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Southern Baptists responded with renewed evangelical fervor. With Scriptures in their saddlebags, they followed the frontiersmen West, baptized in rivers, creeks and cow ponds, worshiped in barns and shacks, staged hell-raising, Bible-banging revivals in tents and private homes. Clapboard churches, throughout the South and Southwest, became the architectural landmark of the Baptist advance for nearly a century. Any man who heard the call was encouraged to grasp a Bible and summon a crowd.
Until well after World War I, the Southern Baptist trademark seemed to be high-decibel evangelism and opposition to the Pope, Darwin, smoking, dancing and drinking. Between the enactment of Prohibition and the 1928 defeat of Al Smith, Southern Baptism went through some of its rowdiest moments. Some memorably colorful but questionable leaders appeared —and in a denomination without central authority, where each church has complete local autonomy, no one could say whether or not they spoke for Southern Baptism. There was, for instance, J. Frank Norris, a Fort Worth Baptist preacher ("the Texas tornado"), who killed a political foe by shooting him four times in the belly, was acquitted on "self-defense." H. L. Mencken's picture, done with his usual exaggerated gusto, was taken as real by many readers: "It became dangerous in the South to be intelligent . . . Every Baptist pastor became a neighborhood Pope . . . Every pastor was a chartered libertine, free to bawl nonsense without challenge . . . What the poor whites heard from the outside world they heard from the lips of these pious ignoramuses."
Poets & Philosophers. Today, probably not even Mencken would describe the Southern Baptists that way. With the Depression and the U.S.'s increasing concern over international problems, Southern Baptists began to come out of their provincial hard shell. Fundamentalism declined and social issues moved to the forefront—although the Baptists never took to the "Social Gospel." Today, hellfire and brimstone revivalists are increasingly scarce, and though emotion-packed evangelism is still part of every Baptist sermon, more and more Baptist preachers are university-trained. They read the classics, study foreign languages, keep informed on science. Richmond's Theodore Adams quotes Kierkegaard in his sermons; Pastor Blake Smith of the University Baptist Church of Austin, Texas likes to quote Balzac, while New Orleans' J. D. Grey is likely to make his points with tags from poets and philosophers.
If Baptist ministers have changed, so have their places of worship. Many Baptist churches still show their recent mission origins, having grown up helter-skelter around meeting halls, stores or garages. But more and more churches are apt to be modern, functional and air-conditioned. Washington's First Baptist Church is not the only Southern Baptist church that looks almost like a cathedral.