Baptists in America: A History

by Thomas S. Kidd

The terroristic radicalism of Münster was hardly indicative of the Baptist movement to come, but the memory of Münster haunted Baptists for centuries thereafter. Many sects that practiced believer’s baptism had to deflect association with the “Monsters of Münster.”7 Some rejected the name “Anabaptist” altogether because of its unfortunate connotations.

By the early seventeenth century, some radical Separatists concluded that complete purity in the church demanded a rejection of infant baptism. Infant baptism reflected an inclusive, geographic view of church membership that both Roman Catholics and Anglicans embraced, introducing the children of Christian families into the church as quasi-members. But what if those children never experienced conversion? The practice necessarily brought into the church people who, according to the Calvinist view of Puritans and Separatists, were not members of the elect, the chosen people of God. Baptists sought to clear up this confusion, and to foster a pure church membership, by baptizing only those who had actually experienced conversion. Many of the Separatists adopted views similar to those of the Mennonites on issues such as the strong separation of church and state, as both experienced harsh persecution, fines, and imprisonment at the hands of political and church authorities. The Separatists and Mennonites undoubtedly influenced each other, as English and Continental radicals routinely crossed the North Sea in these decades, looking for economic opportunity and religious freedom.

Many of the early English Baptists also rejected the dominant Calvinist beliefs of the Separatists, including predestination and limited atonement (the idea that Christ died only for those predestined for salvation), in favor of the theology of a general atonement (the idea that Christ died for everyone). They probably picked up this new doctrine from Continental Anabaptists.9 The “General” Baptists, as they came to be called, believed that all people could be saved, in contrast to the “Particular” Baptists, who believed that only the chosen elect of God could be saved. The first English Baptist church in Holland was founded by Separatist pastor John Smyth. Educated at Cambridge, in 1600 Smyth began serving as a priest of the Church of England in Lincoln, in northeast England. Even though local officials knew of his Puritan leanings when they hired him, Smyth’s preaching earned him powerful enemies. Two years later Smyth was removed from his pastorate for “undue teaching of matters of religion,” and for attacks on elite residents of the town. Smyth became a minister of a Separatist congregation in nearby Gainsborough.

In Amsterdam, Smyth became familiar with several Mennonite congregations. Smyth’s church rented space (presumably for meetings and/or lodging) at a bakeshop owned by a local Mennonite. The Mennonites may have helped Smyth take the final step from Separatist to Baptist, and they likely also contributed to Smyth’s developing belief in the general atonement.

Although Williams believed that God had ordained civil governments, he did not believe that God had ever made any special covenant with any people since ancient Israel. That included Puritan Massachusetts.

Rhode Island began filling with Separatists, some of whom were following the lead of their English brethren and becoming Baptists. The mercurial Williams went with this logical flow toward Baptist convictions and repudiated his original baptism as an infant. He was influenced in his decision by Catherine Scott, a sister of the controversial Anne Hutchinson, who had also been banished from Massachusetts for her “antinomian” views in 1638. (“Antinomians,” to their critics, rejected God’s moral law in a dangerous quest after the leadings of God’s Holy Spirit.) That year, Williams joined with a small group of followers and established America’s first Baptist church in Providence. Williams was baptized by Ezekiel Holliman, one of his followers from Salem, and then Williams baptized Holliman and the rest of the group.

Thomas Shepard, the Puritan minister of Cambridge, Massachusetts, wrote an introduction to one of the anti-Baptist tracts and expressed concern that Baptist opinions would “gangrene far” if not met with a vigorous defense of infant baptism. Shepard declared that to deny baptism to infants was essentially to refuse God’s covenant blessing on one’s children. The Baptists, he wrote, condemned the finest Protestant churches as illegitimate and set up their own private assemblies, even if they had to use an uneducated man as a minister. They even indulged the “promiscuous prophecies” of Spirit-filled laypeople (as in Clarke’s congregation) and argued that anyone who could preach could also baptize. To Shepard, this was sheer chaos. It represented the “abuse of liberty for every man to think what he pleaseth.” A godly state and church should shut these heretics down.

