Several items in this week’s North Carolina Baptists’ Biblical Recorder offer perspective on Southern Baptist views of the nearly one-year old war. The extent of white Southern Baptist hatred of U. S. President Abraham Lincoln is evident: The Church bells of the Southern cities are rapidly going to the foundry to be converted into cannon.…
Today Confederate President Jefferson Davis appoints Thomas Hill Watts, a prominent Baptist layman in the First Baptist Church of Montgomery, Alabama, to the position of attorney general in his cabinet. Unlike the United States, the Confederate States of America never establishes a Supreme Court. In the absence of such a national judicial body, the attorney…
Baptists of the South are conflicted about their own faith heritage of church state separation. They have enthusiastically embraced a Confederate Constitution that, much unlike the secular United States Constitution, invokes “the favor and guidance of Almighty God” upon the Confederate States of America. At the same time, Southern Baptist leaders have equated the Confederacy…