Independent Baptists: From Sectarian Minority to ‘Moral Majority’

Abstract

Raymond W. Barber, Baptist pastor and president of the Baptist World Fellowship, wrote in 1982, “Fundamentalists have moved out of the storefront buildings on back alleys into beautiful sanctuaries fronting the freeways and boulevards that dissect the nation's biggest cities. No longer do fundamentalists operate from the closet of inferiority, but from the parlor of influence, affecting the spiritual and cultural life of America. The so-called “splinter-group” of yesterday has become a special vanguard of the truth whose influence is evidenced from the courthouse to the White House.”1