The Massachusetts authorities would normally have crushed Baptists like Goold and his new church. But now their reaction was muted, for a variety of reasons. One was the ongoing controversy related to the Halfway Covenant: clearly, baptism was an issue they needed to handle delicately. But the English government was also putting pressure on Massachusetts to temper its persecuting ways, especially in the wake of the recent Quaker hangings.

The first era of criminal actions against the Baptists had largely concluded. Over the next generation, Baptists in New England (and elsewhere in the colonies) grew slowly in numbers, but, more important, they grew in respect. The zealots for church purity and believer’s baptism had established footholds, especially in Rhode Island but also in Massachusetts. Sixty years later, however, the cycle of Baptist radicalism would begin anew. Colonial churches—including the Baptists—would face their greatest challenge yet with the coming of the Great Awakening.

The Great Awakening of the eighteenth century had a most unusual effect on the Baptist movement in America. It virtually destroyed older Baptist churches, especially in New England. Newer Baptist churches associated with the Philadelphia Association of Baptists generally accommodated, but did not lead, the Great Awakening. From the radical fringe of the awakening’s evangelicals, however, a new Baptist faction emerged. Like many radical evangelicals, these Separate Baptists experienced harsh persecution at the hands of the colonial governments. But the Baptists surging out of the Great Awakening would not back down. They took aim at America’s established churches and eventually captured the hearts of millions of Americans.

In general, Baptist churches between 1680 and 1740 received greater respect and less persecution than they had in the early colonial period. As a result of the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689, the new English monarchs William and Mary championed the Act of Toleration (1689), which relieved persecution against dissenters like the Baptists. King James II had revoked Massachusetts’s charter in the 1680s, but William and Mary granted a new one in 1692. It returned much of the colony’s political autonomy but required it, in accordance with the Toleration Act, to give freedom to all Protestant Christians, including Baptists. The era of exclusive Puritanism had come to a close. Baptists could now worship in relative peace and quiet, but they still had to pay taxes to support the established state churches.7 At the same time that persecution was declining, Baptists also sought greater levels of respect in colonial American society. Whereas the original Baptist churches of the seventeenth century had depended on largely uneducated but militant leaders, in the eighteenth century highly educated pastors such as Jeremiah Condy were more common. In 1718, Elisha Callender became the first Harvard-educated pastor of Boston’s First Baptist Church, and Congregationalist stalwarts Increase and Cotton Mather even participated in his ordination. In a few short years, Baptist pastors had achieved an unprecedented level of prestige.

Comer’s early America was a period of deep inequality and the ever-present fear of death. Perhaps these bleak realities primed early Americans to think long and hard about their standing before God.

IN THE 1740s and early 1750s, the Philadelphia Association was the key agency spreading Baptist influence across the colonies from New England to the Carolinas. New England and the Chesapeake actually outpaced the Middle Colonies in the number of Baptist churches, but the Philadelphia Association was critical in organizing Calvinist (also known as Particular, or Regular) Baptist congregations throughout the colonies.

LONG-ESTABLISHED BAPTIST CHURCHES of New England typically opposed the Great Awakening. Those affiliated with the Philadelphia Association supported it tentatively. But the new, radical Baptist movement emerging de novo from the Great Awakening transformed America’s religious landscape. The spawning of the radical evangelical Baptists was reminiscent of the way that the English Puritan and Separatist movement had helped create the original English Baptists. In the 1740s and 1750s, radical Protestants stumbled again on the problems created by infant baptism, and the presence of so many who had received baptism as infants but never experienced conversion. Infant baptism was practiced by all Anglicans and Congregationalists, and to Baptists, it was the sign of an impure church. The heady environment of the Great Awakening presented a great opportunity for a return to biblical purity in all areas, including the practice of baptism. The Separate Baptists brought the radical edge back to the Baptist movement.

The church also refused to make a conversion testimony a requirement for full membership, instead requiring only the desire to live a godly life.28 By mid-1745, thirteen members of the church, including Backus, stopped attending and began holding private meetings by themselves. Lord insisted that the aggrieved members appear before him and explain themselves. Among their reasons for leaving were that the church did not make conversion a condition of membership, and that Lord was “not a friend to lowly preaching and preachers.” One of the Separates simply stated that “the gospel is not preached here.”

