“I knew that I didn’t want to be in charge of anything,” said Atkinson, long known as the “Real, Live, Preacher” to those who read his intensely personal online journal (reallivepreacher.com).

“Preachers talk and talk and I wanted to get away from that. I didn’t want to be a worship tourist, but I thought it would be refreshing to worship in some places where I was the person in the room who knew the least about what was going on.”

It helps to know that Atkinson leads an unusual Baptist flock, a “contemplative Christian community” that holds spiritual retreats based on the writings of St. Francis of Assisi and men’s fellowship meetings over beer and pizza. Covenant’s belief statement stresses that the “fullness of the gospel cannot be contained in any one church.”

While proud of his Baptist heritage, Atkinson said the “glory days” when “moderate” and “conservative” Baptists fought to control the old corporate machinery are long gone. Now, many congregations are experimenting with “emerging,” “post-denominational” and “postmodern” identities and forms of worship.

Thus, Atkinson began his sabbatical by visiting the radical stillness of a Quaker gathering, a tradition that asks believers to remain silent until God inspires someone to speak. For 30 minutes, every cough, sneeze or stomach growl was audible.

“You have to lose a lot of your shame when you sit in silence with people,” he wrote. “These sounds are not disturbing to the time of worship. Not at all. They are the delightful sounds of humans trying to be quiet. And we cannot. … So even the sounds of people trying to be quiet are a part of the lesson.”

A few Sundays later, Atkinson found himself swimming in words and symbols when his family visited an Eastern Orthodox sanctuary.

“It was like they were ripping raw chunks of theology out of ancient creeds and throwing them by the handfuls into the congregation,” he wrote. “I heard words and phrases I had not heard since seminary. Theotokos, begotten not made, Cherubim and Seraphim borne on their pinions, supplications and oblations.”

The experience, he concluded, was an “ADD kid’s nightmare,” with the “robes, scary art, smoking incense, secret doors in the Iconostas popping open and little robed boys coming out with golden candlesticks, chants and singing from a small choir that rolled across the curved ceiling. … There was so much going on I couldn’t keep up with all the things I couldn’t pay attention to.”

His family struggled, but Atkinson had tears in his eyes by the end of the nearly two-hour liturgy. After years of focusing on user-friendly ways to attract people to church, he was stunned to attend a service that — much like the Quaker meeting — placed intense demands on all the participants.

It was, he concluded, as if visitors were being told: “You don’t know what Theotokos means? Get a book and read about it. You have a hard time standing for two hours? Do some sit ups and get yourself into worship shape. It is the Lord our God we worship here, mortal. … THIS IS BIGGER THAN YOU ARE.”

Atkinson was intrigued and eventually attended Russian, Greek and Antiochian Orthodox churches.

Nevertheless, by the end of his sabbatical this liberal Baptist preacher knew he had a problem. While Atkinson appreciated the symbols, rituals and sacraments he encountered, he also knew that he couldn’t accept the doctrines that defined the worship, especially the Orthodox rites.

Simply stated, his views on sin, sexuality, salvation, heaven and hell were too modern. There was “no wiggle room” in the ancient doctrines and, Atkinson concluded, “I just couldn’t buy all of it.”

Now he is returning to his Baptist pulpit, while hearing choirs of voices arguing in his head representing many different eras of church history.

“What I don’t know how to do is rank all of these voices and decide who has authority,” he said. “Who is right and who is wrong? … And I want to know, where does Gordon Atkinson fit into this whole picture? I know that I can’t go back to the old Protestant, evangelical way that I was, but I don’t know where I’m supposed to go now. This is a problem.”

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“For many people, connecting ‘Baptist’ and ‘spirituality’ is like ‘military’ and ‘intelligence.’ They just can’t picture those two words together,” said Whitney, director of the new Center for Biblical Spirituality at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky.

But for Baptists, he stressed, it’s crucial to underline the word “biblical” in front “spirituality,” in order to stress the center’s ties to Protestant reformers who rejected what they believed were the errors of Rome.

When Whitney and his colleagues talk about spirituality, they emphasize images of the great Charles Spurgeon spending hours in Bible study before preaching, laypeople meditating on the symbolism in John Bunyan’s “The Pilgrim’s Progress” and missionaries weeping while praying for the lost. They do not focus on monks chanting ancient prayers day after day, night after night, generation after generation.

