BAPTIST CHURCHES

BAPTIST CHURCHES . As with most denominational names, the term Baptist began as a pejorative nickname. It first appeared as Anabaptist, or "rebaptizer," because in the sixteenth century, when this group arose in Western Christendom, virtually all persons had already been baptized as infants. Thus, these rebaptizers were scandalously denying the validity of that first baptism, setting themselves up as a truer church, if not indeed as the true church. Gradually, as infant baptism became less prevalent and as alternative modes of worship grew more widespread, this still young denomination adopted the shortened form of Baptist, both as a convenient distinction and as a point of honor. (New England churches in the seventeenth century and early eighteenth century gradually progressed from simply "the Church of Christ" to "the Church of Christ in Gospel Order" to "the Church of Christ Baptized upon Profession of Their Faith" to "the Baptized Church of Christ" to, finally, the Baptist Church.) To be sure, the new subject of the baptism (namely the adult, or "believer") and not originally the mode of baptism (whether by sprinkling, pouring, or immersing) stood out as the most glaring liturgical innovation of this politically powerless and socially suspect group. Although not preserved in the denominational designation, the other feature of the early Baptist movement that most alarmed contemporaries was the Baptists' novel notion that civil government had no responsibility, and indeed no right, to enforce a religious conformity. As one of their seventeenth-century opponents wrote, Anabaptists "deny Civil Government to be proved of Christ" (Featley, 1646).

Origins

As used by their enemies, the word Anabaptist was calculated to have an unnerving effect upon all who believed in a well-ordered society, for the term suggested that English rebaptizers of the seventeenth century were of a piece with the most radical continental rebaptizers of the century before. Thus every fanaticism, every antinomianism, every vagary of the Reformation's bloodiest days could be laid at the doorstep of those English Separatists opposing infant baptism. History, to say nothing of the specific individuals involved, was by this indiscriminate name-calling badly served, for modern Baptists have only the most tenuous connection with the radical reformers of the sixteenth century. (Modern Mennonites may be more accurately seen as lineal descendants of the Reformation's left wing.) English and American Baptists, who in the twentieth century accounted for nearly 90 percent of all Baptists worldwide, emerged from the Puritan agitations of Elizabethan and Jacobean England.

Sharing many of the Puritan concerns about a Church of England still too papist, still too engrossed with civil enforcement and ecclesiastical preferment, these separating Puritans early distinguished themselves by insisting that the church be a voluntary society. That voluntarism had two critical components: (1) the insistence that members choose their church rather than be born into it; this voluntary act was testified to by the act of baptism, which was both obedient to Christ's command and declarative of one's personal, uncoerced confession of faith; and (2) the conviction that the covenant of believers to work and worship together was a private agreement with which the state had nothing to do, for conscience must be left free. As Thomas Helwys (c. 1550–c. 1616), one of that first generation of English Baptists, wrote, "the King is a mortal man and not God, therefore [he] hath no power over the immortal souls of his subjects, to make laws and ordinances for them, and to set spiritual lords over them."

The leadership of Helwys and two others, John Smyth (d. 1612) and John Murton, proved decisive in the first two decades of the seventeenth century as the English General Baptists (that is, non-Calvinist, affirming an unrestricted or general atonement for humankind) grew from a scarcely visible knot of believers in 1609 to around twenty thousand members by 1660. Despite this impressive showing, however, the major strength of the modern Baptist churches came from a somewhat later development of the 1630s: the rise of the Particular Baptists (of Calvinist orientation, affirming a limited or particular redemption for humankind). Under the leadership of John Spilsbury in the decade following 1633, a single church became mother to six more. By the time seven such churches existed in and around London, these Calvinist Baptists had also reintroduced the ancient Christian practice of baptism by immersion, this mode being preferred as a more suitable symbol of one's burial with Christ followed by one's new birth or resurrection from that death to walk in a wholly new life. One of the members of Spilsbury's group, Mark Lucar (d. 1676), immigrated to America, settling in Newport, Rhode Island. There he introduced the "new baptism" to New England's scattered Anabaptists, as they were still called. Lucar, arriving sometime before 1648, also helped strengthen ties between American and English Baptists as the two groups together labored to make clear the unfairness of the broad application of the "Anabaptist" label. (New England continued to legislate against Anabaptists.) In this endeavor they were much assisted by the moderate, well-reasoned, properly Calvinist London Confession of 1644.