The Separates and Baptists of New England, despite their common origins, were finding it difficult to coexist. At a synod in Stonington, Connecticut, in 1754, Separates decided to ban Baptists from their churches.36 Backus also became convinced that a mixed communion of Baptists and supporters of infant baptism was unsustainable. This determination drove him toward founding a new Baptist church in 1756.

This kind of official and unofficial persecution undoubtedly hindered Baptist growth in New England. But it also fired the zeal of committed Baptists, confirming that they should sacrifice everything for God’s truth. Out of the renewed persecution of the Great Awakening, the Separate Baptist movement became one of the primary seedbeds for American ideas about the separation of church and state. Baptists saw firsthand the dreadful effect of state persecution of dissenting religion. The Separate Baptists also fueled an unprecedented missionary campaign into the South, which prior to the Great Awakening had only a minimal Baptist presence.

The key figure in exporting the Separate Baptist movement to the South was Shubal Stearns of Tolland, Connecticut. Stearns followed a familiar path to Separate Baptist convictions. He experienced conversion under George Whitefield’s preaching, grew dissatisfied with the local Congregational church, and helped organize a Separate congregation. By the mid-1740s, Stearns had become an activist for religious freedom for the Separates, and he signed petitions to the Connecticut General Assembly asking for liberty of worship under the 1689 Toleration Act.44 In 1751 (shortly before Isaac Backus accepted believer’s baptism about ninety miles away in Massachusetts), Stearns and most of his extended family were converted to Baptist principles under a visiting preacher, Wait Palmer. Palmer helped Stearns organize a Separate Baptist congregation in Tolland and ordained Stearns with the assistance of the provocative Joshua Morse. But Stearns did not stay long at the church, as he and his family left in 1754 to bring the Separate Baptist faith to the South. Why did Stearns leave? Early Baptist historian Robert Baylor Semple chalked it up to the Separate Baptists’ mystical piety: “Mr. Stearns and most of the Separates had strong faith in the immediate teachings of the Spirit. . . . Mr. Stearns, listening to some of these instructions from Heaven, conceived himself called upon by the Almighty to move far to the westward to execute a great and extensive work.” Stearns had also likely learn...

THE YEARS LEADING up to the American Revolution were a time of growth for Baptists. In New England, Baptists sought greater respectability, especially through the establishment of their first college, the College of Rhode Island (later Brown University). The key figures in the establishment of the College of Rhode Island were James Manning and Isaac Backus. The Separate Baptists, unlike those affiliated with the Philadelphia Association, were suspicious of educational requirements for pastors. Most of the early Separate Baptists, including Backus, did not have a college education, and they believed that the only essential qualification to preach was the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit. Requiring a college degree for pastors seemed to denigrate the role of spiritual calling, for God would presumably call whomever he wanted, regardless of their worldly credentials. The Baptists looked to the example of Christ’s apostles, some of whom were untutored fishermen. Nevertheless, Baptist leaders in the 1760s came to believe that they needed a college to train pastors. None of the Baptists opposed education per se, and many accepted the idea that specialized education in theology could help develop better pastors. They worried that some aspiring pastors might go to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton and be tempted to become Congregationalists or Presbyterians. Already in 1756, Baptists had founded the precollegiate Hopewell Academy in New Jersey. One of its early graduates was James...

In the early 1760s, Manning and Backus began to develop plans for the college, collaborating with some non-Baptists, including Congregationalist pastor Ezra Stiles of Newport, Rhode Island. Rhode Island had no college and was friendly to the Baptists because of its policy of religious freedom. So in 1764 the College of Rhode Island was opened in Warren. Some Separate Baptists were appalled by the development, thinking that Backus, a college trustee, had sold them out in the name of respectability. One critic wrote, “I cannot see how he, acting faithfully, upon his own declared principles, can long keep his standing as a member of that body the chief of whose principles and views differing so widely from his.” Backus countered that Baptists needed this kind of school to help train more effective pastors, but he admitted that there was danger in associating education with godliness. Baptists should “never imagine to confine Christ or his church, to that, or any other human school for ministers,” he cautioned. Despite initial reservations, by the time the college moved to its permanent home in Providence, in 1770, the school had become widely accepted among both Separate Baptists and those of the Philadelphia Association.

