With 16.3 million members and 44,000 churches, the Southern Baptist Convention is the largest Baptist group in the world, and the largest Protestant denomination in the United States. Unlike the so-called mainstream Protestant denominations, Southern Baptists have remained stubbornly conservative, refusing to adapt their beliefs and practices to modernity's individualist and populist values. Instead, they have held fast to traditional orthodoxy in such fundamental areas as biblical inspiration, creation, conversion, and miracles. Gregory Wills argues that Southern Baptist Theological Seminary has played a fundamental role in the persistence of conservatism, not entirely intentionally. Tracing the history of the seminary from the beginning to the present, Wills shows how its foundational commitment to preserving orthodoxy was implanted in denominational memory in ways that strengthened the denomination's conservatism and limited the seminary's ability to stray from it. In a set of circumstances in which the seminary played a central part, Southern Baptists' populist values bolstered traditional orthodoxy rather than diminishing it. In the end, says Wills, their populism privileged orthodoxy over individualism. The story of Southern Seminary is fundamental to understanding Southern Baptist controversy and identity. Wills's study sheds important new light on the denomination that has played - and continues to play - such a central role in our national history.

Author  Gregory A. Wills is Professor of Church History at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Endorsements  "No region in America is more religiously conservative than the South, no denomination has symbolized that conservatism more than the Southern Baptist Convention, and no single institution has promoted it in the early twenty-first century more vigorously than the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. In this detailed, comprehensive, thoroughly researched study of the seminary from its origins to the present, Gregory Wills has done far more than chronicle the story of an instiution. He has presented a lens through which to view a region that has, especially during the last decade, influenced the whole nation. Wills depicts a long history of often bitter struggle between moderate and conservative voices at the school and religious devotion. Readers interested in American religious conservatism will find invaluable." -E. Brooks Holifield