On Oct. 21, the trustees of Shorter University in Rome, Ga., approved a covenant requiring faculty and staff to support the “mission of Shorter University as a Christ-centered institution affiliated with the Georgia Baptist Convention.” Then they asked employees to “reject as acceptable all sexual activity not in agreement with the Bible, including, but not limited to, premarital sex, adultery and homosexuality.”

A fortnight latter, Baptists learned about a “fall update” email from leaders at Mercer University in Macon, Ga., announcing a policy extending health care and other benefits to the “domestic partners” of faculty and staff, regardless of sexual orientation.

The Georgia Baptist Convention cut its historic ties to Mercer in 2005. Now, the school’s strategic shift brings it “into line with other leading private universities … including Emory, Duke, Vanderbilt, Wake Forest, Tulane, Furman, Rollins, Elon and Stetson,” noted Mercer President Bill Underwood, in a statement quoted at EthicsDaily.com, a progressive Baptist website. “It is also consistent with our established policy of not discriminating against employees based on sexual orientation.”

While this divide may shock outsiders, these decisions are “totally logical” in light of trends in Baptist life and higher education, stressed Lutheran scholar Robert Benne of Roanoke (Va.) College, author of “Quality with Soul: How Six Premier Colleges and Universities Keep Faith with Their Religious Traditions.”

“These schools are headed in opposite directions because their leaders want them to become radically different kinds of institutions,” he said. Shorter wants to “become a ‘Christian’ university in terms of its approach to education and campus life. … Mercer is trying to become what its leaders see as an elite institution, the kind of place where if you tried to talk about ‘Christian education’ the faculty would raise all holy hell.”

In some ways, these Baptist conflicts resemble those among educators in other religious groups, he said. For example, many American Catholic colleges and universities have become highly secularized, while their leaders insist that they remain rooted in “Catholic” values or some specific educational tradition, such as the legacy of the Jesuits. Meanwhile, a few other Catholic schools publicly stress their loyalty to the Vatican.

With that in mind, it’s significant that Mercer’s Internet homepage states: “Founded by early 19th century Baptists, Mercer — while no longer formally affiliated with the Baptist denomination — remains committed to an educational environment that embraces intellectual and religious freedom while affirming values that arise from a Judeo-Christian understanding of the world.”

Benne noted that few well-known schools can accurately be labeled “fundamentalist,” as would be the case with the independent Bob Jones University in South Carolina. Meanwhile, most conflicts in Southern Baptist academia involve debates about accepting some explicitly “Christian” approach to education, often referred to as the “integration of faith and learning.”

Thus, it’s symbolic that Mercer leaders openly say they want to go the other direction, following in the footsteps of universities such as Vanderbilt and Duke, and historically Baptist institutions such as Furman and Wake Forest. The Mercer student handbook, for example, contains no moral code covering student conduct on premarital sex, adultery and homosexuality.

At this point, Shorter accepts non-Christian students. However, Benne said Shorter’s new doctrinal and lifestyle code for faculty and staff suggests that it will soon ask its students to sign a similar covenant of faith and moral conduct. If so, covenants of this kind are common on Christian campuses, including famous liberal arts schools such as Wheaton College, Calvin College, Biola University and numerous other members of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (the global network in which I teach).

Many of these schools retain ties to the denominations that founded them, but they are reach out to recruit other evangelicals or traditional Christians as students, faculty and staff. Some of these schools now openly appeal to Catholics, as well.

The problem for many Baptist academics, stressed Benne, is that they place such a strong emphasis on “soul freedom” and the “priesthood of every believer” that they struggle to find ways to separate themselves from the “lukewarm people who are not really committed to the their school’s vision.”

The result is a perfect Baptist Catch 22.

“How do you defend specific doctrines and convictions,” he said, “without daring to list these specifics, which means you have committed the sin of having a creed?”

It’s all about location, location, location.

Why would a preacher want to baptize a new believer in a heated, indoor tank when he can dunk them in the powerful, living, frigid waters of the river that created the valley in which his flock has lived for generations? There’s no question which option the self-proclaimed Primitive Baptists will choose, even if it adds an element of risk.

“Among Primitive Baptists, you almost always see two ministers when they baptize someone — one to do the baptism and one to hold on. It’s even become part of their unique liturgical tradition to have two ministers there,” said Baptist historian Bill Leonard of the Wake Forest School of Divinity in Winston-Salem, N.C.

“As the saying goes, you could get baptized and go to heaven on the same day if there wasn’t somebody there to hang on so you didn’t wash away and drown.”

This is the kind of old-fashioned faith that Americans are used to seeing in paintings of frontier life or grainy black-and-white photographs from the days before interstate highways, shopping malls, satellite dishes and the Internet. Appalachian religion has played a dramatic role in American culture, helping shape our folk art, Scotch-Irish history, roots music and a host of other subjects.

The question, for Leonard and many other scholars, is whether the rich heritage of “mountain Christianity” will play much of a role in the nation’s future.

“Increasingly,” he said, “our modern forms of American religion and our mass media and culture are sucking the life out of one of our most distinctive regions.”

While the region contains religious groups with European ties, the most important fact about the common Appalachian churches is that they are uniquely American.

For outsiders, this can be very complex territory.

The Calvinist, Primitive Baptists are not the only Baptists whose sanctuaries dot the landscape of the 1,600-mile-long strip of mountains that run from Eastern Canada down to the high hills of Alabama and Georgia, cresting at Mount Mitchell in the heart of North Carolina’s Black Mountains. There are Independent Baptists (of various kinds), Free Will Baptists, Old Regular Baptists, Missionary Baptists, Southern Baptists and dozens of other brands.