Brown remained the lone Baptist college in America for about half a century. Then other northern Baptist colleges appeared, including Maine’s Colby College (1817), New York’s Colgate University (1820), and Ohio’s Denison University (1831). Baptist institutions of higher learning came more slowly to the South, but sixty years after the founding of the College of Rhode Island, Baptists founded a spate of new schools there, too, including Furman University in South Carolina (1826), Wake Forest in North Carolina (1834), Judson College (originally Judson Female Institute) in Alabama (1839), and Baylor, chartered by the Republic of Texas in 1845. Leading Baptists were also key players at state institutions; for example, Baptist pastor Basil Manly served from 1837 to 1855 as the University of Alabama’s second president. The founding of Brown illustrated the New England Separate Baptists’ growing sophistication, and their increasing similarity to the more established Philadelphia Association.

The most spectacular instances of persecution against the Baptists in the decade prior to the War for Independence occurred in Virginia. Aggressive evangelism and unwillingness to comply with regulations of the established church made the Virginia Baptists seem like revolutionaries. Numerous Baptists suffered beatings and imprisonment for illegal preaching.

Although a number of Baptists refused to support the Patriot cause, most Baptists agreed with Furman that the Patriots’ grievances against Britain were compelling. The Separate Baptists of Virginia declared in 1775 that although they had many religious differences with their fellow Americans, they shared the same political cause of liberty. They advised “military resistance against Great Britain in her unjust invasion, tyrannical oppression, and repeated hostilities.” The Philadelphia Association took a more muted tone, worrying over the “awful impending calamities” of war and recommending that congregations hold days of fasting to pray for God’s help and forgiveness for America’s sins.

JUST AS THE revivals of the 1740s had spun off the Separate Baptists, the New Light Stir also fostered more radical, visionary sects. The Shakers, led by the messianic visionary Mother Ann Lee, traced their public ministry in America to the Dark Day of 1780. Among the Baptists, the most important offshoots of the New Light Stir were the Freewill Baptists, who combined the evangelical zeal of the Separate Baptists with a trenchant critique of Calvinist theology. The Freewill Baptists’ leader was Benjamin Randel, a New Hampshire tailor who was one of the very last converts of the great revivalist George Whitefield. The unconverted Randel was skeptical about evangelical piety, but he grudgingly agreed to hear Whitefield preach in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1770. Soon thereafter, the aging Whitefield died in Newburyport, Massachusetts, and the news of his demise tormented Randel with thoughts of his own eternal destiny. Soon Randel experienced conversion, and he also became convinced that believer’s baptism was the only proper mode. In 1776, he received baptism by immersion and began preaching.33

They hoped that the American victory over tyranny would be followed quickly by its logical outcome: full religious liberty. Baptists had come a long way from their dissenting English roots and their days as colonial outlaws. The travails of the Revolution had helped them to become Americans.

Jefferson and Madison both worked on a House committee in Richmond that handled the flood of petitions from dissenters. Jefferson later wrote that the barrage precipitated the “severest contests in which I have ever been engaged.” And no wonder: the signatures on the Ten Thousand Name petition alone probably represented more than 10 percent of Virginia’s white male population.14 Virginia legislators could not afford to ignore these kinds of popular grievances. They had a war to fight. So in December 1776, the assembly exempted Baptists and other non-Anglicans from paying required tithes to support the Anglican Church. Moreover, it suspended the establishment tax altogether, a policy Virginia maintained until the war’s conclusion. Some of the Anglican Church’s privileges remained, and the state would consider resuming tithes for a “general assessment” for religion in 1784, a modified establishment that would still mandate that Virginians pay a religious tax, but the taxpayer could choose which church would receive it. In the meantime, Virginia’s dissenters had pressured the state into granting considerable relief, cleverly using their loyal service in the war to make progress toward liberty of conscience.

