Baptists in America: A History

by Thomas S. Kidd

BUFFETED BY CROSSCUTTING theological winds generated by Freewill Baptists, Campbellites, antimission movements, and others, many Baptist churches embraced the new statement of faith published by the New Hampshire Baptist Association in 1833. This statement moderated the Calvinism of older statements such as the Philadelphia Confession of 1742, but just how moderate it was stood open to debate. The statement remained elusive on the thorniest questions of limited atonement and God’s immutable decree of election, allowing a range of Baptists to interpret those matters as they wished. Some strong Calvinists did see the New Hampshire Confession as too moderate, or possibly even free-will Arminian. In the 1840s, for example, the Florida Association of Baptists, having once accepted the New Hampshire confession, on second thought rejected it in favor of articles affirming “the doctrine of eternal and particular election.”45 The New Hampshire confession also declined to use the term “elders” when describing biblical church officers but only mentioned the synonymous terms “bishops or pastors.” (The term “elders” reappeared in the 1925 Baptist Faith and Message, which dropped the word “pastors.”) Over time the term “pastor” became more conventional in pro-missionary Baptist congregations, while Primitive churches continued using the term “elder.”

norm. Evidence suggests that early churches of the Separate Baptist tradition, especially in Virginia and the Carolinas, often used a system of plural elders. Early churches of the Philadelphia Association did so as well.

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

White southern Baptists did not necessarily think slavery was right, but they could see no way to safely abolish it. Baptist officials saw no reason to disrupt their national fellowship in the name of abolition. In light of the antimission controversy and breakaways, the need for unity among pro-missionary Baptists seemed even more pressing.19 The mission board’s tepid response was not good enough for some northern Baptists, a group of whom sent a letter with 180 signatories commending the English Baptists for their admonition. “SLAVEHOLDING,” they thundered, “is now the most heinous sin with which America is chargeable.” Southerners responded in kind, with the Charleston Association deploring the work of “deluded and mischievous fanatics . . . to interfere with the domestic institutions of the Southern and Slave-holding States.” Such efforts to convince southerners of slavery’s immorality would fail, they proclaimed, as long as southerners had “the Bible in their hands.” The association regarded outside interference on the issue “not only as officious and unfriendly but incendiary and murderous.” It could fatally damage the union of American states, the Charlestonians averred—fifteen years before their state would actually secede. The association also reaffirmed its commitment to the evangelization of slaves and cautioned against restricting the religious liberty of blacks except in cases of compelling urgency.

Because they were evangelicals, the Baptists’ antislavery argument had to hinge upon Scripture. But antislavery activists had difficulty with a literal reading of the Bible, which seemed to tacitly accept the existence of slavery—at least in the forms that existed in ancient Israel and the Roman Empire of Jesus’s time. Slavery’s defenders often noted that the Bible never explicitly condemned slavery. Jesus was silent on the matter. Galusha explained this reticence by suggesting that the disciples were “too busy” with other pressing matters to address every conceivable sin. The Savior, likewise, had never “witnessed a scene of slavery . . . the chained coffle,- the naked gang of the cotton field,- the exposed female reeking under the lash,- the child torn forever from its mother’s breaking heart,—these, and worse acts of slavery’s tragedy, were not performed, so far as history, before the face of Jesus.” Human bondage was a modern crime to which Scripture did not speak directly, but one could intuit from Christ’s teachings and character that he would have deplored American slavery. Although Galusha and the antislavery evangelicals were as eager as proslavery Christians to cite Scripture, they indirectly acknowledged that the letter of Scripture alone did not supply a definitive word on slavery “in the abstract.”

Triennial Convention

The original SBC consolidated home and foreign mission boards under one umbrella, and the constitution stipulated that other boards would be developed as representatives to convention meetings saw fit. The new body issued a statement acknowledging that “a painful division has taken place.” The release also stated that the SBC was not formed to defend slavery. Its purposes were the “extension of the Messiah’s kingdom, and the glory of our God.” The SBC wished to move beyond the needless controversy precipitated by the “ultra Northern brethren” and focus again on the gospel. In 1995, upon the convention’s 150th anniversary, the SBC—by then the nation’s largest Protestant denomination—would apologize for the “role that slavery played in the formation of the Southern Baptist Convention.” This formally repudiated the notion that slavery was not at the heart of the schism.

