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Many Texas Baptist leaders were wholeheartedly committed to the temperance issues, several to the Prohibition Party. J. B. Cranfill was national vice-presidential candidate on the Prohibition ticket in 1892 and kept the anti-saloon fight alive on the pages of the Baptist Standard . That paper's support of blue laws, of labor reform, and of the American cause in World War I were further evidence of Baptists' growing compromise with church-state separation.

Capitalism and the accumulation of wealth appeared to give little cause for concern. Until the twentieth century, there were not enough worldly goods among Texas Baptists to generate many warnings about "storing up treasure on earth." After 1900, when fortunes were made in land, cattle, and oil, this clarification was made: "Wealth is not a curse per se any more than is wind and water... It is the abuse of wealth that is accursed." BS, October 8,1903, p.2. The wealthy were urged to respond in a manner similar to Colonel Slaughter of Dallas, who said, "I have prayed that as He has given me a hand to get, He would give me a heart to give." BS, January 27, 1916, p.7. An overwhelming acceptance of the growing national capitalistic enterprise—even leadership in it—is seen in the offering of stock in the San Jacinto Oil Company of Beaumont on the front page of the Baptist Standard BS, February 6, 1902, p.1. and the full-page advertisement by the Texas Company urging Baptists to vote to change Texas laws to allow oil companies to diversify, i.e., to manage their own supply and production forces. BS, January 11, 1917, p.23.

With a Puritanical delight in success as a measure of God's grace, Baptists embraced the system that enabled them to have the means to expand his kingdom on earth. They expressed nostalgia for rural values and less complicated times, but no real criticism of the economic arrangements that produced the change. Quite the contrary, having weathered the flurry of challenges to the centralization of power for state denominational work, they further refined the organization based on a business model. They gave real executive power to the Executive Board of the BGCT in 1914, "such powers and authority as may be necessary to carry on the work of the Convention." Constitution of the BGCT, Article V. Section 4. And they sought to reduce the duplication of tasks and appeals by grouping the concerns of the convention into major headings, each collective making one appeal at a specific time of the year. The efficiency model remained incomplete—budget deficits continued to plague them until they inaugurated a systematic pledging program in the 1920s—but defensiveness about applying it to a religious agency had disappeared. Further controversies were based more on the issue of who held the power rather than the legitimacy of centralized power itself.

A transition was made by Texas Baptists between 1880 and 1920; they enlarged the scope of their projects and institutions and accepted the concomitant bureaucratic organization and power. One of them described the change as a transformation of their definition of "freedom": "A new conception of freedom was forming," J. M. Dawson explained, "freedom to cooperate instead of freedom to obstruct. . . .” Elliott, p. 61. Indeed they changed considerably from the atomistic individualism and autonomous churches of the nineteenth century, loosely bound if bound at all, to boast in 1919: "When Baptists organize they succeed; when Baptists do not organize they fail." BS, June 12, 1919, p. 22.

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Source:  OpenStax, Patricia martin's phd thesis. OpenStax CNX. Dec 12, 2012 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col11462/1.1
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