“Why should we go to people who have locked themselves behind a door for 50 years if we want to learn about true spirituality, when the Bible tells us to go out and be salt and light in the world? … This is not to say that we shouldn’t go outside our tradition in order to learn, but we are saying that it’s important to go to our own guys, first,” said Whitney.

“We believe that biblical, Evangelical spirituality has not been tried and found wanting. It simply has not been tried.”

The potential impact of this project is great, if only because 20 percent of all students attending U.S. seminaries study on Southern Baptist campuses. The center opened in January and seminary leaders believe they can handle five students in the Ph.D. program and 10 in their doctor of ministry program. While graduate programs teaching spirituality exist in a few U.S. seminaries, this Ph.D. program is the first targeting scholars and clergy among evangelicals.

One of the first challenges the center will face is defining “spirituality,” a word that means one thing on the Oprah Winfrey Show and something else altogether then it appears in textbooks describing traditions in various world religions. For modern Americans, the word is so vague that it’s almost meaningless, said church historian Michael Haykin, who teaches in the Southern Seminary programs.

Nevertheless, the word has great power and its appeal must be understood by anyone who wants to understand contemporary American religion.

When most Americans hear “spirituality,” said Haykin, they think of “all of those areas in their internal experiences in which they come into contact with things that transcend daily life. … It’s all incredibly nebulous. The key is that the whole ritual of institutionalized, formal religion has nothing to do with this, for most people today.”

Thus, researchers keep running into increasing numbers of un-churched adults who identify themselves as “spiritual,” but not “religious.” These seekers are interested in “spirituality” that is connected to emotions and personal experiences, but not in formal “religion” that comes packaged with history, doctrines and rules.

Meanwhile, many Protestant believers are anxious to escape what they believe is the dry, formal, merely rational approach to worship and prayer that dominates mainstream churches. Some turn to charismatic or Pentecostal churches and some turn to the so-called “emerging churches” that try to weave some ancient Christian prayers and disciplines into their progressive, “postmodern” take on faith.

“What unites all these people is an emphasis on personal experience,” said Haykin. “For all of them, ‘religion’ is a bad word, something they are trying to get away from.”

The Southern Seminary programs, he added, will emphasize that Protestant pioneers such as John Calvin and Martin Luther were interested in early Christian spirituality, but rejected what they believed were newer Catholic traditions. Then again, students will also study the works of latter reformers, such as the Puritans, who stressed personal piety while criticizing what they saw as the formalized, ritualized traditions of the Presbyterians, Lutherans and others.

This cycle keeps repeating itself, generation after generation.

“We already have people accusing us of trying to smuggle a kind of Roman Catholic approach to faith into an evangelical seminary,” said Haykin. “What we are saying is that the Protestant reformers were trying to get past the whole medieval Catholic world and reconnect with the ancient church and its approach to the spiritual life. That’s what we are trying to do, too.”

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The guest of honor at the White House was the Rev. Ed Young, the Southern Baptist Convention’s new president. The two men went jogging near the National Mall and had breakfast on the Truman Balcony with Vice President Al Gore. The three Southern Baptists didn’t agree on everything, but the atmosphere was friendly — in large part because the president admired Young’s preaching so much.

But the crucial exchange in that 1993 meeting centered on a question about the Bible, said Clinton, speaking to last week’s New Baptist Covenant Celebration in Atlanta. This unprecedented summit drew about 10,000 Anglo, African-American, Asian-American and Hispanic Baptists from 30 North American conventions and organizations linked to the Baptist World Alliance.

Continuing a lengthy story that he turned into a parable, Clinton claimed that Young “looked at me and he said, ‘I want to ask you a question, a simple question, and I just want a yes or no answer. I don’t want one of those slick political answers. … Do you believe the Bible is literally true? Yes or no.’

“I said, ‘Reverend Young, I think that it is completely true, but I do not believe that you, or I, or any other living person, is wise enough to understand it completely.’ He said, ‘That’s a political answer.’ I said, ‘No, it’s not. You asked a political question.’ “

The audience in the Georgia World Congress Center cheered, which isn’t surprising since the New Covenant gathering served as a rally for Clinton and other Baptists anxious to build a progressive network to stand opposite the conservative Southern Baptist Convention.

