W.A. Criswell
Senior pastor of First Baptist Dallas for 50 years and SBC president (1968–70). The patriarch whose theological authority the resurgence co-opted — and whose early support for Roe v. Wade was later erased from memory.
View in the interactive map →W.A. Criswell was the most prominent Southern Baptist pastor of the 20th century. He led First Baptist Dallas from 1944 to 1994 — half a century — building it into the model of the Southern Baptist megachurch. He was an outspoken segregationist in the 1950s and 60s, and remained a committed racial conservative throughout his career. Criswell was the SBC's most prominent inerrantist — his 1969 book 'Why I Preach That the Bible Is Literally True' became a foundational text. In this sense he provided the theological framework the resurgence would later institutionalize. But there is a deeply inconvenient fact in Criswell's record: in 1973, after Roe v. Wade was decided, Criswell said he was 'pleased' with the ruling. He told Baptist Press that 'I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person.' This statement — from the SBC's most authoritative theological voice — demolishes the narrative that evangelical opposition to abortion was a biblically-grounded organic response to Roe. It was constructed afterward, for political purposes. Criswell's legacy is a contradiction: inerrantist theology that enabled the resurgence; racial conservatism that reflected the SBC's segregationist history; and a position on abortion that refutes the mythology the movement later built around it.
Documented themes
Connections from W.A. Criswell
- influenced → SBC Conservative Resurgence (1979) — Criswell's inerrancy theology — articulated in his 1969 book — provided the doctrinal framework the resurgence weaponized as a litmus test for institutional control.
Connections to W.A. Criswell
- Christian Nationalism: Before 1940 influenced (1944) — W.A. Criswell's vision of the Southern Baptist pastor as a culture warrior — defending Christian civilization against secular liberalism — was not original to him. It was the expression of a pre-existing theological framework that had been building in American evangelical Protestantism for over a century, fusing national identity with Protestant Christian identity in ways that made any retreat from public life feel like abandonment of the faith.
- Patriarchy & Gender: Before 1940 influenced (1944) — W.A. Criswell's fierce resistance to women's ordination and his insistence on male headship in family and church were not theological innovations. They were the expression of a pre-existing fundamentalist consensus, built over decades of reaction against first-wave feminism, that had fused gender hierarchy with biblical orthodoxy so completely that to question one was to question the other.
Sources
- Thy Kingdom Come — Randall Balmer (2006), pp. 12-14
- Jesus and John Wayne — Kristin Kobes Du Mez (2020), pp. 90-91