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They kept a firm hand on manners and morals: dancing, drinking, smoking were Baptist sins, and horse racing was almost as bad as horse stealing. When the Bible needed explaining, the Baptists were not afraid to do it by sheer lung power; when it needed defending against the eggheads of evolution they were ready to do that, too (six Baptists were on the Scopes trial jury). Neither priest nor church nor neighbor might come between a Baptist and his God. This could lead to a deep personal religion, and it could also produce a welter of small, off-beat sects, e.g., the Duck River, General Six-Principle, Primitive or Hard Shell, and Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit Predestinarian Baptists. And all this spiritual nonconformity was often matched by an ironbound, triple-riveted social conformity, designed to keep everything and everybody in its place—especially the Negro.
This was the Bible Belt, but it is no longer. Two generations of Southerners have been moving into cities; the tiny sects have been drying up, and old hellfire revivals are fewer and farther between in the highly organized world of Billy Graham, Oral Roberts and TV. Southern Baptism today is bigger, busier and a lot better than ever. For a case in point, there is Pastor Ted Adams and Richmond's First Baptist Church.
Offer in Toledo. In booming 1928 First Baptist (founded in 1780) built itself a big $400,000 Georgian building, which covers most of a block on Monument Avenue. But in depressed 1935 the deacons were desperate. Interest payments on the building debt were barely being met, and the congregation had been without a regular pastor for 14 months.
The pulpit committee, unable to agree on any candidate, appointed a five-man subcommittee under the chairmanship of Lawyer T. Justin Moore. "I told them I'd take it," Moore recalls, "only if they'd authorize us to go out and hire the best Baptist preacher in the U.S., regardless of where we found him."
They found him in Ohio. Pastor Adams of Toledo's thriving Ashland Avenue Baptist Church was a Northerner of Northerners, and more surprised to be getting their call than the Southerners were to be giving it to him. When he heard what they wanted, he immediately asked that his wife, Esther, sit in on the discussion. "The only argument that seemed to have any weight," Chairman Moore remembers, "was that the First Baptist Church of Richmond had great influence in the South. One of the committee members put it pretty bluntly: Baptists in the South, he said, suffered from a much too narrow point of view, and here was a chance for Adams to do something about it."
Ted and Esther Adams thought it over, casting up the account of their ministry together.
Beginning in Palmyra. It had hardly ever occurred to Ted Adams that he could do anything else but serve God full time.
His first memory is of sitting with his mother in the little Baptist Church in his native Palmyra, N.Y. "and looking out there and seeing my father in the pulpit, preaching to the congregation, and thinking what a wonderful thing that was."