This groundbreaking research reveals Southern Baptists extra diversified in
their attitudes towards segregation than formerly assumed.

Focusing at the 11 states of the previous Confederacy,
Getting correct with God examines the evolution of Southern Baptists'
attitudes towards African americans in the course of a tumultuous interval of change
within the usa. Mark Newman not just deals an in-depth analysis
of Baptist associations from the Southern Baptist conference (SBC) and
kingdom conventions to schools and church buildings but additionally probes past these
through interpreting the reaction of pastors and lay humans to altering race relations.

The SBC lengthy held that felony segregation used to be in line with
biblical teachings, yet after the best Court's 1954 Brown vs. Board
of Education choice in prefer of desegregating public institutions,
a few Southern Baptists came across an inconsistency of their easy ideals. Newman
identifies 3 significant blocs of Baptist opinion approximately race kinfolk: a
hard-line segregationist minority that believed God had ordained slavery
within the Bible; a extra average majority that approved the present social
order of racial segregation; and a innovative staff of lay humans, pastors,
and denominational leaders who criticized and finally rejected discrimination
as opposite to biblical teachings.

According to Newman, the efforts of the progressives to
attract Baptists' fundamental commitments and the dying of de jure segregation
triggered many average after which hard-line segregationists to progressively relinquish
their perspectives, resulting in the 1995 apology by way of the Southern Baptist Convention
for its complicity in slavery and racism. evaluating Southern Baptists to
different significant white denominations, Newman concludes that lay Baptists differed
little from different white southerners of their reaction to segregation.