Baptist growth in America lagged behind that of England in the seventeenth century and early eighteenth century. Roger Williams (1603?–1683) gave the infant denomination both a geographical base and a theological thrust when in 1636, as an exile from Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony, he made his way on foot to a territory at the head of the Narragansett Bay. After a careful and conscientious purchase of land from the Indians, he named the first settlement Providence in gratitude to God for having delivered him safely from the Puritans, the Indians, and the rigors of his fourteen-week exposure to the New England winter. The colony of Rhode Island, founded on the principle of a "full liberty in religious concernments," as well as on a hot hatred of the "Bloudy Tenent of Persecution" (the title of Williams's 1644 London publication), received into its midst all manner of religious pariahs: Baptists, Quakers, Ranters, Fifth Monarchists, Gortonists, and many others. Yet only in a limited sense did Rhode Island become a Baptist stronghold. By the end of the seventeenth century, Quakers dominated the colony politically, while Baptists had separated into Calvinist, Arminian (Six Principle), and Seventh-day factions. Williams, moreover, had remained within the Baptist fold only briefly; the leadership of the Providence church quickly passed into other hands. In Newport, on the other hand, the more enduring leadership of John Clarke (1609–1676; assisted by Lucar, Obadiah Holmes [1607–1650], and Joseph Torrey) gave the infant denomination a firm if tiny base in the New World.

Expansion in North America

The great growth of Baptists in North America (and by extension in the world) followed the eighteenth century's Great Awakening, that Calvinist explosion of evangelical zeal and intense religious experience. Even though Baptists were not prime leaders in the movement, they were the prime beneficiaries of it. Churches separating from the Congregational establishments in New England often moved from a halfway house called "Separatist" to a new denominational home called "Baptist." For example, the eminent pastor, theologian, historian, and civil libertarian Isaac Backus (1724–1806) followed this path. Moreover, the Awakening, even if it did not make an itinerant ministry respectable, did make such traveling evangelism both popular and pervasive. John Leland (1754–1841), a New Englander transplanted to Virginia, is an instructive example of such a ministry: irregular, unauthorized, ill-supported, and enormously effective. The names of Backus and Leland also point to a rhetoric that during the Revolutionary period served to identify Baptists with the cause of liberty, both civil and ecclesiastical. In the South, where the Church of England had for so long enjoyed a legal monopoly, Baptists seized upon the discomfort of a church so swiftly disestablished and so widely under suspicion to make major conquests among farmers, artisans, and even gentry.

After the American Revolution, Baptists also made phenomenal advances among the nation's blacks. Using a persuasive preaching style, an accessible theology, an appealing baptismal ritual, and an ecclesiology that granted freedom from white rule, the Baptist message found ready hearers among both enslaved and free blacks. By the end of the nineteenth century, black Baptists had formed their own national organizations, publishing boards, and mission societies. By the mid-twentieth century, approximately two-thirds of America's black Christians were Baptists, and one-third or more of all of America's Baptists were black. Like their white counterparts, however, blacks found it difficult to maintain organizational or theological unity.