Inspired by the opportunities in western settlements upon the end of the American Revolution, many Virginians began to relocate to Kentucky. Entire congregations moved there, along with many talented Baptist preachers, leading Robert B. Semple to call it “the vortex of Baptist preachers.” In 1810, he estimated that perhaps half of all Baptist pastors raised in Virginia had moved west.

The religion clauses of the First Amendment, then, were a triumph of the Baptists’ and Madison’s shared view of religious liberty. The Baptists’ perspective was crafted out of the bitter experience of persecution in the colonial era. At every step, especially in Virginia, Madison utterly depended upon their support to bring about freedom of conscience. In the Constitution, Baptist pressure pushed Madison further than he originally sought to go.

The Baptist vision for religious liberty had won out on the national level; it would be confirmed by Jefferson’s election in 1800 and the “wall of separation” letter, which made explicit his alliance with the Baptists. In Virginia, and in most of the states outside of New England, momentum was growing for robust endorsements of religious liberty, especially through disestablishment of state churches. When Kentucky, the new home of so many Baptists, became the fifteenth state in the union in 1792, its constitution echoed Virginia’s commitment to religious liberty. “All men have a natural and indefeasible right to worship Almighty God according to the dictates of their own consciences,” it said, and “no man can of right be compelled to attend, erect, or support any place of worship, or to maintain any ministry against his consent.” The state also affirmed that “no preference shall ever be given by law to any religious societies or modes of worship.” The Baptist view of religious liberty was becoming America’s, too. Soon the Baptists’ gospel would enter a similar era of ascendancy, in the lonely reaches of the American backcountry.43

Bower was converted, but what church should he join? The decision hinged on his view of baptism. In the evenings he searched his Bible by firelight for guidance. The Dunkards of his background used immersion, but they dipped a convert three times. Bower, however, came to believe that baptism was a representation of a believer’s death, burial, and resurrection in Christ. That spiritual experience only happened once; thus, he concluded, baptism should be by immersion, and the convert should be dipped only once. And so he was dipped, at Hazle Creek Baptist Church, along with fifteen others. (Two others who came for baptism were rejected, perhaps because they did not have a clear testimony of conversion.) He was one of seventy-six who joined the Hazle Creek congregation during this earthquake revival.

By 1800, there were one hundred thousand, and by 1848, there were approximately eight hundred thousand. Baptist growth was not limited to America: the number of English Baptist congregations also more than doubled during that period. Nor was revival unique to their denomination; indeed, the growth of Methodism was even more spectacular. But by the eve of the Civil War, older denominations such as Congregationalists and Episcopalians lagged far behind, and Baptists and other new denominations, fueled by the Second Great Awakening, had become evangelical juggernauts.

Nevertheless, countless reports of Baptist growth came from the New England frontier and elsewhere in the 1790s. The overwhelming majority of Baptist churches in this decade remained Calvinist—one estimate counted 956 out of 1,024 white-led Baptist churches as “Particular” in theology, meaning those who believed that Christ died only for the elect. But new Freewill Baptist churches were growing, too, from eighteen congregations to fifty-one over the course of the decade.

A group of Baptists from South Carolina similarly journeyed to Mississippi in the 1780s in search of fertile farmland. They suffered an attack by Cherokee Indians as they traversed the Tennessee River near the present-day site of Chattanooga, but they eventually made it to a settlement near the Mississippi River north of Natchez and began worshiping in private homes. They formally organized a church in 1791, with seven charter members who committed to the doctrines of baptism “according to the apostolic mode” and “particular redemption.” Following the American Revolution, the British had ceded West Florida, including lower Mississippi, to the Spanish, who made Catholicism the official religion of the territory. As the Baptists began to spread in the 1790s, Spanish authorities ordered Baptist minister Richard Curtis and his followers to “desist from their heretical psalm-singing, praying and preaching,” or they would send them to the silver mines of Mexico. They did not desist, and Curtis was arrested and hauled before the Spanish territorial governor. He was released when he promised to obey the laws of the province, but the threat of a second detention caused him to flee back to South Carolina. When the United States assumed control of the Mississippi Territory in 1798, Curtis returned and established the Salem Church.

