by Keith Bassham
I came to faith in Jesus Christ in my teens. I had little to no background in religion, and everything associated with serious Christianity and Baptists was new to me. At about the same time, I was just beginning to have an interest in journalism. I was on the school newspaper staff, and later in an editorial position (I confess to quite a lot of nerdy activity in high school), and now I could argue what seemed a whim at the time was actually God’s providence. Given all that, you can imagine my disappointment when I learned that the branch of God’s family I had embraced found virtue in the phrase, “nary a piece of literature!”
I was relieved to learn that slogan was just that, and most of the time it was a custom (to use Shakespeare’s language) “more honour’d in the breach than the observance.” Baptists did read and write, I discovered, and they had been at it a long time. This article will reflect a small slice of the history of Baptists and their publishing. I warn you though, that it is a slice. If all I did in the next few pages was to merely recite the names of Baptist periodicals, both extant and those dead and long buried, I would not have enough space.
We all know that the invention of the movable type printing press made the Reformation possible, and Baptists benefited perhaps more than any other group in that era for reasons I will give in a moment.
Pre-Gutenberg reformers such as John Wycliffe in England and John Huss in Bohemia had both experienced good receptions to their ideas and preaching. But movements like Wycliffe’s or Huss’s could not travel far because of the limitations of the spoken word. They were localized and easily suppressed by authorities. The establishments who opposed them had access to the monasteries and scriptoriums that were at the heart of the information industry in Europe before 1500.
However, with the printing and rapid distribution of Luther’s 95 Theses, the German New Testament, and books in European languages 100 years later, the Reformation spread easily throughout the general population. Peter Drucker, who calls this era the Third Information Revolution, says that an individual person working with others in a print shop could be responsible for as many as 2.5 million pages of text in a year’s time, whereas a couple of generations before, an individual monk would have been able to produce just a little over 1,000 pages. That is the definition of an information explosion.
Just as internet access, blogging, and social media levels the playing field for communicators today, the printing press was especially helpful for anti-establishment reformers — and that’s a fairly apt name for Baptists in the English separatist tradition. Baptist ideas spread through the printed word would not be localized, and thus easily suppressed. As was true for countless anti-establishment and separatist Christians, when they wrote, their ideas became truly portable and possible to spread across national boundaries.
Of course, other social changes took place alongside the development of printing, and these changes also had an effect in the West so that knowledge moved from ecclesiastic scholars and royalty to the masses, and then this knowledge became set as it moved from orality to literacy.
Baptist churches and associations began flourishing shortly after, and it was only natural they would communicate with one another and with the rest of the world. These communications give us a look into what was happening in those congregations.
John F. Kennedy is supposed to have declared that magazines are “the interior dialogue of a society,” and I’m reasonably certain he coined that last phrase. The day-to-day and week-to-week contemporary exchange of information, even when filtered by writers and editors in Baptist periodicals, should and does yield valuable information for the historian, and in some cases it may give a better and more accurate picture than the official history books and position papers. This is surely true of the Baptist Bible Fellowship. Aside from some short summaries in encyclopedias and a few romanticized book-length accounts of the founding of the Baptist Bible Fellowship, the only genuine history of our Fellowship is contained in the pages of the Tribune. I have a friend or two who like to regale us with their memorable stories of events long past, but they forget I have access to the archives with the contemporary records. And when I compare their recalled versions with the actual printed stories from the day, I know that what I am really hearing from my friends is sometimes an adventure in postmodernism.
Papers of record have that “correcting” function. An example of an important paper for historical purposes would have to be something like The Christian Index. The Index claims to be the oldest continuously published religious newspaper in the United States, and I am not prepared to dispute that.
