Baptists in America: A History

by Thomas S. Kidd

THE MAJOR BLACK Baptist denominations formed for sociological rather than theological reasons. The slave experience often overshadowed theological differences over Calvinism that white Baptists inherited from the Protestant Reformation in Europe. Black Baptist cooperation emerged instead out of the struggle for freedom, a struggle often chronicled in black gospel music.50 Another way of putting this is that black Baptists were outsiders to the dominant white/European way of doing church. Instead, they forged a history of their own, and even their own distinct form of sacred music. In so doing, they turned their churches into institutions of African American identity within a society dominated by whites. Long after white Baptists became insider elites, especially in the South, black Baptists were still marked by the outsider/dissenter posture of early Baptist history.