Perhaps more surprising was the vigorous Baptist growth among southern African Americans. One estimate holds that from 1845 to 1860, black Baptist membership doubled from two hundred thousand to four hundred thousand. Many white Baptists, feeling the sting of the abolitionist controversy, and remembering the tumult over Baptist outreach to blacks in Nat Turner’s wake, redoubled their efforts to evangelize blacks in the fifteen years following the creation of the SBC. In Virginia, the influential Dover Association, in Richmond, saw the percentage of black members go up consistently in the years after 1844. That year, black membership stood at just over eight thousand; in 1860, it had reached just under fourteen thousand. Many African American Virginians belonged to “quasi-independent” churches, often technically pastored by a white minister but in reality allowed to operate with relative autonomy. In 1843, whites reopened the Williamsburg African Baptist Church, which they had anxiously closed after Turner’s revolt.

In the mid-1840s, Baptist opinion on slavery ran along a continuum from abolitionist activists to those who considered slavery a God-ordained good. Many of the most influential white Baptists, in both the North and the South, stood in between these poles. Some whites argued that while slavery was ethically problematic, it should not break fellowship between believers. Others readily conceded that slavery as practiced in America was rife with problems, but that Christians could redeem the institution.

As debates focused on slavery in the abstract, it became more difficult to ameliorate or slowly abolish slavery. Kentucky Baptist pastor and gradual emancipationist James Pendleton was exasperated by this overtheorizing. “Pro-slavery men,” he said in 1849, “most ridiculously transfer their idea of the innocence of slavery in the abstract to slavery in the concrete. Because they can conceive of circumstances in which a master may hold a slave without doing wrong, they infer that there is nothing wrong in the system of slavery in Kentucky.” The abuses, proslavery advocates argued, were peripheral to a God-permitted social arrangement.

AFTER THE CIVIL WAR, Northern Baptist missionaries rushed to the South to help freed slaves build churches. At first these struggling black congregations relied almost entirely on the support they received from Christians above the Mason-Dixon Line.5 Congregationalists provided support for education, but black Christians were not fond of the Congregationalists’ worship style. Instead, African Americans attended Congregationalist schools during the week and then flocked to Baptist churches on Sunday. According to some estimates, when the Southern Baptist Convention was organized in 1845, black Baptists outnumbered white Baptists in the South. It was not uncommon in antebellum Baptist churches for black membership to dwarf that of whites, as at First Baptist, Richmond. First Baptist, Natchez, Mississippi, for example, had 442 members, 380 of whom were black, while in Columbus, Mississippi, 80 percent of Baptists were black. At the end of the Civil War, First Baptist Church of Montgomery, Alabama, had 600 black members out of a total membership of roughly 900. Thirty-five to 40 percent of Baptists in Georgia were black; by the early twentieth century they had become a majority.

In bringing the blues to the gospel, Dorsey reintroduced northern and urban black Baptist churches to the soulful and emotional form of worship that characterized the African American experience in the South. His songs and those of other black gospel singers helped recapture the longings of the Negro spiritual and the rhythms of Africa. As Dorsey’s principal biographer puts it, the music Nix inspired Dorsey to develop allowed black Baptists to “rejoin that part of themselves they had sacrificed for another religion.”

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.

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.

HAVING SETTLED ON segregation as the answer to the race question, Southern Baptists faced one of their most intense theological controversies, this time over Landmarkism—the belief that only Baptist congregations are true churches and that there exists an unbroken succession of Baptists since apostolic times. The controversy centered on Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and its president, William H. Whitsitt. Whitsitt grew up as a member of Landmark leader James R. Graves’s church. His experience in the Civil War put him in contact with non-Landmark Baptists whom he came to view as authentic Christians. After the war he attended Southern Seminary. His studies there convinced him more fully of the errors of Landmarkism, and he debated those still in its throes. After seminary, Whitsitt studied at the University of Virginia, then the University of Berlin, where he adopted what was called “scientific history,” essentially the quest to document with evidence what actually happened in the past. In 1872, he returned to Southern Seminary as a faculty member. Whitsitt began a quest to pinpoint when Baptists actually started baptizing by immersion, concluding that it was not until 1641. This meant that the earliest English Baptists had baptized adult believers by affusion (pouring) or even sprinkling for an entire generation before adopting immersion. Such a view rejected the unbroken line of Baptist churches that Landmarkers insist existed from the time of the apostles forward...

