Baptists in America: A History

by Thomas S. Kidd

Graves, a Baptist pastor in Nashville, was convinced that these casual deviations did not please God. True Christians should insist on New Testament practices and condemn all others. Graves and other Landmarkists assaulted the notion that “evangelicals” could make common cause in missions and revivals, because non-Baptist churches were illegitimate. “Baptist churches are the churches of Christ,” he wrote, and “they alone hold, and have alone ever held, and preserved the doctrine of the gospel in all ages.” Presbyterians, Methodists, and the other churches that had worked with Baptists in revivals and evangelical societies were not true churches, and Baptists should cut off fellowship with them. Many Landmarkists further argued that there was an unbroken succession, however scattered and small, of local Baptist churches that had existed since the time of Christ, and that these congregations alone constituted the apostolic work of God’s kingdom on earth. A failed Landmarkist attempt to have the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) turn away from denominational (as opposed to local church-based) missions agencies in the late 1850s led some to abandon the SBC, but Landmarkist themes continued to color Southern Baptist theology after the Civil War.48 From