Also, it isn’t surprising to learn that Young has a radically different take on what happened that morning. He agrees it was a friendly meeting, but doesn’t remember eating breakfast. However, the preacher said the logistical details are beside the point.

“The main thing is that I have never asked anyone on this earth that question,” said Young, who continues to lead Second Baptist Church in Houston, which draws about 25,000 worshippers to services each week on five campuses throughout that giant metroplex. “I have no doubt that someone, somewhere has asked Bill Clinton if he thinks the Bible is literally true, but it wasn’t me.

“That isn’t a question I ask. I mean, Jesus says, ‘I am a door.’ … How do you claim something like that is literally true?”

In fact, Young doesn’t remember mentioning “biblical inerrancy” during that White House meeting, the theological term at the heart of 30 years of conflict in the 16-million-member Southern Baptist Convention, America’s largest non-Catholic flock.

However, the men did discuss the divisions in their church, Young added, and Clinton offered an articulate defense of his more liberal approach to the Christian faith. They also talked about specific moral and political issues, the kind of hot-button issues that are causing splits in many mainstream churches these days.

“I agreed not to make any public statements after that meeting,” said Young. “So what we talked about was off the record then and I’ll keep it that way today.”

But Clinton and other New Covenant speakers — including Gore and former President Jimmy Carter — talked openly about the SBC’s fault lines, including abortion, gay rights, the ordination of women, clashing accounts of creation, global warming, the death penalty and the separation of church and state.

For Baptist conservatives, Clinton insisted, the theological foundation for their public activism was the “proposition that the Bible was literally true and that, once you understood its literal meaning, it was possible to know what God intended us to do about every conceivable political question alive in this day. And, that knowing God’s will, if we did not do it, we had committed not just a political error, but a religious heresy.”

But when it comes to politics, the former president said Baptists should focus on the verse in the Apostle Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians in which he stresses that it’s impossible to understand everything about God’s will because, in this life, “we see through a glass, darkly.”

Therefore, Clinton stressed, “it almost doesn’t matter whether the Bible is literally true, because we know in part, we see through a glass darkly. Humility is the order of the day. The reason we have to love each other is because all of us might be wrong.”

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The Rev. Rick “Purpose Driven Life” Warren is a Baptist and so is the Rev. Jesse Jackson. The Rev. Bob Jones III of Greenville, S.C., is a Baptist and so is the Rev. Al Sharpton, Jr., of New York. The Rev. Bill Moyers is a Baptist, or used to be, and that’s also true for the Rev. Pat Robertson.

There are all kinds of Baptists, so saying people are “Baptists” may do little to clarify what they actually believe.

But two things are clear. The first is that the Rev. Fred Phelps of Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kan., is a Baptist. The second is that millions of other Baptists wish Phelps and his infamous flock would stop calling themselves “Baptists.”

“It does make you cringe when you read about Phelps and Westboro, because you rarely see anyone stress that these people have no connections to Southern Baptists or to American Baptists or to anybody else,” said Greg Warner, editor of the Associated Baptist Press, one of two news agencies that cover Baptist life.

“This is just some of the baggage that comes with being Baptist. It goes with the territory.”

Phelps and his followers make keep making headlines because of their protests at military funerals, featuring signs with shocking slogans — such as “God Hates Fags” and “Thank God for Dead Soldiers.” The church has about 60 members, most of them related to Phelps, and teaches that God is punishing America because of this culture’s growing acceptance of homosexuality. A jury in Baltimore recently handed down a $10.9 million verdict against Westboro because of its ugly protests at the March 2006 funeral of Lance Cpl. Matthew A. Snyder, who died in Iraq.

At its website — GodhatesAmerica.com — the church offers this history: “Established in 1955 by Pastor Fred Phelps, the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas still exists today as an Old School (or, Primitive) Baptist Church. … We adhere to the teachings of the Bible, preach against all form of sin (e.g., fornication, adultery, sodomy), and insist that the doctrines of grace be taught publicly to all men. These doctrines of grace were well summed up by John Calvin in his 5 points of Calvinism: Total Depravity, Unconditional Election, Limited Atonement, Irresistible Grace, and Perseverance of the Saints. Although these doctrines are almost universally hated today, they were once loved and believed.”

