J. Frank Norris - Biography

Biography

J. Frank Norris was born in Dadeville, Alabama, but the family shortly moved to Arkansas and then back to Columbiana, Alabama. In the late 1880s, the Norrises bought land near Hubbard, Texas, about thirty miles from Waco, where they farmed. James Warner Norris was an alcoholic, and Frank Norris claimed that his father once severely injured him after he had emptied his liquor bottles. In 1891, both were shot by an acquaintance of Warner Norris, and Frank said he did not fully recuperate for three years.

Norris was converted at a Baptist revival meeting in the early 1890s, and in 1897, he became pastor of Mount Antioch Baptist Church, Mount Calm, Texas. The following year he enrolled in Baylor University (1898-1903). He earned a master of theology degree from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. 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 arson and perjury charges related to fires that respectively destroyed his church auditorium and severely damaged his home. Norris was also the radio pastor of, variously, KFQB, KTAT and then KSAT (not to be confused with KSAT in San Antonio), 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 in Waco, Texas. Because of his attacks on Baylor and denominational leaders, 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 mayor of Fort Worth, accusing him of misappropriating funds for Catholic causes. That same year, Norris was indicted for the murder of lumberman Dexter Elliott Chipps, a friend of Meacham's, in the church office. Norris claimed that Chipps had threatened his life. Norris was acquitted on grounds of self-defense.

During 1928, Norris 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. For sixteen years, Norris commuted by train and plane between the two churches. In September 1947, while on a tour of Europe, Norris secured an audience with Pope Pius XII and declared that the pope was "the last Gibraltar in Europe against Communism." Thereafter, Norris took the position that communism was more dangerous than Catholicism, and some of Norris's erstwhile allies, such as Toronto evangelist T. T. Shields, criticized him for his "folly."

In the late 1930s, Norris organized a group of independent, premillennial Baptist churches into the Premillennial Missionary Baptist Fellowship (later the World Baptist Fellowship), in an attempt to combat what he believed were socialist, liberal, and "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 in the United States. Norris's premillennial views led him to urge President Harry Truman to recognize and support the new state of Israel.

Norris published a religious 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. Norris died of a heart attack while attending a youth camp at Jacksonville, Florida in 1952. He was succeeded at the First Baptist Church of Fort Worth by Homer Ritchie, who pastored the church for 30 years.