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¶ JAMES D. GREY, 53, New Jersey-born head of the $1,625,000 First Baptist Church of New Orleans since 1937, was the youngest president of the Southern Baptist Convention when he was elected in 1951 and 1952. He is a member of the executive committee of the Baptist World Alliance, vetoes dancing but smokes cigars. When Negroes come to his church, he lets them stay but on occasion labels their "kneel-ins" provocative and "an exhibition of egotism." A fundamentalist and evangelist who complains that the modern church microphone is "a gadget of the devil, it's bugging me," Grey insists that "spineless and convictionless preaching is contaminating the land" and that Baptists must beware of becoming "ritualistic, formal, cold and dead, like so many other decadent denominations." He characterizes Southern Baptism as "a healthy, wealthy young lady," wooed by ecumenicalism on one side, nondenominationalism on the other. "These ambitious 'Lotharios' are making eyes at us. But we have not, cannot and will not even drop our handkerchief."
¶ THEODORE FLOYD ADAMS, 62, president of the Baptist World Alliance (TIME cover, Dec. 5, 1955), has been pastor of Richmond's First Baptist Church since 1936 and has seen his congregation rise from 1,600 members to 4,100. Regarded as perhaps the Baptists' most distinguished preacher, Adams is firmly on record as opposed to segregation.
¶ CARLYLE MARNEY, 44, fiery minister of the Charlotte (N.C.) Myers Park Baptist Church, practices open Communion and has fought segregation for years. He tells businessmen that "the profit motive is ethically bankrupt." A staunch believer in church-state separation, he wants religious teaching banned from all schools, nevertheless dubs religious opposition to Kennedy "prejudice," and slaps Baptist extremists as "Holy Roller Catholics who are creating an emotional authoritarianism which is far more rigid than Roman Catholicism."
In agreement or disagreement, these ministers, like thousands more throughout the South, Southwest, and even in a few Northern enclaves, are all members in good standing of the Southern Baptist Convention.
Resurgence After Disaster. Both Northern and Southern Baptists share the basic Baptist tenets: the supreme authority of Scripture, baptism by immersion, the autonomy of the individual soul before God. The split between them began with the issue of slavery; the Southern Baptist Conference was founded in 1845, after a Northern majority of Baptists had ruled against missionaries' owning slaves. During the Civil War the Southern Baptists evangelized fervently among Confederate soldiers, financed their foreign missions in part by blockade-running cotton exports to England.
The Confederacy's defeat and its aftermath brought near disaster to Southern Baptists: some of their meeting houses were confiscated, Northern Baptists flooded the South with their publications, and preachers were kept from their pulpits unless they swore that they had not sympathized with the Confederacy.