University Fights ‘Debauchery’ Charge : Fundamentalists Seeking to Control Baptist School

When Playboy magazine ranked Mercer University among the nation’s top 10 “party colleges” last winter, students and administrators at the small Southern Baptist school here were incredulous.

“Most people thought it was a bad joke, a slap by Playboy at Southern Baptists,” said Ruby Fowler, a senior Christianity major and associate editor of the student newspaper. “Anybody who knows anything about Mercer knows it’s far from a party school.”

Not Lee Roberts, an influential fundamentalist Baptist layman and well-heeled mortgage banker from Marietta, near Atlanta, whose business cards read: “Dedicated to spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ through financing the growth of the local church.”

To Roberts, the Playboy ranking was no joke but evidence of what he describes as a pervasive atmosphere of “debauchery and lewdness” at Mercer, engendered from on high by a “heretical” president and a morally lax board of trustees.

Other examples he cites: the nude photographs of two Mercer students in Playboy’s October “back to campus” issue, a condom ad and a condom cartoon that were printed in the student newspaper, the R-rated films shown on campus and a university-sponsored seminar for pharmacists at which hard liquor was served.

In a move that is focusing national attention on Mercer, he has launched an all-out crusade to clean up the campus and bring the school’s administration under stricter control of the fundamentalist-dominated state Baptist organization.

“If Mercer were a secular school, like the University of Georgia or Georgia Tech, they could do anything they wanted to do,” Roberts said. “But it is a Christian school and Christian schools are supposed to bring glory to Jesus by their actions. Mercer is not doing that.”

Roberts’ campaign is the latest offensive in a battle by fundamentalists to stem what they view as a dangerous drift toward secularism among Baptist colleges and theological seminaries.

From humble Bible-based origins, many of these institutions have grown into educational powerhouses with national reputations for academic excellence. The arts and science college and the business school at Mercer’s branch campus in Atlanta, for example, were rated among the 10 best in the South last year by U.S. News & World Report. Mercer’s medical school, on the main campus in Macon, pioneered the “case study” method of instruction now employed at such schools as Harvard University.

Straying Contended

But as these institutions have developed, fundamentalists contend, many have strayed further and further from their basic Baptist heritage--moving away from state convention control, drifting toward liberal theology, dropping required chapel attendance and growing in moral permissiveness.

Now, with the right wing in control of the 14.6-million-member Southern Baptist Convention and dominant in several state conventions, fundamentalists see a golden opportunity to begin returning the apostate schools to their religious roots.

“I think there’s a momentum building in the fundamentalist camp that says: ‘We’ve got the power; we’ve got the votes; let’s clean house,’ ” said Jack Harwell, editor of the Christian Index, the state Baptist newspaper in Georgia.

A fundamentalist victory was scored earlier this year when the board of trustees of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C.--one of the denomination’s most important seminaries--came under conservative control.

Juicier Target

Mercer, which has a combined enrollment of nearly 6,000 students at its Macon and Atlanta campuses, is considered an even juicier target. The 154-year-old school is the flagship institution of Baptist higher education in Georgia and the second-largest of the more than 50 Baptist-affiliated colleges and theological seminaries in the nation.

Fundamentalists were jolted when Playboy’s January issue hit the stands, rating Mercer ninth among the nation’s top 40 “party colleges.” Mercer President R. Kirby Godsey dismissed the ranking as a “bad joke” and said that “it has no empirical connection whatever with Mercer.”

However, that did not satisfy his fundamentalist critics, already upset with him over reports of student drunkenness on campus and for permitting R-rated films such as “Beverly Hills Cop” and “Rosemary’s Baby” to be shown and advertised at the school.

Condom Ad

Nor were they amused when a one-third-page ad by Planned Parenthood appeared in the Cluster, the student newspaper. The ad showed a girl handing a gift box of condoms to a man, with the caption: “Oh, darling. You have everything I’ve always wanted in a man, except these . . . .”

Such ads were later banned, but what fundamentalists call the “grand finale” came when a news story and ad appeared in the Cluster announcing that a Playboy photographer was coming to campus. The executive committee of the state convention voted 54 to 20 in favor of a resolution calling for expulsion of any student posing for Playboy.

Godsey refused to abide by the resolution, however, contending that to do so would violate civil rights laws.

As matters turned out, he would have had difficulty anyway--one of the female students who posed had already graduated by the time the photographs were published, and the other wore a wig and sunglasses and had her face partially obscured by a balloon, making identification virtually impossible.