The pattern of increasing diversity had been set by the white Baptists. Even before the nineteenth century began, some Baptists, disturbed by the prevailing Calvinist orientation of their denomination, chose to emphasize people's free will: Free Will Baptists thus maintained a separate identity until early in the twentieth century. Others in the new nation, fearing that Baptists would aspire to national status with all the evils that bureaucracy and hierarchy implied, resisted the creation of national societies and boards, preferring to remain in smaller, more local, more nearly autonomous units. In the bitter conflict over slavery, more specifically over the appointment of a slaveholding missionary, white Baptists split along geographical lines in 1845, and the Southern Baptist Convention was organized in Augusta, Georgia. (A national organization of Baptists dated back only to 1814, so denominational unity in the United States enjoyed but a brief life.) The Southern Baptist Convention, with its base initially in the states of the southern Confederacy, moved aggressively to the West, to the North, and to "foreign fields," becoming the largest single Baptist entity in the world. By the mid-twentieth century it had also become the largest Protestant denomination in the United States. The northern group (originally the Northern Baptist Convention, now the American Baptist Churches, USA), with about three-fourths the number of churches as the southern group at the time of separation, found itself repeatedly depleted in the twentieth century by separations and schisms—most of them related to the conflict between modernists and fundamentalists. As a consequence, by the late twentieth century the Southern Baptist Convention outnumbered its northern counterpart by about ten to one. Although the other major Protestant groups that divided over slavery reunited—the Methodists in 1939 and the Presbyterians in 1983—the Baptists have shown little sign of returning to a single fold. In fact they continued to divide and subdivide into the twenty-first century. Southern Baptists divided over questions of theology and denominational control, with moderates forming such new groups as the Alliance of Baptists, the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, and Baptists Committed.

In 2000 the northern and southern "halves" had an aggregate membership of around nineteen million, while the two oldest black denominations had a combined membership of eight to ten million. This leaves uncounted some four or five million Baptists in the United States who are scattered among a wide variety of other organizations. Most of these groups affirm a strict congregational polity (eschewing any national superstructure or headquarters), a rigid biblical theology (rejecting all critical study of the biblical text itself), and their own special hold on "the faith once delivered to the saints" (opposing all ecumenical ventures, even with other Baptist bodies). The Baptist family in the United States is large—Protestantism's largest by far in the nation, as it approaches thirty million—but as in many another large family, some members do not speak to other members.

Worldwide

Outside the United States, the Baptist churches are unevenly, and often sparsely, scattered. One may speak most conveniently in terms of continents rather than individual nations in offering estimates of membership: in Africa and Europe, about 1 million in each; in Asia, about 1.5 million; and in Central and South America, something less than 1 million. In Canada, to which New England Baptists began to migrate in the late eighteenth century, there are between 100,000 and 200,000 Baptists. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, Baptists worldwide numbered over forty million, with over thirty million in the United States.

The former Soviet Union (counted in the European total) constitutes something of a special case as the Baptist presence there is both highly visible and highly vulnerable. Baptists entered Russia from several points of departure in the late nineteenth century, but they encountered severe opposition from the czars and the Russian Orthodox Church. In the USSR that opposition intensified as Baptists, true to an ancient heritage, found any interference or regulation by the state intolerable. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, new Baptist groups were established in a variety of newly formed eastern European countries. These groups included the Baptist Unions of Lithuania, Georgia, Romania, and Latvia. New churches and seminaries were formed, and many of the unions affiliated with the European Baptist Federation and the Baptist World Alliance. The latter is the primary international fellowship of Baptists, funding programs and promoting church interaction throughout the world.

In England the General Baptists of the seventeenth century lost either zeal or identity or both, and many of that number merged with the Universalists. The Calvinist or Particular Baptists maintained both zeal and identity, but in the face of a powerful and sometimes repressive national church, the numbers of these dissenters never approached that of their coreligionists in the United States. In 2000, Baptists in the British Isles (England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales) numbered a little over 200,000.

Because of their belief in a threefold immersion (separately in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit), German Baptists received the nickname of "Dunkers" (or "Dunkards"). Known officially since 1908 as the Church of the Brethren, these Baptists originated in Germany early in the eighteenth century. Fleeing from persecution there, however, they immigrated virtually en masse to America, settling in Pennsylvania, the Virginia backcountry, and the Midwest. Although distinguished by liturgical emphases on the Love Feast and the ceremonial washing of each other's feet, these German Baptists attract most public attention by their consistent witness for peace and their choice of alternative service rather than military enlistment. Their membership in 2000 neared 200,000. One other sizable group of distinctive ethnic heritage, the (Swedish) Baptist General Conference, dropped its ethnic label in 1945; in 2000 its membership in the United States exceeded 130,000.