The church does not, however, appear to be part of the National Primitive Baptist Convention of the U.S.A. Then again, it isn’t linked to the Southern Baptist Convention, the American Baptist Churches, the National Baptist Convention U.S.A., the Conservative Baptist Association of America, the American Baptist Association (Landmark Baptists), the Regular Baptist Churches, Reformed Baptist Churches, Free Will Baptist Churches, the Progressive National Baptist Convention, the National Baptist Evangelical Life and Soul Saving Assembly of the U.S.A., the Independent, Fundamental Baptist Churches or any other known Baptist group.

Obviously, it’s hard for Baptists to agree on a common definition of what “Baptist” means. One online definition states: “A member of an evangelical Protestant church of congregational polity, following the reformed tradition in worship and believing in individual freedom, in the separation of church and state, and in baptism of voluntary, conscious believers.”

However, various streams of Baptist life predate the birth of the modern “evangelical” movement. And would Baptists agree they are “reformed” churches or “Reformed,” as in rooted in Calvinist teachings? Do Baptists today share a common understanding of the “separation of church and state”? Of course not.

All Baptists would, however, stress a congregational approach to church government and the autonomy of each local congregation. This means that it’s all but impossible for any Baptist flock to tell another flock what to do — unless they’re part of a larger voluntarily association or convention.

“Just about anyone can get themselves ordained and then say that they’ve started a church,” said Will Hall, head of the 16.4-million-member Southern Baptist Convention’s official Baptist Press news agency.

But in the case of Westboro Baptist, he said, it isn’t even enough “to call them an independent Baptist church, because they’re not typical of the many independent Baptist churches and missionary Baptist churches out there across America. This is a tiny church that’s out there all by itself and that’s the way they want it.”

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After all, one of the main characters in his syndicated comic strip “Kudzu” was the Rev. Will B. Dunn, a deep-fried Southern preacher who always remained optimistic, even as he battled with the insanity of modern life (especially trendy Bible translations).

Meanwhile, Marlette’s political cartoons often inspired readers to barrage editors with the kind of God talk that cannot be printed in family newspapers.

There was, for example, his caricature of Pope John Paul II wearing a “No Women Priests” button. The caption said, “Upon this Rock I will build my church” and Marlette drew an arrow pointing at the pope’s head. Another infamous cartoon showed an Arab terrorist driving a truck containing a nuclear bomb. The caption: “What Would Mohammed Drive?”

A cartoon on my office wall — a gift from Marlette as I left the Charlotte Observer — shows PTL televangelist Jim Bakker kneeling before a dollar sign that towers over a stone altar framed with candles. Bakker proclaims, with his boyish grin, “Gimme that old time religion!”

The cartoonist knew he was playing with holy fire. You can’t draw Jesus climbing Calvary on Good Friday — carrying an electric chair — and not expect people to react.

Marlette insisted that his goal was to remind his fellow believers to practice what they preach.

“As I look back through my work, I’m always amazed by how much of what I do just comes out of having gone to Sunday school,” he said, taking a break in his cluttered Observer office in the mid-1980s. “The perspective, the viewpoint, comes out of that. They don’t teach subversive ideas in the Magnolia Street Baptist Church in Laurel, Mississippi.”

Marlette, 57, was back in Mississippi recently when he died in a single-vehicle crash on a rain-swept highway while on the way to help a high school perform his musical, “Kudzu.” A true gadfly, he rattled cages for more than three decades and died with more than his share of faithful friends and fierce critics.

A native of North Carolina, the cartoonist and writer burst into print after studying at Florida State University, where he tried to study art but ended up majoring in philosophy. He took classes in New Testament and ethics but also, as he loved to note, classes in sports officiating. Marlette won a Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for his work at the Observer and the Atlanta Constitution. He wrote two novels and, in 2001, became a distinguished visiting professor of journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Marlette had a better grasp of the power of religion than most journalists, noted former Observer editor Rich Oppel, who led the newsroom during the PTL era. The cartoonist was a provocateur and, at his best, a prophet.

“After 10 years of our reporting, televangelist Bakker resigned from PTL and was later convicted of fraud and sentenced to federal prison,” noted Oppel, in his editor’s column at the Austin American-Statesman. “Bakker’s handpicked successor was Jerry Falwell, who came in to see me and ‘make peace.’

“From a corner, Marlette cast a gimlet eye on Falwell as the minister did his best Sunday school number on me. Marlette then retreated to his lair to pen a cartoon of the preacher as a serpent in the Garden of Eden. Falwell refused to talk to me again.”

