Settling accounts with Southern Baptist distinctives: James Howel Street's The Gauntlet

Abstract

James Howell Street has been lauded for crafting in fiction one of the most insightful portrayals of the twentieth-century Protestant ministry. His pastorates in the Southern Baptist Convention were quite brief, but they bequeathed to him a cornucopia of experiences from which he created two commendable novels, The Gauntlet (1945) and The High Calling (1951). In the first of these works Street focused his attention primarily on conflicts between a neophyte pastor from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary who is called to a small church in Missouri in the 1920s, his quest for a deeper faith at a time of theological turmoil, and the vulnerable situation in which his wife winds herself when subjected to domineering older members of the congregation. The Gauntlet can be read as a critical commentary on aspects of Baptist polity which place pastors at the mercy of their flocks