TRUETT’S AND MULLINS’s views dominated Southern Baptist life in the early twentieth century. While Southern Baptists extolled the virtues of institutional separation of church and state, and revered their history of dissent, they at the same time saw church and state as allies in the promotion of freedom and democracy. As Baptist scholar, preacher, and critic Christopher Canipe has argued, the cherished wall of separation had come to function like a mirror. When Baptists looked at American democracy, they saw themselves.47 This was true not just of Southern Baptists. Northern Baptist liberals routinely trumpeted the ways in which a progressive Social Gospel worked hand in hand with the march of civilization and democracy. A major thrust of Rauschenbusch’s theology included transforming the conception of God from “despotic” to “democratic.” As he concluded his classic book, A Theology for the Social Gospel, “The era of prophetic and democratic Christianity has just begun.”48 Nothing could have signaled any more clearly that many white Baptists had gone from outsiders to insiders and joined the American mainstream.

New Hampshire Confession of Faith of 1833

Liberal theology was exactly what it purported to be—a revision of Protestantism accommodating the spirit of the modern age. That spirit pushed individual religious experience of a natural yet romantic sort to the forefront of the Christian faith, while the old traditions of orthodoxy receded into the background. Fundamentalists, whether militant or moderate, were clearly out of sync with such a spirit. Fundamentalist Baptists in the North once again became cultural outsiders, like their forebears in the eighteenth century, while liberal Baptists retained their insider status by adjusting their faith to fit the times. Baptists had faced this same choice a number of times in history and would do so once more at the end of the twentieth century. Again, it would produce a bitter fight over Baptist identity.

Among the older groups were General Baptists, who had nearly died out by 1800, only to be revived in Indiana in the 1820s. Seventh Day Baptists, who began in the 1650s, came together in 1801 as the General Conference of Seventh Day Baptists, which is still around

Joining these older groups were twentieth-century Baptist denominations often referred to as fundamentalist. Many of these emerged from the permanent rift created by the fundamentalist-modernist controversy. But some also emerged from the Landmark Baptist movement of the nineteenth century, and thus predate fundamentalism. In addition to the smattering of small Landmark denominations and some independent Landmark congregations, a small minority of Southern Baptist churches still hold Landmark views. It is difficult to say whether Landmark Baptists should be included among fundamentalists. Some Landmarkers prefer a separate identity and at times even see Baptist fundamentalists as their competitors.

For much of the twentieth century, most Baptists opposed vouchers for private schools. But that was when most private schools were Catholic. Meanwhile, Catholics claimed that public schools were pervasively Protestant and that as a matter of fairness the state should assist Catholic schools at least indirectly through vouchers or tax credits. In other words, Catholics believed the state discriminated against their schools much as conservative Southern Baptists came to believe the state infringed the right of their children to have group prayer in public schools. The voucher debate broke down largely along Protestant-Catholic lines into the 1970s, with Baptists among the most vocal opponents of vouchers. This all began to change in the 1970s and 1980s as many conservative evangelicals, among them Baptists, came to the conclusion that the public schools were pervasively secular and hostile to religion. Desegregation compounded the problem in the South, as many white Baptist congregations started their own all-white academies rather than send their children to integrated public schools. As this happened, Baptists began to migrate toward a pro-voucher position.

the American Baptist Churches in the United States, denominational control has remained in the hands of moderates and liberals, and their official positions on church-state issues continue to be separationist. Independent fundamentalist Baptists, while less active politically, usually side with the accommodationists, but some, like the Baptist Bible Fellowship, have no central bureaucracy capable of issuing official statements. Black Baptists, who are often conservative on social issues such as abortion and gay rights, can be either separationist or accommodationist on church-state issues. AS IS THE case within American religion generally, Baptists do not stand together against other groups on political and cultural issues. Rather, conservative and fundamentalist Baptists find themselves holding church-state positions in common with conservatives in other denominations and even with conservative Catholics. Meanwhile, moderate and liberal Baptists generally hold positions in common with moderates and liberals from non-Baptist denominations. Religion is still one of the strongest predictors of political behavior and attitudes toward the wider culture. But the key variable is not the name of the denomination but whether the group, congregation, or individual identifies as theologically conservative, moderate, or liberal within those groups.