When it came to religion, Marlette thought of himself as a Baptist’s Baptist, a fierce believer in the “priesthood of the believer,” the authority of human experience and the separation of church and state.

There are, he told me, people who become cynical about religion and he was determined not to yield to that temptation — very often. But there were many times when he preferred laughing, instead of crying.

While he took the Christian faith seriously, he also thought it was futile to obsess over details. There were times when he felt like a church of one.

“It’s my own church, my own perspective. It certainly doesn’t deserve to be institutionalized or taken more seriously than other people’s,” said Marlette. “It’s not infallible. It’s skewed. It’s mine. … It’s kind of like dissecting a frog. Once you get the thing cut up and taken apart, it’s not really a frog anymore. Something dies in the process.”

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The recipe John David Finley grew up with was as down to earth as cooking can get, with one cup of butter, four eggs, the grated peel of half a lemon and the right amounts of flour, sugar, baking powder, vanilla, salt and nutmeg.

But somewhere between the lines is the joy of his paternal grandmother, Lula Mae Finley. And those black-eyed peas — you’ll need a ham bone — are just black-eyed peas, unless you have the chopped bell pepper and jalapenos in there. Then you’re talking about New Year’s dinner with Owen Jefferson “Popo” Finley, Sr. That homemade vanilla ice cream? That’s part of the legacy of the Rev. Owen Jefferson Finley, Jr., who survived the hell of Omaha Beach on D-Day before spending 38 years as pastor of the Trinity Baptist Church in McAlester, Okla. The list goes on and on.

People used to teach old recipes to their children back in the days before interstate highways, fast-food empires and televisions ate the family dinner hour, said Father John David Finley, author of “Sacred Meals: From Our Family Table.” It’s a book about cooking, of course, but it’s also a memoir about the ties that bind his past as a Southern Baptist preacher’s kid to his adult life as an Eastern Orthodox priest, composer and evangelist in Southern California.

“One of the most important things I’ve learned in life is that food isn’t just food,” he said. “At some point, I realized that I was preparing and serving certain foods at certain times of the year not just to honor or remember my grandparents and my parents, but to enter into a kind of communion with them. …

“Suddenly I saw the Communion of the Saints in a whole different way. I realized why food has been so important to the church’s theology since the very beginning.”

At the deepest level, there is the bread and wine consecrated in the altar rites of the Divine Liturgy. But the ordinary foods of life play key roles in the Eastern fasting traditions of Great Lent, the six-week season in which observant Orthodox believers strive not to eat meat and dairy products. The fasting traditions of Great Lent lead to Holy Week and the great feast of Pascha, or Easter. The Orthodox feast this year is on April 23, using the ancient Julian calendar.

Father Finley said the goal, through the church’s feasts and fasts, is for families to realize that the meals they share together are also sacred. Thus, the altar table and the family table are linked. Both are “manifestations of the ways that God feeds us throughout our lives,” he said.

It’s hard to grasp this in an age in which food is surrounded by golden arches and plastic toys more often than golden vestments, incense and icons.

“There’s no room for fellowship in a McDonald’s culture,” he said. “Every now and then people realize this. They feel isolated and rushed and cheated. They know something is wrong.”

“Sacred Meals” features commentary on this subject from an Eastern Orthodox pioneer in North America, the late theologian Father Alexander Schmemann.

“Centuries of secularism have failed to transform eating into something strictly utilitarian,” he wrote. “A meal is still a rite — the last ‘natural sacrament’ of family and friendship, of life that is more than ‘eating’ and ‘drinking.’ To eat is still something more than to maintain bodily functions. People may not understand what that ‘something more’ is, but they nevertheless desire to celebrate it.”

This is precisely what Finley and his family will celebrate Sunday when the midnight rites of Holy Pascha give way to a communal feast — rich in meats, cheeses, eggs and non-Lenten treats — that will last into the hours just before dawn.

“Our basket will have to include ham, because I can’t imagine a Finley feast without ham,” said the priest. “Then there is that great Pascha cheese that the Russians make. It’s almost like cheesecake that you spread with a knife. They eat it with that wonderful bread called ‘Kulich.’

“I have to make that for the children. You know a food has become a family tradition when the children yell at you if you don’t make it.”

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He went straight to “The Great Book of Needs,” a four-volume set of prayers collected over two millennia for use during every imaginable kind of ritual.