Most Baptist churches espoused moderate Calvinist beliefs. They generally held to the doctrinal views of English Baptist minister Andrew Fuller, who advocated a modified Calvinist view of the atonement. Fuller argued that Christ’s death on the cross was “sufficient” to forgive the sins of all, but “efficient” only for the elect. In 1795, the Danbury Association entertained a query from a member church: “Are the non-elect in any sense bought by the blood of Christ?” It answered, “If by being bought, you mean to ask, whether the atonement is sufficient for the whole world; we answer in the affirmative: but if you mean to ask, whether the atonement of Christ has bought any of the fallen race, so as to release them from the curse of the divine law until they are regenerated, we answer in the negative.” Some thought that this position was quasi-Arminian, suggesting that Christ had somehow died for all humankind. Staunch Calvinists saw the atonement as sufficient for only those predestined to salvation. At the Powelton Baptist Church in Georgia, four members separated in 1791 because the church endorsed Fuller’s theology of the atonement. Pastor Silas Mercer polled the congregation, asking whether it should “excommunicate a member, for holding what is called a general provision.” A majority voted in the negative, and they decided to expel the four hyper-Calvinist schismatics instead.

The strongest Arminian Baptist sentiments in the early republic were found among the Freewill Baptists, centered in New England. That denomination’s founder, Benjamin Randel, objected to “the whole doctrine of John Calvin, with respect to eternal, particular, personal, unconditional election and reprobation.”

Instead of breaking up the First and Second Great Awakenings into discrete events, we might see the century from the 1740s (the emergence of the Separate Baptists) to the 1840s (the sectional division of the Baptists) as a unified whole, because there were significant revivals happening among the Baptists and other evangelicals throughout this period. Baptists certainly saw massive stirs in the early 1800s, but those events did not necessarily exceed the ferment of awakenings that happened in the 1780s, 1820s, or 1830s.

During the period from the end of the American Revolution to the onset of America’s sectional crisis in the 1840s, Baptists (along with Methodists, Presbyterians, and the Churches of Christ) proved zealous and flexible enough to keep pace with the booming settlement in the trans-Appalachian West. From upstate New York to the territories of the new Southwest (Alabama to Texas), Baptist associations monitored settlement patterns of Anglo pioneers (many of whom brought slaves along) and commissioned preachers and missionaries “to travel into new places where the Gospel was likely to flourish,” as Baptist historian Robert Baylor Semple noted. In an era of dramatic population shifts, “the spoils would go to those who were prepared to be mobile, and who had a powerful religious message to trade,” as one writer put it. Some Baptists, as in the case of the early Ohio and Mississippi settlers, were among the first Anglo pioneers and opened churches wherever they went. Because Baptist elders and pastors were not required to have college educations at the time, there was a ready supply of pastoral candidates whose primary qualification was zeal for the gospel. Churches in established areas saw revivals, too, but what is most striking is the way that Baptists’ passion for evangelism helped build entrepreneurial church organizations that moved west with the frontier. They also won the allegiance of growing numbers of African Americans as slavery spread into new regions of the South. Fr...

Even more remarkable news came from the west and south, however. Stephen Gano reported to the Groton Conference in 1801 that he had received reports from Kentucky of a “marvelous work of God in that state, where 1400 persons had been added to 7 or 8 churches in a few months.” As the Kentucky revivals began in earnest, Baptists worked alongside Methodists and Presbyterians at massive outdoor assemblies, or “camp meetings,” although the Baptists remained somewhat peripheral to events such as the great Presbyterian communion gathering at Cane Ridge. (Baptists would preach but not “commune,” noted one observer.) Evangelicals fed on one another’s energy, in spite of divisions over Calvinism and the proper mode of baptism; Baptists in Kentucky grew alongside Methodists and Presbyterians.

