After congress passed the National Defense Education Act in 1958 in response to the Sputnik satellite launch, public and private schools across the country began to reap their benefit. This monumental legislation established access to student loans, created grants for STEM related programs, and helped expand graduate education along with many other benefits.

The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), however, grew increasingly concerned over this new access of funding to private, religious institutions. If the government funded their operation today, what would stop them from taking control tomorrow?

Unfortunately for the SBC, the National Defense Education Act was only the beginning of federal funding for higher education. Over the next few years multiple pieces of legislation further increased the amount of money available to public and private institutions, some of which include the Higher Education Facilities Act of 1963, the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, and the Higher Education Act of 1965. The SBC had to decide whether their principles were worth the widening resource gap between their educational institutions and that of those who willingly accepted federal funds.

This excerpt from the Lariat, a student run newspaper at Baylor University, describes the conflict between convention principles and federal benefits for a Baptist unviversity in 1961.

Though their principles regarding the separation of Church and State remained widely supported within the denomination, the educational institutions themselves were struggling with insufficient budgets while competing against other institutions supported by the very tax dollars they had shunned. North Carolina became the first convention of Baptists to seriously consider taking funds from the Higher Education Facilities Act and received convention wide backlash because of it. Critics within this issue of the Baptist Standard viewed the North Carolina convention even allowing such a prospect to come to vote as an insult against all Baptists who care about the separation of church and state.

While potential government influence was a key factor in the Baptist’ fear of federally funding for private, religious education, there loomed another catastrophe in the distance. Protestants across America were concerned with Catholic influence in the country. At the time of this pamphlet, Catholic education represented the majority of private, religious primary and secondary schools in the United States. If the government were to fund such a massive enterprise, the Protestants concluded that the country would likely establish Catholicism as its primary religion. The rest of this pamphlet details the other areas of policy, whether state or federal, that are in progress and their hope that current lawsuits could pave the way to strike down the bigger fish, such as the Higher Education Facilities Act of 1963.

With Baylor being a premier Baptist institution, it is no wonder that their president, Abner McCall, held a powerful voice in the conversation around federal funding for higher education. Within his article of the 1967 Baylor Line, he argued that the Southern Baptist Convention could not afford to lose involvement in the field of higher education and that federal funding was a practical necessity to be effective in that involvement. McCall reframed the problem not as whether federal funding should be available to religious private institutions, but that it was already plentifully available, and by abstaining from utilizing such funds, Baptists were funding other denominational institutions through taxes while neglecting their own. He declares that the only choice is to accept federal funding and to put guideposts in the process to ensure that participating institutions do not become fully dependent on the government to keep their doors open.