It was easy to find prayers about Jesus and healing, including: “Do now, O Lord, give your grace to all those here gathered who have labored and studied hour upon hour, to go into all the world, and also to heal by the talent You have given to each of them. Strengthen them, by your strength, to fear no evil or disease, enlighten them to do no evil by the works of their hands and preserve them and those they serve in peace, for You are our God, and we know no other.”

Then he received a letter from the president’s office offering guidelines for prayers at this public school in Charleston, S.C. It required inclusive language such as “Holy God, Holy One, Creator, Sustainer” rather than prayers mentioning Jesus, Allah, the Trinity or other specific divine references.

“Steer clear of parochial, exclusively defining religious names, concepts, practices, and metaphors,” it said. “A good rule of thumb to remember is that you come representing the entire faith community, not just your own group. The prayer should therefore not be offensive to anyone, whether Catholic, Baptist, Jewish, Muslim, etc.”

Parker had a problem, because he knew that centuries of Orthodox tradition forbad this approach. He decided that the policy was so inclusive that ancient Christian prayers would be excluded.

“As an Orthodox priest, I was invited to pray on behalf of all and for all,” he said. “The question was, once I was there, would I be allowed to pray as an Orthodox Christian? According to that memo, they wanted me to pray in somebody else’s words and, if you stop and think about it, to pray to somebody else’s God. …

“I knew that my archbishop would not allow me to do that. We cannot pray the way they wanted me to pray.”

Nevertheless, Parker sent school officials the text of the Orthodox benediction. His invitation to pray was immediately revoked and the May graduation slot filled by a Southern Baptist pastor, one linked with the progressive Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. Another member of the same church serves as the medical school’s chaplain.

The goal was not to “silence any local pastor or the voice of any religious tradition in the public square,” wrote Chaplain Terry Wilson, responding to Parker’s concerns. Neutral prayers had, in the past, been offered by an array of clergy — Presbyterian, United Methodist, Episcopal, Jewish and Catholic.

“Our graduates represent the major faith traditions of the world,” noted Wilson. “Watching the commencement service, I hummed to myself the words of the old spiritual, ‘He’s got the whole world in his hands.’ ” On 9/11, he added, the beautiful St. Luke’s Chapel at the school “overflowed with students, faculty and medical staff. We prayed, wept and sang together as Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Bahais and Sikhs in the midst of the terror. … This is who we are and such is the make up of our graduates. God bless us all.”

Parker understood this dynamic. But it is one thing, he said, for Christians to gather in “ecumenical” settings in which their prayers can be based on images and beliefs that they share in common. It is something else to participate in truly “interfaith” events that blur the lines between world religions or, even worse, combine pieces of these faiths in a syncretistic puzzle.

At some point, he stressed, leaders of public institutions must ask why they want to continue including moments of prayer in these pluralistic public settings.

“No Christian may judge the soul of any person. God alone is judge,” said Parker, in a final response to school officials. “We must learn to dwell in peaceful co-existence with those who do not believe as we do. But, dwelling in peace co-existence does not mean the same thing as saying that we actually believe the same thing. To the contrary, it would be disrespectful to pretend that we have no differences.”

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The environment is brutal in there, and not just because the Bears play Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska and other Big 12 powers. Central Texas offers searing heat and then its share of ice. Since 1950, Baylor has tried grass, various brands of fake grass, real grass again and now Prestige System artificial turf.

“We’re committed to making changes,” said McCaw, a young sports management professional who arrived in the midst of Baylor’s recent siege of scandals and woe. “We’re moving forward. We think this is going to work out fine.”

McCaw was talking about the grass, but he could have been defending his own turf. The environment has been brutal for months, with the world’s largest Baptist school facing a searing media spotlight and the cold reality that when many fans hear “Baylor” they now think of death, drugs and dirty dollars, not dedication to Christian principles.

Surely the grass was greener at the University of Massachusetts, where McCaw had done his graduate studies and returned to direct a 23-sport athletic program. But after one successful year, and two weeks before moving his wife and four children into a newly constructed home, he answered the call to help resurrect Baylor’s reputation.

“From a branding, marketing standpoint, we know what we have to do,” he said. “We have to position ourselves to the whole Baptist and Protestant community as the flagship, much as Notre Dame always has been for Catholics. … To compete at the highest level, we’re going to have to have that kind of brand.