Packet Mailed

But his fundamentalist critics had had enough. Early this month at his own expense, Roberts mailed a 16-page information packet to more than 5,000 Georgia Baptists--including the parents of every Mercer student from Georgia and the pastor of each Southern Baptist church in the state.

The packets, which he compiled, featured a bold “Caution” warning on the cover and a printed suggestion that “this information not be placed in the hands of women or children.” The materials included copies of:

--The photographs from Playboy with the strategic parts of the two female students blanked out.

--Excerpts from a lecture series on salvation delivered earlier this year by Godsey. Roberts brands as heretical such statements as “Jesus did not have to die” and “Christianity is not about accepting the fact of Jesus’ death or pledging to be faithful to his admonitions.”

--A classified ad from the student newspaper seeking “1 red Jansport (swimsuit)” that was “Lost in a druken (sic) frenzy Saturday night.”

--The title page of a book printed by the university press, “Called to Preach, Condemned to Survive,” with a listing compiled by Roberts of various “four-letter” words and the number of the pages on which they appear.

Copies of the condom ad, the condom cartoon and the campus movie-house bill also were included.

‘Vicious Assault’

Until then, the conflict between the fundamentalists and the school had remained largely out of public view. But, in response to Roberts’ mailing, Godsey decided to bring the issue into the open. In a barnstorming tour of Georgia last Monday, he held news conferences in each of the state’s six largest cities, denouncing Roberts’ attack as a “vicious assault” on Mercer’s academic integrity.

Godsey’s action was prompted in large part by the fact that Roberts is a formidable adversary.

In recent years, the businessman has emerged as a major figure in the fundamentalist cause. For example, he played a key role in helping fundamentalists retain control of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1985 and in getting his own pastor--the Rev. Clark Hutchinson of Eastside Baptist Church in Marietta--elected as president of the Georgia Baptist Convention.

In the school controversy, Roberts’ goal is to give the state convention a stronger hand in selecting the school’s trustees.

School Nominates

Now candidates are nominated by the university and then approved or disapproved by the convention. But the convention has no power to nominate candidates on its own; it simply votes up or down on choices provided by the school.

Godsey and his supporters fear the consequences if Roberts’ camp is successful.

“By controlling the election of trustees, they can control what is taught in classrooms, the selection of faculty members, the selection of textbooks and the content of books published by the university,” he said. “Mr. Roberts and the political fundamentalists seek to change Mercer from a place where students are educated to a place where they are indoctrinated.”

A student petition drive also launched last week has collected more than 1,700 signatures in support of Godsey and the board of trustees. Pro-administration resolutions also have been passed by the student government associations at the Macon and Atlanta campuses.

‘If He Wins, I’m Leaving’

“We’ll fight him (Roberts) till the battle’s over. If we win, fine. If he wins, I’m leaving,” said David Sisk, a junior English major and student government president in Macon.

Both the Atlanta Constitution, the state’s largest and most influential newspaper, and the Macon Telegraph & News have editorialized against Roberts’ campaign.

“The scurrilous material Lee Roberts has sent around . . . amounts to an extended libel of a Christian institution and its Christian president,” the Macon paper said. “Unhappily, it may be persuasive to those who do not know today’s Mercer or its president. They won’t realize Roberts is displaying isolated pimples to argue the whole body is gangrenous.”

But, in an indication of Roberts’ support, the First Baptist Church of Atlanta--with more than 10,000 members the denomination’s largest congregation in Georgia--announced a cutoff of its annual financial contributions to Mercer. That is only a reported $20,000 a year--a minuscule fraction of Mercer’s $75-million budget this year--but it has a high symbolic value.

Annual Meeting

The controversy is expected to reach a head early next month when Georgia Baptists hold their annual meeting in Savannah.

If Mercer officials do not voluntarily give in to calls for a change in the trustee selection process, Roberts says, they may face a cutoff of the $2 million a year the school gets from the state convention. He says there also are plans afoot to seek the resignation of all 45 trustees and to make them personally liable for the return of about $12 million in convention support since Godsey became president in 1980.

But university officials say they will disaffiliate the school from the convention if necessary rather than compromise the university’s academic integrity.

Wake Forest University in North Carolina took that route last year, approving a “declaration of independence” from the state convention that was the culmination of a decade-long struggle over trustee selection.

“The great strength of the Baptist faith is it’s a big tent everybody can get under,” said Robert Steed, an Atlanta attorney and chairman of Mercer’s board of trustees. “But a small few are trying to manipulate the greater body and bring Mercer to heel--and we’re going to resist that.”