With this phenomenal growth among frontier Baptists, distinctively Calvinist theology began to wane. Often this was just a matter of things no longer said. In 1785, the Elkhorn Baptist Association had adopted the robustly Calvinist Philadelphia Confession of 1742. But when it united with two other Kentucky associations in 1802, they agreed that “the preaching Christ tasted death for every man [general atonement], shall be no bar to communion.” Some Baptists may have felt that they had more fundamental theological challenges with which to contend than the division between Calvinists and Arminians. In 1804, the Elkhorn Association took action against two member churches in which significant portions of the congregation, and probably at least one pastor, had begun denying the doctrine of the Trinity and contending that “Jesus Christ is not truly God.” The nearby Bracken Association was also troubled by this news and reminded its member churches that “the Christian religion stands or falls with the doctrine of the Trinity.”32 As Baptists battled these threats, rigorous Calvinism became less of a priority. The doctrine of limited atonement seems to have become particularly muted after 1800. We should not overstate the rapidity of Calvinism’s decline, however, as Calvinist doctrines such as total depravity and the chosen elect remained standard Baptist fare through the nineteenth century. Moreover, many Baptists still defended a limited atonement. In 1808, for instance, the Bowd...

The publication of English Baptist William Carey’s Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians, to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens (1792) and his role in founding the English Baptist Missionary Society were turning points not only in Baptist missions but in the history of Christian missions generally. Carey was hardly the first to call for foreign missions—Christianity was a missionary religion from its beginnings—and many Baptists had wittingly and unwittingly been working as missionaries for centuries. (Think of the Separate Baptists’ movement into the South in the 1750s, for example, or former slave David George’s ventures in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone after the American Revolution.) Nevertheless, Carey’s work, and his voyage to India in 1793, signaled a new seriousness about missions among Baptists and other evangelicals.

Adoniram Judson, an early Congregationalist missionary and convert to Baptist convictions, was also deeply influenced by New Divinity theology. His father, a Congregationalist pastor, was also a follower of Nathanael Emmons, and Judson himself confirmed his New Divinity principles while attending Brown University and Andover Theological Seminary. Ann Hasseltine, Judson’s first wife, was likewise influenced by Emmons and other New Divinity theologians such as Jonathan Edwards’s protégé Joseph Bellamy.

In 1820, those troubles lay largely in the future. During the era of the great revival and the expansion of missions, Baptists had proved themselves capable of matching the growth on the American frontier, from Mississippi to Michigan. They surged into northern New England, the Ohio River Valley, and the Lower Mississippi Region, sometimes going self-consciously as missionaries, and sometimes simply as immigrants. As they moved, they saw periodic revivals, and a broader pattern of itinerant preaching and new church starts, all leading to a vast ingathering of Americans. The experiences of converts such as Jacob Bower, physically and spiritually awakened by a Kentucky earthquake, were immeasurably valuable to each man and woman who went through them. They also fit into a template replicated in the lives of hundreds of thousands of Baptists during this period. A dynamic, nationwide Baptist movement had emerged.

As Baptists spread throughout the American South in the early nineteenth century, so did slavery. Some white Baptists in the Revolutionary era had condemned Christian slave owning, but over time most white Baptists in the South made peace with the institution, whether they owned slaves or not. This trend accelerated as Baptists helped fashion a new kind of cultural and religious establishment, especially in the southern states of the Atlantic seaboard, and many Baptist elites came to own slaves. Yet the issue of human bondage festered as the small but boisterous antislavery movement won over some white northern evangelicals. Everyday pressure against slavery came most directly from black Baptists themselves, including slaves like Nancy and Winney.

In the 1790s, it became common for Virginia’s Baptist associations to assert that debate over emancipation belonged more properly in a “legislative body” than an ecclesiastical one. This position ironically resulted from disestablishment: Baptists could now spiritualize the business of the church and insist that divisive moral issues like slavery were not their concern.

WE MIGHT IMAGINE that Furman’s brand of paternalism would drive away slaves, and untold thousands of blacks surely accepted evangelical faith more enthusiastically than they embraced white pastors’ strictures. But we must also remember that to white and black Baptists (as well as the small numbers of Native American Baptists), salvation and a right standing before God were their primary religious concerns. Worldly considerations were secondary.