“We certainly can’t try to hide what Baylor is, or what Baylor is supposed to be.”

But that brand name also raises questions in an era when schools with small markets and high academic standards face brutal pressures to cut corners. Meanwhile, this is a boom time for Christian colleges and universities, along with their athletic programs. Many are now asking: What does it mean to have “Christian” athletics?

It doesn’t mean all of the school’s athletes have to be Christians, said Grant Teaff, a Baylor coaching legend and, for the past decade, executive director of the American Football Coaches Association. But dedicated Christian coaches are a must.

“You can’t say, ‘Find me the best Christian defensive back you can and go sign him.’ You can’t compete like that,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean that, if one of the top defensive backs in the country is a strong Christian kid, you can’t look him in the eye and tell him Baylor is where he would feel right at home.”

It’s also time for these coaches to admit that larger schools will sign almost all the top blue-chip recruits. However, Teaff noted that most of these phenoms — in basketball and perhaps soon in football — linger only one or two years in college. At some point, teams led by experienced, loyal juniors and seniors may start winning more games against the freshmen and sophomore superstars.

“The world says to these young men, ‘Get as much as you can as soon as you can. Get your hand out — right now,’ ” said Teaff. “Schools like Baylor can’t compete in that game. … But a school like this has other strengths and it can’t be afraid to use them.”

Schools that emphasize academics and spiritual values will also need stronger ties to national networks of ministries, home-school families and Christian high schools that stress athletics, noted McCaw. The evidence is strong that schools emphasizing faith are especially attractive to top female athletes.

Another trend may help. As Third World churches grow in power, global recruiting efforts will increasingly affect sports such as soccer, track, baseball and basketball. Missionaries often packed sports equipment with their Bibles.

But earning the trust of parents remains the key.

“There is a growing percentage of parents that want their children to go to a Christian college, yet they also want to see their children compete in Division I athletics. If you want a quality, Christian education and you want to compete at the highest level in athletics, how many options do you have? Where are you going to go?”

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“My Irish mother was always saying, ‘They’re just not our kind of people,’ ” said the 68-year-old priest, hinting at her accent. “But, you know, we learned to get along. … It helped that almost everybody was Catholic.”

Before long, Dalton became a priest in the Glenmary Home Mission Society, which works across the rural South. This meant learning a whole different cultural vocabulary. It meant learning how to talk to Southern Baptists.

By the early 1980s, Dalton was representing the Church of Rome at Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meetings and in the hallways of the giant “Baptist Vatican” in downtown Nashville. He has talked to Southern Baptists in state conventions and regional associations, too. He has talked to Southern Baptists at the all-important level of the local church.

And this is what he has learned.

“Catholics and Baptists have a lot in common,” said Dalton, who recently returned to his SBC liaison role. “But we’re still looking at each other and saying, ‘They’re just not our kind of people.’ … We’re two massive groups of people who still don’t know each other.”

Recent statistics gathered by the Glenmary Research Center found 62 million U.S. Catholics and 20 million Southern Baptists — the nation’s two largest flocks. These two culturally conservative giants continue to grow, but they are not growing closer together.

Official dialogues began three decades ago, with key leadership coming from “moderate” Baptists who were willing to risk being called “ecumenists.” Progressive Baptists huddled with progressive Catholics, while Baptist conservatives seethed.

Then conservatives seized control of the SBC and, to the surprise of many experts, this soon led to an intense, but radically different, era of Catholic-Baptist work. Liberals howled about right-wing politics, while “Evangelicals and Catholics Together” and similar efforts found common ground on issues such as abortion, sexual abstinence and human rights.

A key 1994 document made news by affirming that Catholics and evangelicals are “brothers and sisters in Christ” and that both streams of tradition represent “authentic forms of discipleship.” Before long, powerful SBC voices — especially in regions heavy in ex-Catholics — began saying that enough is enough. Southern Baptist leaders recently shut down the formal dialogue.

What happens next? The bottom line is that many Southern Baptists do not believe that years of dialogue have produced consensus on issues of salvation and biblical authority. A growing awareness of the Vatican II statement that salvation can be found through faith in non-Christian religions has only widened the gap.

One of the SBC’s most outspoken scholars did not mince words on CNN’s Larry King Show.

