User:AmerRelHist/Ben M. Bogard

Kentucky background[edit]
Bogard was the only son of six children born to M. L. and Nancy Bogard in Elizabethtown in central Kentucky. The Bogards were tenant farmers who raised tobacco as their cash crop. In 1873, the Bogards moved to Caseyville in Union County in western Kentucky. There he attended school and the nearby Woodland Baptist Church, still in existence in Morganfield, Kentucky. Young Bogard was also a frequent participant in religious camp meetings. In the spring of 1913, Caseyville was destroyed by an Ohio River flood and not rebuilt.

During a church service in February 1885, the teenaged Bogard was baptized in an icy pond, a signal of his faith in Jesus Christ. In 1887 and 1888, he attended Georgetown College in Georgetown, Scott County, north of Lexington, Kentucky. In 1887, he was ordained as a Baptist minister.

After Georgetown, he pursued further studies at Bethel College in Russellville, also formerly known as Russellville Male Academy. Located in Logan County in south Kentucky, the institution closed in 1964. Though he was called "Dr. Bogard", the title was ceremonial.

In 1891, Bogard married Lynn Oneida Meacham Owen (1868–1952), a native of Christian County in southwestern Kentucky, and the widow of Frazier Westley Owen Jr. (1867–1889). Both were twenty-three; she had a three-year-old daughter, Lela Owen, who was born in 1888. The Bogards had a son together, Douglas Bogard.

From 1892 to 1898, Bogard was the pastor of several churches in Kentucky and Missouri.

Arkansas years[edit]
In 1901, Bogard became the editor and half-owner of the Arkansas Baptist newspaper. Three years later, he secured editorial control of the publication. In 1905, he left the Southern Baptist Convention and formed the General Association of Baptist Churches of the United States of America, the first attempt to organize Landmark Baptists on a national level. Nearly two decades later, he worked to establish the ABA, or the Missionary Baptist denomination, which dispatches missionaries not through an associational body like the SBC authorizes but through individual churches.

In 1899, Bogard came to Arkansas. For his first four years there, he was the pastor of First Baptist Church in Searcy in White County near the capital city of Little Rock. Between 1903 and 1909, he was the pastor of First Baptist Church in Argenta, now North Little Rock in Pulaski County. Then he preached independently in revivals and crusades in seven states. In 1914, he moved to Texarkana in Miller County, Arkansas, where he founded The Baptist Commoner. In 1917, he merged The Baptist Commoner with the Arkansas Baptist to create The Baptist and Commoner. In 1920, he assumed his final pastorate at Antioch Missionary Baptist Church in Little Rock, where he remained until retirement in 1947. At the time, no Missionary Baptist pastor earned more than the $100 gross monthly salary paid to Bogard by Antioch Church.

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During the 1920s, Bogard joined the Ku Klux Klan, which targeted in that phase of its existence foreigners and Roman Catholics. Bogard claimed that the theory of evolution had contributed to the moral decline of the United States. In 1926, Bogard joined with Doss Nathan Jackson to write Evolution: Unscientific and Unscriptural, which claims that Darwin's's theory causes discouraged persons to turn to atheism and Bolshevism. Bogard and Jackson subsequently broke fellowship when Jackson's father-in-law, C. A. Gilbert, the chairman of the Missionary Baptist Sunday School Committee, was blamed for a deficit. For a decade Bogard tried to remove Gilbert as the committee chairman. In 1950, Jackson left the Missionary Baptist denomination and started the Baptist Missionary Association of America, formerly the North American Baptist Association.

In 1927, the Arkansas State Senate tabled an anti-evolution bill. Bogard led a petition drive to place the issue on the ballot as Initiated Act No. 1 in the general election held on November 6, 1928. In the campaign Bogard unexpectedly found himself defending the right of free speech of Charles Lee Smith, the founder and president of the since defunct American Association for the Advancement of Atheism who opposed the initiated act and had been charged with blasphemy while distributing atheist literature in Little Rock. Bogard was convinced that his conservative ideas would prove superior to those of Smith in an honest forum. Arkansas voters defied their state senators and passed the anti-evolution act by a two-to-one margin and also supported the Democratic presidential nominee Al Smith, the governor of New York, though Bogard had been among the southern clergy who opposed this first ever Catholic nominee of a major party despite U.S. Senator Joseph T. Robinson of Arkansas being tapped as Smith's vice-presidential running mate. Even before the term civil rights was widely used, Bogard believed that Al Smith as president would work for equality of African Americans in the still racially segregated American South. Though successful in Arkansas, the Smith-Robinson ticket was defeated by the Republican Hoover-Curtis slate.