Across nearly four centuries and six continents, the Baptist churches have multiplied in variety nearly as much as in number. Yet it is possible to point to broad features generally characteristic of the entire group. The first broad feature is voluntarism, which places Baptists squarely in the free-church tradition. Membership is by choice; creeds are to emerge from below and not to be handed down from above; covenants are ideally arrived at by the local congregations and periodically revised; and worship follows no fixed form, without service books or a canon of prayers. That voluntarism also sees its integrity and spontaneity as fatally compromised whenever the state intrudes into the realm of religious conscience. Voluntarism has its weaker side in becoming the passive reflection of a surrounding culture, in surrendering slowly and unthinkingly to what one author has called the "cultural captivity of the churches" (Eighmy, 1972). The second broad feature is Pietism, which places its first priority on the personal and direct encounter with God. Such individualism protects against an autocratic or coldly impersonal structure, but it can also lead to a chaotic splintering where, as Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) said, every man is his own church. Pietism ensures a zeal; it does not always carry with it a corresponding bounty of knowledge and public responsibility.

The Baptist movement's third broad feature is evangelism, which in some times and places has been seen as the totality of the Baptist effort. Special classes and techniques in "soul winning" have been developed, and the revival meeting became standard fare in most Baptist churches, whether large or small, urban or rural. This evangelistic emphasis has also been responsible for a heavy investment in missions, both at home and abroad. In the opening of the American West, such men as Isaac McCoy (1784–1846) and John Mason Peck (1789–1858) played major roles. Abroad, the path cut in the early nineteenth century by Adoniram Judson (1788–1850) and Luther Rice (1783–1836) was traveled by thousands, both male and female, in succeeding decades. Yet there is also a strong antimission strain in Baptist history, institutionalized in several Primitive Baptist bodies, both black and white.

The fourth broad feature is sectarianism, which has kept most Baptists on the fringes of the ecumenical movement. The transition from sect to denomination is uneven and to some degree unpredictable. A mid-nineteenth-century movement known as Landmarkism represents the sectarian extreme; it held that true Baptist churches have existed from the apostolic age and only the true local church has a valid ministry, valid sacraments, and biblical authenticity. The American Baptist Association, with about one million members in the 1980s, constitutes the contemporary manifestation of a sectarianism that rejects all ecumenical endeavors, is strongly suspicious of Roman Catholicism, and deeply resents those Baptist churches that behave in a more "denominational" way.

See Also

Anabaptism; Williams, Roger.

Bibliography

Two books on English Baptists that provide not only good historical background but excellent insight into contemporary life and thought are H. Wheeler Robinson's The Life and Faith of the Baptists, rev. ed. (London, 1946), and Ernest A. Payne's The Fellowship of Believers: Baptist Thought and Practice Yesterday and Today, rev. ed. (London, 1952). These two works have been reprinted together under the title British Baptists (New York, 1980). A worldview is provided in Bill J. Leonard's Baptist Ways: A History (Valley Forge, Pa., 2003), whereas Samuel S. Hill Jr. and Robert G. Torbet reviewed the American scene in Baptists North and South (Valley Forge, Pa., 1964). On the Southern Baptist Convention specifically, see Jesse C. Fletcher, The Southern Baptist Convention (Nashville, Tenn., 1994). Two works on Baptist development in early America made giant historiographical strides over most previous efforts. William G. McLoughlin's New England Dissent, 1630–1833, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), and C. C. Goen's Revivalism and Separatism in New England, 1740–1800 (New Haven, Conn., 1962). Finally, for an informed view of alternative ecclesiological styles among Baptists, see Winthrop Still Hudson, ed., Baptist Concepts of the Church (Chicago, 1959).

Other sources cited in the article include John Lee Eighmy, Churches in Cultural Captivity: A History of the Social Attitudes of Southern Baptists (Knoxville, Tenn., 1972), and Daniel Featley, The Dippers Dipt, or the Anabaptists Duck'd and Plung'd over head and eares, at a disputation in Southwark (London, 1646).

Edwin S. Gaustad (1987)

Bill Leonard (2005)