Selective Compassion: Public Memory, Persona, and “The Early Years” of the Southern Baptist Convention

ABSTRACT

Founded in 1845 to defend the appointment of slaveholders to missionary posts, the Southern Baptist Convention’s origins complicate its efforts to communicate its history to its members. Developing a public memory-based approach to persona criticism, this essay analyzes a 2006 documentary entitled “Forged by Faith: The Early Years.” By selectively narrating SBC history to construct a “legacy of compassion,” the documentary offers a harmful post-racial ideology to its auditors. The video’s substantive claims and stylistic tokens construct Southern Baptist commitments to personal freedom, church autonomy, and cooperation while minimizing historical commitments to slavery and negating African American history. This essay proposes persona criticism as an innovative method for critiquing the ideology-shaping work performed by audiovisual memory texts such as documentaries.

KEYWORDS:

• Christianity
• race
• ideology
• persona criticism
• public memory

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Dr. Sara VanderHaagen for feedback on early drafts of this essay and for sharing invaluable insights into public memory. The author also thanks Jessica Gehrke for insightful comments on the direction of this essay. Finally, the author expresses gratitude to the anonymous reviewers whose commentary provided tremendous refinements to this essay.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).