Although John was the patriarch of the Parker clan, his son Daniel left a deeper imprint on Baptist history. By the time that Daniel joined his family in Texas—he had settled farther east, thereby avoiding the Fort Parker attack—he had already become one of the leading Baptist voices against missionary societies. As we have seen, grumbling against the missions agencies began to appear among Baptists in the 1810s, as some argued that such extracongregational societies did not appear in Scripture, and that their representatives seemed awfully concerned with raising money. Historians have also attributed the rise of these antimission “Primitive” Baptists to the antielitist mood of the Jacksonian era and the strength of populist opinion in the wiregrass South (south Alabama and south Georgia, as well as the Florida Panhandle). In these and other impoverished areas of the southern states, the Primitives flourished.

In 1826, Lawrence crafted the Kehukee Association’s declaration, which one historian regards as the “beginnings of antimission schism and the Primitive Baptists.” The New York Telescope, a chief outlet for antimission writing, prefaced the declaration with a Bible passage describing the Beast of Revelation, with a pointed implication about the missionary societies. The Kehukee Association not only deplored the work of the missionary agencies but also declared “NON-FELLOWSHIP with all such societies and proceedings, and with all churches who hold members” of them. The association banned any member of a missionary society from joining its churches and prohibited any “missionary preacher or beggar” from addressing its congregations. The same went for members of tract and Bible societies. The association also denounced “theological seminaries” as unbiblical, calling their representatives “agents of Anti-Christ.” Echoing Daniel Parker’s critique, it exhorted slave owners to “first learn their own negroes to read the Bible, who have sweated and toiled for the very money perhaps they are giving to others.”

The antimission schism went fully national in 1832, with a convention of twenty-two elders and laymen held at Black Rock, Maryland. In an address directed to “the Particular Baptist Churches of the ‘Old School,’” delegates regretted that their former brethren, sucked in by missionary charlatans, now charged them with “antinomianism, inertness, stupidity, &c., for refusing to go beyond the word of God.” They denounced not only the usual societies but also “sectarian colleges,” including Baptist schools, because such institutions imply that “our distinct views of church government of gospel doctrine and gospel ordinances, are connected with human sciences.” This was “a principle which we cannot admit.” They further opposed institutionalized revival or camp meetings and extrabiblical inventions like the anxious seat (a pew at the front of churches where revivalists would pray for those in the travail of conversion). They could not countenance assemblies where “all the borrowed machinery from Methodist campmeetings is introduced,” nor did they wish to see if “a four days’ meeting will not induce the Holy Ghost to produce a revival among us commensurate with the strange fire enkindled by others.” The Holy Spirit was not “somehow so the creature of human feelings that he is led to regenerate persons by our getting their animal feelings excited.” They welcomed all like-minded Baptists to attend future national assemblies.

The antimission Baptists went by many names: “Black Rock Baptists,” “Old School,” “Old Fashioned,” “Predestination,” “Particular,” and, more dismissively, “Square-Toed,” “Hard Rined,” “Broad-Brimmed,” “Ironsides,” and “Hard-Shell.” Most commonly, they called themselves “Primitive Baptists,” which to them meant biblical Baptists. One estimate suggests that by 1844 more than sixteen hundred antimission churches and sixty-eight thousand members had broken with the missionary Baptists. Most of this devastating exodus transpired in the South and Midwest.

The antimission controversy was the largest of a host of theological fracases among Baptists in the antebellum era. Baptists also suffered defections by the followers of Alexander Campbell, founder of the Disciples of Christ, or Churches of Christ, who rejected the Baptists’ requirement of a conversion testimony prior to baptism. Campbell asked only for a profession of faith in Jesus and implied that baptism secured forgiveness of sins and regeneration of the believer. Campbell also adopted strong antimission views. Entire churches and some Baptist associations went over to the Campbellites, with severe losses in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Indiana. Pro-missionary Baptists perceived the Campbellites and the antimission movement as a conjoined threat, with one Indiana association recalling the “destruction of the two antagonisms—baptismal regeneration . . . on one hand, and antinomian antimissionism on the other. The adverse winds . . . swept over the western churches like the simoon or sirocco, splitting, dividing and rending all before them.”