J. Frank Norris

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John Franklin Norris, (born September 18, 1877, Dadeville, Alabama, died August 20, 1952, Jacksonville, Florida, USA) was a firebrand fundamentalist preacher and popular Baptist leader. He was one of the most controversial and flamboyant figures in the history of fundamentalism. Norris was popularly known as the "Texas Tornado" and the "Texas Cyclone."

In 1881, the Norris family moved to Hubbard, Texas. After graduation from high school, he attended Baylor University (1898-1903) and Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, where he earned the master of theology degree. In 1905, Norris returned to Texas as the pastor of the McKinney Avenue Baptist Church in Dallas, resigning in 1907 to become editor of the Baptist Standard. Norris is credited with ending the Texas Baptist newspaper war, with moving Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary from Waco to Fort Worth, and with persuading the state legislature to abolish racetrack gambling.

In 1909, Norris sold his interest in the Baptist Standard and accepted the pastorate of the First Baptist Church, Fort Worth, where he served for forty-four years until his death. In 1912, Norris was acquitted of both arson and perjury charges related to a fire which destroy the auditorium of the church. Norris was also the radio pastor of Station KSAT, where he started the first regular radio ministry in the United States in the 1920s.

The height of Norris's career came in the 1920s, when he became the leader of the fundamentalist movement in Texas by attacking the teaching of "that hell-born, Bible-destroying, deity-of-Christ-denying, German rationalism known as evolution" at Baylor University. Because of his controversial attacks on Baylor, denominational leaders, and Texas Baptist politics, Norris and his church were denied seats at the annual meeting of the Baptist General Convention of Texas in 1922 and 1923.

In his 1926 sermon series "Rum and Romanism," Norris attacked H. C. Meacham the Catholic mayor of Fort Worth, accusing him of misappropriating funds for Catholic causes. That same year, Norris was indicted for the murder of lumberman Dexter Elliot Chipps, a friend of Meacham's, in the church office. Norris claimed Chipps had threated his life and was acquitted on grounds of self-defense.

Norris published a pastoral newspaper, The Searchlight, the front page of which had a picture of Norris grasping a Bible in one hand and a searchlight in the other while Satan cowered in the opposite lower corner.

During 1928, Norris actively campaigned against the election of Al Smith to the presidency, voicing his anti-Catholic views from the pulpit, his radio station, and his weekly newspaper. In 1935, he accepted the pastorate of a second church, Temple Baptist Church in Detroit, Michigan. By 1946, the combined membership of the two congregations was more than 26,000. Norris commuted by train and later plane between the two churches for some 16 years.

In the late 1930s, Norris organized the World Missionary Baptist Fellowship, a group of independent, premillennial Baptist churches, to combat socialist, liberal, or "modernist" tendencies within the Southern Baptist Convention. After World War II, when John Birch, a graduate of his seminary in Fort Worth, was killed by the Chinese communists, Norris renewed his attack on Communist influences inside the United States. Norris's premillennialist views led him to urge President Harry Truman to recognize and support the new state of Israel. Norris died of a heart attack while attending a youth camp at Jacksonville, Florida in 1952, ending an era of religious controversy in Texas.

[edit] References

• Roy Emerson Falls, A Biography of J. Frank Norris, 1877-1952 (Euless, Texas, 1975)
• Barry Hankins, God's Rascal : J. Frank Norris & the Beginnings of Southern Fundamentalism (University Press of Kentucky, 1996)
• C. Gwin Morris, He Changed Things: The Life and Thought of J. Frank Norris (Ph.D. dissertation, Texas Tech University, 1973)
• C. Gwin Morris, "J. Frank Norris and the Baptist General Convention of Texas," Texas Baptist History 1 (1981)
• J. Frank Norris, Inside History of First Baptist Church, Fort Worth, and Temple Baptist Church, Detroit (Fort Worth, 1938)
• C. Allyn Russell, "J. Frank Norris: Violent Fundamentalist," Southwestern Historical Quarterly 75 (January 1972)
• E. Roy Tatum, Conquest or Failure?: Biography of J. Frank Norris (Dallas: Baptist Historical Foundation, 1966).