Date of Award
1-1-2025
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Ph.D. in History
First Advisor
Darren Grem
Second Advisor
Jarod Roll
Third Advisor
Rebecca Marchiel
School
University of Mississippi
Relational Format
dissertation/thesis
Abstract
“Pastoring the American Right” chronicles the life of Wallie Amos (W. A.) Criswell (1909-2002) and his fifty-year career at the First Baptist Church of Dallas, Texas. Criswell exerted significant influence on the postwar Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), American fundamentalists and neo-evangelicals, and the burgeoning Christian Right, yet historians have overlooked his story. Situating Criswell and First Baptist Dallas at the center of contemporary conservative evangelicalism’s postwar development amplifies and recenters the importance of traditional religious institutions—congregations, pastors, and denominations—to the history of twentieth-century American evangelicalism. While many historians have centered grassroots, corporate, and parachurch actors, this dissertation identifies the locus of religious power and authority, from which religion’s influence on society and politics radiates outward, as the local congregation, its place, its membership, and in this case, its pulpit. Founded in 1868, First Baptist Dallas matured into a downtown institution as the city of Dallas blossomed into a southern metropolis ripe for postwar expansion. After Criswell arrived in 1944, he helmed the influential church—one of America’s largest—through the Cold War, the civil rights era, and the rise of the Republican South. Moreover, Criswell’s congregational and denominational contexts mattered. By cultivating a broad grassroots appeal and commanding a deep well of institutional capital, Criswell shaped the SBC’s identity and future, shepherding its transition from a regional establishment to a nationally oriented denomination, firmly situated on the right wing of American Protestantism and intertwined with the ascendant political right by century’s end.
Recommended Citation
Nicholson, Austin, "Pastoring the American Right: W. A. Criswell, First Baptist Dallas, and the Southern Baptist Convention" (2025). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 3341.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/3341