Even the Primitive Baptists are a complex bunch, noted Leonard. There are some who avoid wine and some who make their own. Some refuse to hire professional pastors or to send their preachers off to seminary, fearing they will be corrupted. There’s even a small body of Primitives — critics call them “no-hellers” — who insist God’s love is so strong that everybody ends up in heaven, no matter what.

Then there are the various kinds of Pentecostal-Holiness churches, including the rare — but world famous — congregations in which believers handle snakes, sip poison and wrestle with demons.

Some “Oneness” Pentecostal believers baptize in the name of Jesus, alone, while others embrace the traditional Trinity of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. In an academic paper entitled “Looking for Religious Appalachia,” Leonard noted that he once heard a Trinitarian Pentecostal preacher explain that doctrinal feud in terms anyone could grasp: “Jesus had a Daddy. He wasn’t no bastard.”

“Case closed,” wrote the historian.

Ironically, some of the most powerful forces that threaten these churches are the efforts of outsiders to help the region — such as missionaries sent to evangelize the locals or social-justice activists who want to help the locals escape their own way of life. Then there are the softer forms of Evangelical Protestantism that arrive through television, mass-marketed gospel music and those new, transplanted megachurches that keep sprouting up like suburban superstores.

Thus, the stark “Sacred Harp” hymns of the shape-note era gradually gave way to the cheery gospel quartets of the radio era, which were then blitzed by the pop-rock “praise bands” of the Contemporary Christian Music era.

What happens when the mountain churches and their traditions are gone?

“Appalachia still exists and it remains something to celebrate,” said Leonard. “Still, what’s happening there is a danger signal to us all. … What was once pristine wilderness is becoming an exploited region. Tragically, a crucial element of America’s religious history and heritage if being lost, as well.”

So it was a solemn occasion when the great preacher from Dallas arrived in “Jerusalem on the Brazos” in 1941 to preach a series of revival services at Baylor University, the planet’s largest Baptist institution of higher learning. Then loud alarm clocks started ringing in the attic of cavernous Waco Hall, on three-minute intervals.

This pandemonium was, of course, orchestrated by Baylor’s Nose Brotherhood. This club for satirists was born in 1926 and quickly became known for its “Pink Tea” spectaculars, which offered “vertical exercising” on a campus that, from 1845-1996, banned dancing. The secret society was “just a fun-loving bunch of boys,” Brother Dude Nose Harrison told the Dallas Morning News in 1931.

The Nose became the NoZe in 1965 when, in an event that has achieved mythic status, a campus bridge that once a year was ceremonially painted pink mysteriously went up in flames. The brothers were temporarily banished, but began appearing in their signature glasses, fake noses and tacky wigs.

The question now facing America is whether the activities of the NoZe Brotherhood could cost the Republican Party control of the U.S. Senate.

Alas, this is not satire.

Kentucky Democrat Jack Conway has asked why Republican Rand Paul, in the ominous words of a television advertisement, was a “member of a secret society that called the Holy Bible a ‘hoax,’ that was banned for mocking Christianity and Christ? Why did Rand Paul once tie a woman up, tell her to bow down before a false idol and say his god was ‘Aqua Buddha’?”

Being accused of “anti-Christian” activities is not a good thing in the Bible Belt. As the Washington Post put it, Paul stands accused of participating in a “secret society while at Baylor University that published mocking statements regarding the Bible.”

The Conway campaign added: “This is an ad about things he did. He has failed to deny any of these charges.”

At this point, I should stress that while I am a Baylor graduate from the same era as Paul, I am not, nor have I ever been, a member of the NoZe Brotherhood. I did know some NoZe folks, including one who became a White House speechwriter, and like all Baylor alumni I know that no non-NoZe knows the no-nonsense non-NoZe news that the NoZe knows.

The Republican has acknowledged participating in NoZe pranks. Meanwhile, one of his Baylor colleagues told the Louisville Courier-Journal: “We aspired to blasphemy and he flourished in it.”

Sounds like the NoZe to me.

During my years at Baylor, the secret society mocked all kinds of people, including Dan Rather, Richard Nixon, Watergate special prosecutor Leon Jaworski (a powerful Baylor alum) and Bob Woodward of the Washington Post. I was present when Woodward was made an honorary member — Brother Water NoZe, or some variation on that theme. As I recall, the NoZe crashed his campus lecture, presenting him with his own plunger, while seated on a rolling commode.

The NoZe mocked all things Baptist, targeting the many sacred cows that resided on campus. These NoZe drippings rarely achieved brilliance and often veered into college-life stupidity.

Nevertheless, the Baylor Library maintains a modest NoZe archive. While the brotherhood has been exiled from campus several times, its official historian — the late Brother Short Nose (William B.) Long — served on the Baylor board of regents and received his alma mater’s highest honor, The Founders Medal.

Drawing on this respected physician’s book, “The Nose Brotherhood Knows: A Collection of Nothings and Non-Happenings, 1926-1965,” Baylor Magazine published a 2003 report that probed the philosophy behind the brotherhood’s attempts to “put the ‘pie’ in piety” and “the ‘pun’ in punctilious.”

The bottom line: It is, as a rule, quite dangerous to mix satire and religion.

One of the NoZe — it may have been Brother Bilbo BaggiNoze or Brother IgNoZetius Reilly — told the magazine: “I have no problems whatsoever with Christianity, but I think blind Christianity is a mistake. People are sometimes afraid to examine other religions, but it just makes your beliefs stronger in the end. I don’t think a Christian mission means that we can’t look at and study everything in the world. Furthermore, if education is really the goal of each student here … certainly they’d want to be exposed to as many opinions and as many things as possible.”

“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.”

“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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”