It was not the first however. A Presbyterian paper, The Christian Secretary, holds that position. Nor was it the first Baptist paper. In 1819, The Christian Watchman was founded in Boston, and The Index, or the paper that became The Index, began publication in 1822 in Washington, D.C. under the name The Columbian Star. Luther Rice began the paper to promote the missionary activities of Rice’s friends like Adoniram Judson and the new Columbia College, later named George Washington University. Known for a time as The Columbian Star and Christian Index, in 1831 the masthead shortened and it became The Christian Index. The paper moved first to Philadelphia and then to Washington, GA, when Jesse Mercer took over the publication in 1833. The paper knew several homes in Georgia before taking up permanent residence in Atlanta, and ultimately becoming the official organ of the Georgia Baptist Convention.
From at least the time that Mercer became publisher the paper had financial problems. When he gave it to the Convention, he still had those troubles in mind when he wrote to readers, “ … let me beseech you to hold fast to The Index. That such a publication is needed in the south is acknowledged by many, but too few feel the right sort of zeal in the cause.” In other words, send money! How often I have thought those thoughts myself!
And if a fine paper like The Index had its woes and lean times (sometimes the paper did not even publish during the Civil War, and the Georgia Convention sold it in 1861) think of the lesser-known and smaller papers. After the war, The Index took up some of these, absorbing papers in the region — Florida, Tennessee, Alabama — and the convention eventually bought it back in 1920.
Omit the details, and the story of The Index could be the story of all Baptist newspapers — starting, moving, starving, changing locations, owners, and names. And what names: Thomas Armitage’s history has a short list from the 19th century — The Watchman, The Christian Secretary, The Latter Day Luminary, the Religious Herald, Zion’s Advocate, many named simply “The Baptist,” or if associated with a state association, “The Tennessee Baptist,” The Baptist, The Baptist Pioneer, The Baptist Advocate, The Baptist Witness, The Baptist Recorder, The Baptist Register, The Baptist Chronicle, The Baptist Examiner, The Baptist Times, The Baptist Review, The Baptist Quarterly, The Baptist Advance, and more elaborate names, such as the Christian Contributor, Watchman of the Prairies, and the National Baptist.
And a whole presentation could be devoted to the numerous publications among the German Baptists and Swedish Baptists — papers like The Monthly Gospel Visitor, The Christian Family Companions, The Primitive Christian, The Pilgrim, The Progressive Christian, and The Gospel Preacher. Some of these became official organs, while others were more family oriented and designed to help reinforce in the home the teachings from church.
Generally speaking, the Baptist periodicals’ content was very similar to those materials you might see in publications today — sermons, expositions of doctrines held in common with all evangelicalism, others setting forth Baptist distinctives, and on occasion, confessional items with and without explanation. Reports from associations, missions, statistics, opinion articles dealing with moral issues, sometimes mirroring the non-Christian press with a tone very nearly like those of the standard temperament and abolition newspapers. But as you know, the slavery issue was handled differently among Baptists in the north and south, and that is reflected in the newspaper content. An abolitionist stance, or an emancipationist stance was nearly unthinkable in the deep South, and those attempting it even in border states would have trouble. Some brave souls paid dearly for their insistence on both a free press and an anti-slavery position.
And in nearly every instance, the proprietor and editor was a pastor or educator, had been one or the other, or was going to be after the assignment on the paper ended. These were luminaries like Mercer, Vedder, Wayland, Newton, and Hovey to name a few.
It is important we take note of that last point. The editors of Baptist periodicals tend to be preachers rather than professional journalists. One implication of that fact is that Baptist newspapers, magazines, and journals will tend toward being cause driven. But I’m getting ahead of myself a bit.
In the publication trade, a periodical like the Baptist Bible Tribune, or any of the denominational or convention magazines and newspapers, is considered an association periodical. With that designation, the official trade is in line with a typology advanced by Leonard Goss and Dan Aycock in their book Inside Religious Publishing. That typology comes from a grid with squares arranged two by two. Each square’s position is determined by how much or how little the publication is cause driven, and to what extent the content is determined by the stakeholders or readers.
