Tennessee Temple University — The Fundamentalist Powerhouse That Shrank Into a Footnote of a Larger School

Summary

Tennessee Temple University, in Chattanooga, Tennessee, founded on July 3, 1946 by the pastor Lee Roberson to train workers for the Independent Baptist movement, voted on March 3, 2015 to dissolve and fold its remaining operations into Piedmont International University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, effective April 30, 2015. The institution that ended that spring was not the one that had once dominated American fundamentalism. At its height in the 1970s and early 1980s, Temple drew more than four thousand students — some accounts put the 1970s figure above five thousand — onto a fifty-five-acre campus laced into the city's Highland Park neighborhood, and fed a national network of pastors, evangelists, missionaries, and Christian-school teachers. By its last semester it counted roughly 300 to 650 students depending on how the online rolls were tallied, and it could no longer afford a campus built for ten times that number.

For most of the twentieth century Temple was less a college than the academic engine of a movement. It was wedded to Highland Park Baptist Church, which under Roberson became one of the early American megachurches, and to a sprawling apparatus of branch churches, a seminary, an academy, and a bus ministry that carried thousands into the pews each Sunday. Temple's graduates planted churches and ran Christian schools across the South and beyond; Jerry Falwell would cite the Temple-and-Highland-Park model as a template when he built Liberty University. To be at Tennessee Temple in 1975 was to be at the center of separatist fundamentalism in America.

What followed was a long, quiet subtraction. Roberson retired in 1983, the Independent Baptist movement fractured and aged, the cultural energy that had filled Temple's dormitories drained away, and enrollment fell year after year — down by roughly three thousand between the early 1980s and 1991, and then down further still. By 2013 the school had "just over" 400 students rattling around a campus it could no longer maintain. In February 2014 it agreed to sell most of the Highland Park buildings to a local congregation and to relocate; the move proved financially impossible, and the relocation became, instead, a merger.

The end, when it came, was gentler than most in this archive. Temple did not strand its students or vanish overnight. It had a sister school — Piedmont, founded a year apart by a friend of Roberson's, under what the men called a "gentleman's agreement" that if either faltered the two would reunite — and that agreement was honored. Online programs transferred whole; residential students who moved to Winston-Salem got a tuition cut; the Temple Baptist Seminary survived as a program inside the larger university; and a perpetual scholarship was created for Temple alumni and their descendants. But the name, the campus, and the independent institution were gone. Piedmont itself would later rename to Carolina University, and Tennessee Temple became a line in another school's history.

Timeline

A Church That Built a University

Tennessee Temple was, from its first day, an extension of a pulpit. Lee Roberson founded it in 1946 not as a freestanding academy but as the training arm of Highland Park Baptist Church, the Chattanooga congregation he would pastor for thirty-seven years and grow into one of the first megachurches of the modern era. The logic was integrated and total: the church supplied the students, the theology, the chapel, and the field placements; the school supplied the church and its imitators with a steady stream of trained personnel. A seminary followed in 1948, an academy in 1952, and around them a vast machine of branch churches — by some counts 77 within a hundred-mile radius — gave students live congregations in which to preach, teach, and run buses. Temple did not prepare graduates for a labor market so much as for a mission.

That fusion of church and college made Temple, for a generation, one of the most important institutions in American fundamentalism. As the Independent Baptist movement surged through the postwar decades, Temple swelled with it. Through the 1970s the campus held thousands; the figure climbed past five thousand in the most expansive accounts, and into the early 1980s the school still reported more than four thousand students. Its graduates fanned out to plant churches and found Christian day schools across the country, and its model — a dominant local church wrapped around a degree-granting college — became something other empire-builders studied. Jerry Falwell pointed to Highland Park and Tennessee Temple as the example he had in mind when he set out to build Lynchburg Baptist College, the school that became Liberty University. At its zenith, Temple was not following a movement; it was supplying one.

When the Movement Cooled

A college tethered this tightly to a movement rises and falls with it, and the Independent Baptist surge did not last. Lee Roberson retired in 1983, and the founder's exit roughly coincided with the cresting of the separatist fundamentalism that had filled Temple's dormitories. The movement aged, fractured into rival camps, and lost its cultural momentum; the supply of eighteen-year-olds eager to spend four years training for full-time Christian ministry thinned year after year. Temple's enrollment, which had been a measure of the movement's vitality on the way up, became a measure of its decline on the way down. Between the early 1980s and 1991 the school shed roughly three thousand students — a fall of more than two-thirds — and the bleeding did not stop there.

By the new century Temple was a small college occupying a large institution's footprint. It had picked up regional-style recognition over the years — earlier accreditation through the Bible-college association, then accreditation by the Transnational Association of Christian Colleges and Schools from around 2000 — but credentials could not manufacture students, and a confessional college this specialized had a narrow pool to recruit from. By September 2013 enrollment had dropped to "just over" 400. A fifty-five-acre campus, a seminary, an academy, dormitories, and a chapel built for thousands now had to be heated, insured, maintained, and staffed for a few hundred. The arithmetic of a tuition-dependent school with a tiny student body and an oversized physical plant is unforgiving: fixed costs do not shrink to match a shrinking class. Temple was, in the plainest terms, too big a body for too small a heart.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

Tennessee Temple's students were not left to fend for themselves, which sets the case apart from the abrupt closures that fill this archive. Online learners moved to Piedmont without interruption; residential students who relocated to Winston-Salem did so at a discount of more than a quarter on tuition and board; those who wanted to stay closer to Chattanooga were given named alternatives in Bryan College and Shorter College. The Temple Baptist Seminary was carried forward as a school within Piedmont, and the Tennessee Temple Scholarship survives as a perpetual discount for the school's diaspora and their descendants — a small, deliberate effort to keep the name alive in the institution that absorbed it. Some Temple faculty and staff made the move to North Carolina; many did not.

The campus had already been sold. The Highland Park buildings passed to Redemption to the Nations and were absorbed into a different religious mission in the same neighborhood Temple had occupied for nearly seventy years. The merged institution, Piedmont International University, went on to rename itself Carolina University, which today curates the Temple legacy as a chapter in its own past — the heritage scholarship, the seminary, and a display of memorabilia standing in for a fifty-five-acre campus. For Chattanooga, the disappearance of Tennessee Temple closed the book on a chapter of American fundamentalism that had once been written largely from its streets. The school's lasting mark is less a building than a model: the megachurch-plus-college template that Temple pioneered, and that Liberty University scaled into something Temple never lived to rival.

Lessons

References

• Tennessee Temple to close, merge with Piedmont Baptist Press
• Tennessee Temple University To Close After Almost 70 Years Chattanoogan.com
• Tennessee Temple U. Expected to Shut Down Inside Higher Ed
• Tennessee Temple University Wikipedia
• Tennessee Temple University Legacy Carolina University