But the split of 1845 is recognized today as one of the most crucial events in Baptist history.3 Unlike their Methodist and Presbyterian counterparts, northern and southern Baptists never reunited. Moreover, the schism gave birth to what is now America’s largest Protestant denomination, called, in jest, the “Catholic Church of the South.”4 Indeed, by the early twentieth century, Southern Baptists were “at ease in Zion,” as historian Rufus Spain put it, having grown comfortable as the dominant cultural institution of the region.