“I believe the Roman Church is a false church and teaches a false gospel,” said R. Albert Mohler, Jr., president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. “Indeed, I believe the pope himself holds a false and unbiblical office.”

Clearly, SBC leaders realize “that those are fighting words,” said Dalton.

The irony, said the priest, is that the lives of most Roman Catholics today are not radically different from those of Southern Baptists.

The Glenmary statistics show that waves of Catholics have moved to the Sunbelt, far from the northern ethnic enclaves of the past. They live in sprawling suburbs and eat Krispy Kremes at church coffee hour like everybody else. They live next door to Southern Baptists, who long ago shed their rural roots and went suburban.

But many Catholics and Baptists have not realized how much times have changed, said Dalton. They still do not know how to talk to their neighbors.

“Maybe the formal dialogue did its thing,” said Dalton. “It got us talking to the Baptist left and then we learned to talk to the Baptist right. But the next level of dialogue will not occur with our leaders sitting in conference rooms. It’s going to have to happen between ordinary people over their backyard fences and down at the local Home Depot.

“We’re living next door to each other. The question is whether we can learn to trust each other. Can we ever learn to see that we are one in Jesus Christ?”

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This ritual included a proclamation from the president, the singing of “national songs” and prayer or Bible readings. But the pivotal moment would come after veterans raised the Stars and Stripes, when the assembled students recited their new pledge of allegiance.

As written by the Rev. Francis Bellamy, it said: “I pledge allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

The pledge was used for the first time on or around Oct. 12, 1892. The rest is a long story, a story that from the beginning has included tensions between church and state and between public and parochial schools.

“You know, it never would have occurred to Francis Bellamy to put ‘under God’ in the pledge, at least according to what he had to say at the time,” said John W. Baer of Annapolis, Md., author of “The Pledge of Allegiance: A Centennial History, 1892-1992.”

“I imagine that that he was thinking like a Mason and he was thinking like a Northern Baptist. Francis Bellamy had a thoroughly modern mind and he knew what he was trying to do. … You’re talking about creating a mandated form of patriotism to be used with millions of children in classrooms everywhere. So he chose every word for a reason.”

As part of a prominent Baptist family, Bellamy had nothing against God.

Still, he wrote his pledge shortly after resigning at Bethany Baptist in Boston. It seems that several wealthy businessmen did not appreciate their pastor’s many sermons on topics such as “Jesus the Socialist” and “The Socialism of the Primitive Church.” But his fiery social activism did appeal to Daniel Ford, publisher of a prominent magazine entitled The Youth’s Companion.

Thus, Bellamy leaped from a local pulpit to national journalism. Within weeks, he was helping the National Education Association plan a massive celebration of public schools, backed by publicity in The Youth’s Companion.

“Our fathers in their wisdom knew that the foundations of liberty, fraternity, and equality must be universal education,” wrote Bellamy, in a speech that was supposed to be read as part of the rites surrounding the pledge of allegiance.

“The free school, therefore, was conceived as the cornerstone of the Republic. Washington and Jefferson recognized that the education of citizens is not the prerogative of church or of other private interest; that while religious training belongs to the church, and while technical and higher culture may be given by private institutions — the training of citizens in the common knowledge and the common duties of citizenship belongs irrevocably to the State.”

This was, of course, a jab at the parochial schools being built by Roman Catholics, in part due to a rising tide of immigration from Eastern Europe. This was not the American way, said Bellamy. He even argued that God opposed parochial schools.

“We uplift the system of free and universal education,” he said, “as the master force which, under God, has been informing each of our generations with the peculiar truths of Americanism.” Thus, American children should attend the same schools, recite the same pledge and unite “under the sacred flag.”

The pledge caught on in Protestant-friendly public schools, with the American Legion urging that its use be mandatory. Soon, noted Baer, “my flag” was changed to “the flag of the United States of America” because officials feared immigrants might think the pledge referred to the flags of their homelands. During World War II, students stopped extending their right arms in salute and began placing their hands over their hearts. Finally, the Knights of Columbus led a campaign to add “under God,” in part so that public and religious schools could use the pledge.

That worked for a few decades.

“The public loves the pledge. That’s the bottom line,” said Baer. “But this is a form of conformity. Anyone who doesn’t want to conform to this one prescribed version of patriotism is going to question it. … The pledge has offended different kinds of people at different times. But it has always offended somebody.”

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