One of the most bitter and painful religious controversies in American history was waged between 1979 and roughly 1995 in the Southern Baptist Convention. Known as the “conservative resurgence,” it was an internal political fight for control of the convention’s leadership, its agencies and its seminaries, with a conservative wing, that had long felt marginalized and ignored, organizing and rising up to seize power.
The battle in the Southern Baptist Convention was largely about the doctrine of “inerrancy,” which says that the Bible is without error and to be taken literally. The conservatives were incensed their seminaries used modern methods of biblical interpretation that denied or explained away some passages conservatives claimed were historically accurate.
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