For instance, among Baptist papers, you might put something like the Sword of the Lord, the newspaper begun by John R. Rice in the first part of the 20th century, and currently edited by Shelton Smith, in the square holding the names of those publications which are both very independent and driven mostly by the cause of the owners or chief supporters. It carries no official support from any recognized Baptist body, and the owners and publisher seek no acknowledgement. It is a prime example of that type of Baptist Bill Brackney calls “the Come Outers,” in chapter seven of his recently published Baptists in North America.
The other three squares in the typology grid include publications driven primarily by the subscribers or target markets. These would be quarterlies or journals tied to fairly narrow specific interests — history, for instance. And then there are publications that advance the cause of or promote an organization. Still technically independent from denominations or conventions, their interests intersect with those organizations, but with few exceptions, Baptist publications, even those founded by individuals or churches, eventually become the public face, in print at least, of the constituencies making up a common membership.
Historically then, Baptist periodicals, unless they were tied to organizations at their founding, began life as independent and cause-driven organs. That helps explain why many of the founders and editors of those papers were people trained first for the pastorate. Both they and their publications were agenda oriented — either for cause, for an organization, or for a constituency.
This brings to mind something I read in one of the bio articles on the website of the Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives. The article is about John Mason Peck, early missionary to the West sent by Triennial Convention in 1816, and later by the Massachusetts Baptist Missionary Society. According to the article, Peck’s thinking on church planting was systematic, with what the article designates a “ … slowly developed strategy included organization of Bible and Sunday school societies, systematic itineration, theological education, and journalism — in the order cited.”
The work of the ministry, the cause, comes first in that list, and journalism, the actual publication of information about that work, is last.
That also helps explain why Baptist publications are at the center of so much controversy. Deeply held beliefs become editors’ agenda, and as I have already intimated, Baptist publications often were read the way Internet blogs are read today, and I am not the first to make that observation.
This short foray into Baptist publishing has a few implications for those of us who produce the publications and for those who read them.
Though many Baptist publications are still agenda oriented, there is a greater dependence on journalism skills. The formation of the Baptist Press in 1946 was a real breakthrough, showing that we were not just about publishing sermons and statistics and devotionals. We can report news and help Baptists make sense of it. And because of the agenda, we can also find the news under the news, often catching things the secular media miss. My informal research indicates that most of us holding editorial positions, and I think this is the case in many denominational or fellowship administrative positions, were more likely trained in ministry rather than journalism. That means as pastors we like to smooth things over, and as journalists we like to stir things up a bit.
That does not mean there are no standards, however. The Baptist Press and The Associated Baptist Press have the look and feel of real news bureaus. The writing and reporting is technically professional, though there is still that agenda thing going on. I don’t say that’s a bad thing, and a truly objective viewpoint may not even be possible. But that does bring up the next thing we have to make a decision about.
As Baptists, we have to work out a balance between objectivity and agenda, and we must tell the truth. Given that Baptists have historically been for freedom, and that includes freedom of the press, we have to go back to the typology grid and take care of the stakeholders. I make no bones about it, the Tribune is the magazine of the Baptist Bible Fellowship International. It is not mine. It is not owned by this segment or another. It is a publication owned and published for the benefit of the Fellowship.
For my own part, I tell people that the Tribune has an agenda. We are friendly to other Christians and certainly to other Baptists, but the largest chunk of our function is related to promoting the interests of the constituents (pastors, missionaries, church members) associated with the Baptist Bible Fellowship.
That means what we do is not pure journalism. However, even when a statistic puts us and our ministries in a bad light, I feel obligated to publish the truth. If an audit shows that contributions are down, the audit story will reflect that. On the other hand, our ministry news stories are primarily going to be good news, and the doctrinal and devotional articles are going to reflect the thinking of the broad middle of our constituency.
Finally, print journalism may be dying. Magazines, and especially smaller circulations, are having a struggle, and we echo what Jesse Mercer wrote at the time he was turning The Index over to the Georgia Baptists, that “a publication is needed in the south is acknowledged by many, but too few feel the right sort of zeal in the cause.” I have that zeal, and I pray that many in our Fellowship continue to share it with me.