Southern Baptist Beginnings

I am doing a month-long Sunday series on the history of the Reformation, and came upon a website on Baptist beginnings. I thought the section on general Baptist history was pretty good, but when I clicked on the link on Southern Baptist beginnings, I discovered this effort to rationalize the real reason for the Baptist split:

The Southern Baptist Convention Organized

When Baptists in this country formed the first of their three national societies in 1814, many of their leaders recognized that there were numerous social, cultural, economic, and political differences between the businessmen of the North, the farmers of the West, and the planters of the South. These differences had already brought much rivalry between the several sections of the new nation. Each section continued to revive old colonial disagreements and wrestled with questions about how the new constitution should be interpreted, what constituted the final legal power, and similar problems.

Perhaps most critical of all was the slavery issue. This practice had been forced upon the colonies by England early in the seventeenth century against the protests of Northerners and Southerners. Northern merchants, however, soon sought the profit involved in importing slaves from Africa. Southern planters, the only ones able to use large numbers of unskilled laborers on large plantations in a relatively warm climate, helped to prolong this evil. At the height of this system, however, two-thirds of the white families of the South owned no slaves at all, and Baptists (who were generally of the lower economic status) were probably less involved than this.

The same moral blindness that caused a minority of northern businessmen to purchase and import slaves from Africa and finance their sale to southern planters was displayed in the South in continuing this evil institution. The same arguments concerning the right of secession from the federal union that were debated by the South in 1860 had been vigorously used by the northeastern states a generation earlier in the Hartford Convention. The same political frenzy that finally brought all of these issues into civil conflict in 1861 dominated equally the New England merchant, the western farmer, and the southern planter....

Sure. Everyone was involved in the political frenzy. And historically there were very few American leaders who came out smelling like a rose on the issue of slavery, especially among the founding "fathers." But by the middle 1800's the northern churches, including the Baptists, had come to see that slavery was incompatible with Christianity. The Southern Baptists didn't become convinced of the evils of slavery until the south was defeated in the Civil War, and it took another hundred years for them to recognize the evils of racial discrimination.