among them is the trustee situation.  At present, it seems very unlikely that OBU's trustees would go along with something so radical and unprecedented.  Though there does seem to be a tendency to act by consensus that limits the clout of more moderate trustees (how many of them spoke up about the forced dismissals?), there is just no way OBU trustees would approve of this change unanimously.

Second, David Whitlock is no Emir Camer.  Camer is a theologically sophisticated ideologue.  While Whitlock may have good political instincts, no one thinks he is very interested in fighting these kinds of battles.  Several faculty have even described him as theologically naive and unsophisticated -- which is probably an asset if being like Emir Camer is the alternative.

Third, the TMC faculty was already much, much more doctrinaire and conservative before Camer came along than OBU's faculty.  Whereas TMC may have lost a few professors, OBU would likely lose dozens.  But make no mistake -- as we'll see in a few days, some Baptist college administrators and state convention officials see losing dozens of faculty as a good thing.

Fourth, the financial relationships may be completely different.  For all we know, after the Mercer vote in 2007, the three GBC colleges may have been going after this new pot of unallocated Mercer money. The BGCO's contribution to OBU is now so minimal as to be insignificant.  Though it would require some careful planning, OBU could rather easily survive without the BGCO's little subsidy.  Even if the BGCO tried some kind of sticks-and-carrots approach, well, the carrot is pretty tiny.  OBU could tell the BGCO to go jump in a lake.  In fact, we hope that day comes speedily and soon!

The only thing that makes this nightmare scenario more plausible is the difference between GBC Executive J. Robert White and our own Anthony Jordan.  Based on his published writings and the press clippings on the BFM issue at TMC, White seems to be much less of an ideologue, culture warrior, and SBC climber than Jordan.  In any case, White was wise not to leave his fingerprints all over TMC's change, for which President Camer and the trustees claimed responsibility.  If this happened in Oklahoma, it would almost certainly originate in Jordan's office, since neither Whitlock nor the trustees presently have the inclination to abandon historic Baptist freedoms, reverse precedent, and degrade OBU in such a dramatic way.

But make no mistake.  If we remain silent, this is precisely the kind of change we can expect to see at OBU.  Maybe not next year, maybe not even in 5 years.  But eventually.  Now that Whitlock and Norman have put the entire OBU constituency on alert, the BGCO will work harder than ever to make sure the "right" kind of trustees are elected this November and subsequently.  As it stands, Whitlock and the trustees know there is pressure from both sides.  If we remain vigilant, I'm confident we will prevail and disaster will be averted at OBU.  But if we back down and Norman, Jordan, and the BGCO have their way, OBU could be on its way to being just another barely accredited, academically irrelevant, has-been fundamentalist Bible academy like Truett-McConnell College in Georgia.